Today's Must-Read: Understanding Fly-Over Country

This, from RawStory, points out, I think, a basic flaw in all the analyses of Trump's base -- and the Republican base in general:

As the aftermath of the election of Donald Trump is still being sorted out, a common theme keeps cropping up from all sides: “Democrats failed to understand white, working-class, fly-over America.”

Trump supporters are saying this. Progressive pundits are saying this. Talking heads across all forms of the media are saying this. Even some Democratic leaders are saying this. It doesn’t matter how many people say it, it is complete bullshit. It is an intellectual/linguistic sleight of hand meant to throw attention away from the real problem. The real problem isn’t east coast elites who don’t understand or care about rural America. The real problem is rural America doesn’t understand the causes of their own situations and fears and they have shown no interest in finding out.

One aspect of this that the author points out is that, unless you are one of them, they're not going to listen to anything you say that disputes what they already believe. There is a deep distrust of "outsiders" at play here -- I've run into samples of it while visiting family in the North Carolina hills: if you're not in some way connected, you're suspect.

It's longish, but it's worth reading in full.

Mainstreaming the Radical

I don't know much about this guy, but he's either bought into the right-wing victim mantra completely, or he's hoping to use it for his own purposes:

In light of the recent stabbing deaths of two men in Portland by a white nationalist — and constant local street brawls between neo-Nazi groups and anti-fascist protesters — the chairman of Portland’s GOP party said he would consider hiring armed right-wing militia members as bodyguards to protect Republicans on the street.

In an interview with the Guardian, Multnomah County GOP chair James Buchal said that disputes between conservatives and progressives have many Republicans considering “abandoning the public square” which worries him.

“I am sort of evolving to the point where I think that it is appropriate for Republicans to continue to go out there,” Buchal explained. “And if they need to have a security force protecting them, that’s an appropriate thing too.”

According to Buchal — a perennial GOP candidate for office — he’s not sure that conservatives can entrust their fate to the police or first responders and proposed using far-right militia members as bodyguards.

You may recall something like this from your world history classes. Maybe this will jog your memory:

“Yeah. And there are these people arising, like the Oath Keepers and the Three Percenters,” he stated, adding, “We’re thinking about that. Because there are now belligerent, unstable people who are convinced that Republicans are like Nazis.”

So he wants to enlist the help of real Nazis to protect these poor right-wing snowflakes who are being bullied by the militant left. Maybe they could all wear brown shirts, or something.

Vive la France!

It appears French voters are not as gullible as Americans:

The pro-EU centrist Emmanuel Macron has vowed to unite a divided and fractured France after winning a decisive victory over the far-right Front National candidate Marine Le Pen in the country’s presidential election.

Macron, 39, a former economy minister who ran as a “neither left nor right” independent promising to shake up the French political system, took 66% to Le Pen’s 34%.

His victory was hailed by his supporters as holding back a tide of populism after the Brexit vote and Donald Trump’s victory in the US election.

Addressing thousands of supporters in the grand courtyard of the Louvre, the vast Paris palace-turned-museum, Macron said he would defend France and Europe. He said Europe and the world are “watching us” and “waiting for us to defend the spirit of the Enlightenment, threatened in so many places”.

Macron, 66% to Le Pen's 34%. Considering the result of the popular vote in our election -- just a couple of points, if that -- there is something wrong here. Has Flint been bottling its water for sale in the red states?

Given the result in France, though, maybe there's hope for the West.

Reuters has an interesting article on the attempted hit on Macron's campaign by Wikileaks and its friends:

U.S. far-right activists helped amplify a leak of hacked emails belonging to leading French presidential candidate Emmanuel Macron's campaign, some researchers said on Saturday, with automated bots and the Twitter account of WikiLeaks also propelling a leak that came two days before France's presidential vote.

The rapid spread on Twitter (TWTR.N), Facebook (FB.O) and the messaging forum 4chan of emails and other campaign documents that Macron's campaign said on Friday had been stolen recalled the effort by right-wing activists and Russian state media to promote hacked documents embarrassing to Democratic U.S. presidential candidate Hillary Clinton last year.

And, strangely enough, there is some evidence that Russia was involved.

The Last Stand

I'm beginning to think that's how the "Christian" right sees the whole trans rights battle: they've lost on gay rights, they've lost on marriage, abortion is still up for grabs, so trans rights are their last chance to enforce their anti-reality biblical sexual agenda on the rest of us. Take, for example, James Dobson:

“Have we gone absolutely mad?” Dobson asked. “Did it upset you when the president of the United States ordered every public school in America to open all its bathroom facilities including those that are in use by a member of the opposite sex? The president’s order made me furious, and then sick to my stomach. How dare this man do something so audacious and unthinkable!”

Accusing Obama of “warping our children” and “wielding dictatorial powers never envisioned in the law,” Dobson accused the president of being a “tyrant” who is “is determined to change Western civilization forever.”

Dobson then predicted that transgender women or men dressed as women will stare at women in restrooms, an act that Dobson said would get them shot, just like back in the good ol’ days: “Would you remain passive after knowing that a strange-looking man, dressed like a woman, has been peering over toilet cubicles to watch your wife in a private moment? What should be done to the pervert who was using mirrors to watch women and girls in their stalls? If you are a dad, I pray you will protect your little girls from men who walk in unannounced, unzip their pants and urinate in front of them. If this had happened 100 years ago, someone might have been shot. Where is today’s manhood? God help us!”

This is the "child psychologist" who recommended that parents beat their children. So now he's recommending that trans folk be shot when they use the bathroom? He's really kicked it up a couple orders of magnitude. Note this, from RawStory:

It is not clear if Dobson is aware that he is using the language of protecting a woman’s honor by killing those who might violate it, but his language is reminiscent of the ways that mobs were whipped up to hang black men and boys for perceived slights to white women. His argument connects his beliefs that Obama is a tyrant with his beliefs that any confusion about gender identity “must be seen as damaging not only to our sons and daughters but also to the long-term stability of society itself.”

Offhand, I'd say Dobson regards his use of inflammatory language as a plus. And of course, can't miss a chance to bash Obama. (Scratch a right-wing evangelical and you'll find a racist.)

It's not surprising that Dobson would reiterate all the bullshit being pushed by the bathroom conservatives. That's what he does. But can't you just see the spittle flying from his mouth?

Today's Must Read

From Josh Marshall at TPM:

"To prevent Obama from becoming the hero who fixed Washington, McConnell decided to break it. And it worked." That's from Matt Yglesias in a post he published yesterday evening before the scope of the GOP victory became fully clear. This is succinct and it is correct.

Indeed, in key respects it worked in 2010. By many measures Republicans should have won the Senate in 2010 and 2012. But each year they were hobbled by a raft of crazy and indisciplined senate candidates who squandered what should have been easy or at least odds-on wins. This year, the terrain was heavily weighted in their favor. And they kept their candidates on the straight and narrow.

But if this was the plan (and it was) and if it worked (which it did) we should ask, why?

Marshall has some interesting insights on this, and builds a good historical context, but there's one point I think he misses: the Republican party, at least as now constituted, is not interested in governing. It is interested in ruling. (And this article only points that up: the gist is that the GOP should wait until it controls Congress and the White House to do anything. Then it can rule without hindrance.) From everything I've read -- and especially from those "mainstream media" figures whose non-partisanship is rather tattered mask -- it seems that the GOP's favored mode is oligarchy. Sadly, too many Democrats have fallen into that trap -- the Blue Dogs and DINOs -- and have paid the price:

One trend that was interesting last night is that clear, strong progressives like Jeff Merkley (OR), Tom Udall (NM), Brian Schatz (HI) and Al Franken (MN)-- who had massive right-wing money thrown at them-- won, while conservative Democrats like Mark Warner, Mary Landrieu, Mark Udall, and Kay Hagan stumbled and the most conservative Democrat of all, Mark Pryor, lost badly. In the House, conservative Democrats-- Blue Dogs and New Dems-- lost everywhere, even in Democratic districts. Almost all of Israel's Red-to-Blue recruits lost, as did many of his Frontline incumbents.

The lesson here is that the Democratic party has a winning message. They should use it.

This Is The Way It's Supposed To Work

According to some. Very good post, if depressing, at Mahablog this morning, based on this article by Joseph Heath at Salon.

The take-away:

The status quo depends on nothing getting fixed, actually. So the status quo will see to it nothing gets fixed. Krugman’s column today says, “Today’s political balance rests on a foundation of ignorance, in which the public has no idea what our society is really like.” And the system is rigged so they can’t find out.

I very reluctantly have come around to thinking that the system is so broken it cannot be returned to anything resembling functionality. The most likely outcome is that the U.S. will continue to decline economically and politically over the next several years until quality of life is so eroded for enough people that something big and nasty and possibly violent will happen to change everything. We may actually have to become a failed state first, though.

Any student of history has seen this coming for a while. Think back to Dwight Eisenhower's warnings about the "military-industrial complex." Guess who's running the government. And our "independent press" is playing along -- the major news outlets are corporations, too.

There is a ray of sunshine, though -- a small one, and it's hard to know how effective it's going to be. From a post by Spocko at Hullabaloo, built around Google severing ties with ALEC:

ALEC and Rush appeal to people's most selfish impulses. They use greed, fear and ignorance to get what they want. They want us to believe that everyone thinks like they do, when in fact it is a self-selected minority that holds these beliefs. They say if you only believe them, you will be among society's winners.

But when we go to the interested third parties and educate them, many of those real winners are disgusted with what they hear. Combining that education with appeals to both personal and stated corporate values systems and you have a solid package to help them decide to walk away.

If you want to convince people within the corporate form to walk away from a right wing media personality or a right wing legislation bill mill, learn who they are, what they say their company is about and ALL the things that they care about.

There are more and more companies that are finding out that being socially conscious is good business. Whether that's enough to offset those who don't give a damn is the big question.

Free Speech? Whazzat?

Very interesting article from The Guardian on the increasing momentum in our so-called "Western democracies" to curtail the right to protest -- that is to say, let's just eliminate this pesky free speech thing, OK?

It's a fairly short article, so just click through and read the whole thing. I do want to highlight this quote from South African author and Nobel Prize winner JM Coetzee:

I used to think that the people who created (South Africa's) laws that effectively suspended the rule of law were moral barbarians. Now I know they were just pioneers ahead of their time.

Well, yes.

Connecting Dots

A couple of stories this morning that somehow linked together in my mind. First, this one, about the Naval Yard shooting in Washington:

The top surgeon at a Washington, D.C. trauma center minutes ago told reporters that “there is something evil in our society” when “when we have these multiple shootings, these multiple injuries.” Dr. Janis Orlowski, the chief medical officer at the MedStar Washington Hospital Center, at times close to tears, decried the “senseless trauma” she says she sees daily.

“There’s something evil in our society that we as Americans have to work to try and eradicate,” Orlowski said. “There’s something wrong here when we have these multiple shootings, these multiple injuries,” she added. “There is something wrong.”

It's heartbreaking:

And somehow, that connected with this story, about Miss America:

The crowning of Miss New York, Nina Davuluri, as Miss America should have been, to paraphrase her platform, a celebration of diversity through cultural competency. But in the hours after her victory, Twitter became a frank demonstration of American incompetence in matters relating to both ethnicity and geography.

“Well they just picked a Muslim for Miss America. That must’ve made Obama happy. Maybe he had a vote,” said one user.

“I am literally soo mad right now a ARAB won. #MissAmerica” wrote another.

It should go without saying that Davuluri, a Syracuse native of Indian descent, is neither Muslim nor an Arab. But according to Fox News Radio host Todd Starnes, the American-born Davuluri doesn’t “represent American values,” unlike the blonde-haired, blue-eyed contestant from Kansas, Theresa Vail.

Trust Fox News -- and I'm more than a little convinced that Fox News is a big part of the problem. The nice part of this story is that Twitter was deluged with tweets in support of Ms. Davuluri, as it should have been.

And how does these connect? I suspect it has to do with something I mentioned in a couple of comments at the AmericaBlog story. First:

The Miss America pageant is one of those iconic "American" things that might have made some sort of sense once upon a time but have become such institutions that the whys don't matter any more. They just are. I'm not sure that it has anything to do with a "sense of national honor" (except for the mouth-breathers who have a warped idea of what this nation is about anyway). It does have a lot to do with a sense of national identity, I think, which is why the reaction from the racist fringe has been so vocal -- you can't be "American" if you're not just like them, which leaves the rest of us -- who do have a more realistic sense of what America means -- scratching our heads and wondering where these idiots came from. (And heaving a sigh of relief that we're not just like them.)

Which leads to:

The teabaggers are the latest manifestation of an element that's always been with us: the "conservative" element (read "reactionary") who can't deal with change. They spend most of their time hiding under rocks and waiting for an opportunity to make their voices heard -- usually at the behest of someone who is vastly smarter and who can use them to further his own agenda -- Reagan with the "Christian" right, the Kochs and Karl Rove with the teabaggers are only two of the latest examples.

It seems that element will always be with us. The frightening thing now is that they've managed to accumulate the power they have. Another case of the tail wagging the dog. I hope the Republican partly implodes before they manage to destroy the rest of us.

There's an element of American society that is small-minded, mean-spirited, vicious, violent, and easily unhinged. (Although I doubt that it's just us -- make that "human" society.) So give them radio, social media, and worse, guns, and this is what you get.* There's a kind of synergy working: crazies have access to wider audiences than ever before, and it's starting to have a strong effect on our national mentality.

It's their core values: exclusion, arrogance, ignorance, hatred for the "Other."

Cue the religious right. And the Second Amendment freaks. The Internet is littered with stories that tie into this.

* And they elect people just like them to Congress.

Food for Thought

While we're all appalled and/or disgusted by the revelations of NSA hijinks (is there anyone they haven't spied on?), I had a sobering thought -- this is just the top end of a trend that's been happening for a long time, and it's all of a piece: the increasingly interlocked nature of the Internet, with what seems to be a natural phenomenon: a few corporations starting to gobble up everything else so that you have one account for everything -- "for your convenience." (Google keeps trying to sign me into everything with my Google account, which I don't use -- I just created it because of a server glitch causing a site I needed to get into to reject my regular account.)

At any rate, let's start with something a little closer to home for most of us. (At least it used to be, but more on that in a minute.) Notice how militarized our police departments are getting? SWAT teams, assault rifles, body armor, the whole works. Here's the Tampa police department, from their official website:

The 12-ton Armored Personnel Carrier (APC) can drive through five feet of water and withstand winds up to 130 mph helping police operate under the most severe conditions. The carrier, nicknamed "high-top shoe" for its tall silhouette look, can be used for search and rescue during a natural disaster or a terrorist attack. The APC is bullet resistant, can hold 13 passengers and it is virtually unstoppable. On pavement, it can reach speeds of 60 mph. This one of a kind APC was purchased from the military and it was paid for with a Federal security grant.

It's worth going to the site just to see the pictures. Is this Tampa, or Baghdad?

The bottom line is that we're putting huge amounts of lethal force in the hands of people who overreact (remember Chicago, 1968? Imagine that with today's armaments), who make mistakes (and that story is by no means the worst in that vein), who stage full-scale raids on flimsy pretexts (and that story is not the only one about the authorities finding "probable cause" after the fact), and whose judgment is open to question (remember the pepper-spray incident at UC Davis? And to underscore my point, the campus police lieutenant who "pulled the trigger" as it were has filed for worker's comp.).

Which brings us to the surveillance state. The police are armed and ready, now they just need a target. Any target will do, and that's where NSA and its subsidiaries come in. The trend toward constant surveillance started a long time ago -- maybe with police radar to catch speeders. Then we went to cameras in high-crime areas. (They don't actually prevent any crime, as it turns out.) But now, with the advent of the Great War on Terror, there are not only a larger pool of suspects, but a ready-made excuse for watching them. This is choice:

The New York Police Department has secretly labeled entire mosques as terrorism organizations, a designation that allows police to use informants to record sermons and spy on imams, often without specific evidence of criminal wrongdoing.

Designating an entire mosque as a terrorism enterprise means that anyone who attends prayer services there is a potential subject of an investigation and fair game for surveillance.

Since the 9/11 attacks, the NYPD has opened at least a dozen “terrorism enterprise investigations” into mosques, according to interviews and confidential police documents. The TEI, as it is known, is a police tool intended to help investigate terrorist cells and the like.

Many TEIs stretch for years, allowing surveillance to continue even though the NYPD has never criminally charged a mosque or Islamic organization with operating as a terrorism enterprise.

Digby has a very good, must-read post on the effect of all this on us, the targets. Her summation:

The surveillance society naturally results in less creativity, less innovation, less dissent, less freedom. I know it sounds ridiculously hyperbolic, but this strikes me as a potentially huge social change that nobody's talking about. What kind of a world will it be when people no longer have an inner self, at least an inner self that has any possibility of expression without being revealed to everyone else. What happens when you lose control over your identity, your history, your ability to reinvent yourself and take second chances?

My reaction: Connect the dots: wages sinking, the 1%'s war on the middle class, constant surveillance, get out of jail free passes for the banks* and "energy" companies (not to mention their very sophisticated use of propaganda). Less dissent, less freedom? That's what they want.

* A footnote: ran across this post this morning. From Henry Paulson, Jr., Secretary of the Treasury during the financial collapse in 2008:

“There was such a total lack of awareness from the firms that paid big bonuses during this extraordinary time.”

That is what Henry M. Paulson Jr., former Treasury secretary, said last week. We were discussing the 2008 financial crisis in light of the approaching five-year anniversary of those white-knuckled days, when Lehman Brothers collapsed and the government stepped in to bail out the American International Group and then the banking system….

"Lack of awareness?": Pot, meet kettle. Read on:

He said the hardest part of the bailouts for him was in the disconnect between the bailouts’ ugly image with the public and his faith that the bailouts would help keep the economy from collapsing.

“I understood that people were angry,” Mr. Paulson said. “They wanted to hear that those that made the mistakes were going to be held responsible. Then on the other side was stability. It’s hard to punish and save the banks at the same time.” He paused for a moment. “I was much more concerned with stability.”

I don't understand how that became an either/or proposition. It seems to me that reining in the bonuses and obscene compensation packages for those who caused the crisis might have contributed to public confidence. Maybe the DoJ going after them would have helped as well. But then, I'm not a economics guru, like Hank Paulson -- who, arguably, is one of the people who created the mess.

Draw your own conclusions.

Today's Required Reading

Gaius Publius at AmericaBlog has done my work for me this morning, taking off from stories by John Schiffman and Kristina Cooke at Reuters and Yves Smith at Naked Capitalism. Just a few key points from those articles:

A secretive U.S. Drug Enforcement Administration unit is funneling information from intelligence intercepts, wiretaps, informants and a massive database of telephone records to authorities across the nation to help them launch criminal investigations of Americans.

… The unit of the DEA that distributes the information is called the Special Operations Division, or SOD. Two dozen partner agencies comprise the unit, including the FBI, CIA, NSA, Internal Revenue Service and the Department of Homeland Security.

So all these agencies -- two dozen, you got that? -- are funneling information into DEA. Why DEA? Well, the program was started in 1994 as a resource to fight Latin American drug cartels. But the DEA doesn't just sit on the information. No, it shares it.

Today, the SOD offers at least three services to federal, state and local law enforcement agents: coordinating international investigations such as the Bout case; distributing tips from overseas NSA intercepts, informants, foreign law enforcement partners and domestic wiretaps; and circulating tips from a massive database known as DICE.

The DICE database contains about 1 billion records, the senior DEA officials said. The majority of the records consist of phone log and Internet data gathered legally by the DEA through subpoenas, arrests and search warrants nationwide. Records are kept for about a year and then purged, the DEA officials said.

About 10,000 federal, state and local law enforcement agents have access to the DICE database, records show.

And as Gaius Publius points out, the information doesn't necessarily stop with those local cops. Being a Chicagoan, I know better, and I'm going to take it one step farther: you can bet that information is finding its way to outside parties -- non-law enforcement -- who have an interest. In return for (insert your favorite quid pro quo here).

And then when they nail someone based on an "anonymous tip," they lie about the source.

After an arrest was made, agents then pretended that their investigation began with the traffic stop, not with the SOD tip, the former agent said. The training document reviewed by Reuters refers to this process as “parallel construction.” … “Parallel construction is a law enforcement technique we use every day,” one official said. “It’s decades old, a bedrock concept.”

Gee, perjury on the part of prosecutors. Who would have guessed?

Smith draws an interesting parallel:

In a weird but more disturbing analogue to chain of title abuses, where banks would forge signatures and fabricate documents to remedy the failure to transfer assets properly to securitization trusts, Reuters reported today that the Drug Enforcement Agency would doctor up where it got evidence from so it could use it in court. Now why would the DEA bother to go to all that trouble? Chorus: Because if a decent defense lawyer found out where it came from, it would in most cases be inadmissible.

Just another facet of the corporate state: Banks and the Feds operating on the same principles. And who else, do you suppose?

But it's all for "national security." There, don't you feel safer?

Read GP's post, then dig into the linked articles.

And then check your blood pressure.

It Doesn't Stop (Updated)

Well, the NRA has finally spoken.

The National Rifle Association broke its silence Friday on last week's shooting rampage at a Connecticut elementary school that left 26 children and staff dead.

The group's top lobbyist, Wayne LaPierre, said at a Washington news conference that "the next Adam Lanza," the man responsible for last week's mayhem, is planning an attack on another school.

"The only thing that stops a bad guy with a gun is a good guy with a gun," LaPierre said.

He blamed video games, movies and music videos for exposing children to a violent culture day in and day out.

"In a race to the bottom, many conglomerates compete with one another to shock, violate, and offend every standard of civilized society, by bringing an even more toxic mix of reckless behavior and criminal cruelty right into our homes," LaPierre said.

In other words, it's everyone else's fault. That's becoming the standard reaction on the right any time their policies backfire.

I've only seen snippets of LaPierre's "press conference," but it's been characterized as meandering, incoherent, defensive, and combative. From what I have seen, I smell desperation.

(Update: Found a video of the whole thing:

Jason Linkins has a slightly different take on LaPierre's speech (because it was a speech).

Granted, if you believe that what LaPierre was trying to do today was to sincerely join in a national conversation over school shootings, or offer a coherent set of preventative policy options, or even just demonstrate some baseline sensitivity for the lives that were lost, it is easy to see why you'd deem LaPierre's press conference to be an ineffective, tone-deaf failure. But what you should remember that the National Rifle Association does not exist to offer sensible public policy or participate in conversations or pretend to be sensitive about tragedies. The National Rifle Association exists to assist the manufacturers of guns and gun-related accoutrements in selling guns and gun-related accoutrements to people. That is their job, summed up, in its entirety.

The NRA are lobbyists who represent a bunch of gun retailers, and this is what lobbyists do -- they help their clients sell their products. And every action that LaPierre took today can and should be viewed through that prism.

There are people who claim to be legitimately gobsmacked today that LaPierre did not come to Washington, D.C., and say, "You know, I honestly think we can give ground on the assault weapons thing." Those people need to ask themselves: Why would a guy who is paid to help assault weapon manufacturers sell assault weapons to people who want assault weapons say, "Hey, let's restrict the sales of assault weapons?" If you thought that the NRA was going to sign on to any sort of weapons ban, then you have not been paying attention to what the NRA is all about.

John Aravosis has a post with some of the post-infomercial (his term) Twitter reactions.

And in the meantime, the shooting deaths continue. From HuffPo, the Top 100.

Here's a screen cap via AmericaBlog (for some reason, I can't do print screen on this computer) of the headline for that story:

This is since Sandy Hook -- one freakin' week. Go ahead -- tell me we need more guns.

The Birth Control Mandate

Digby has a very clear, very good piece up about the realities of the new requirement that employers include birth control in insurance plans for their employees as "preventive care." The expected outrage from the Catholic Bishops, et al. (and why those clowns are not required to register as agents of a foreign government is beyond me at this point) has materialized: they are being persecuted, persecuted, I tell you!

Says Digby:

People are getting very confused on this issue. We ostensibly believe in rights and liberties in America and have a set of rules in our constitution guaranteeing them. But lately, we've decided that these phony constructs of institutional rights and liberties --- "corporate personhood","conscience of the church" --- actually supercede individual rights and liberties. I don't mean to evoke the sacred founders here, but I'm afraid they would say that idea is, in their words, total bullshit. They knew very well that the government wasn't the only possible oppressor. 500 years of bloody European religious history had taught them that.

If the Catholic bishops don't want people to use birth control it needs to convince people not to use birth control. That's how we exercise "conscience" in a free society. No Catholic employees anywhere, including a Catholic bishop, will be forced to use birth control, I guarantee it. Their individual consciences will be respected.

The key issue is institutional "rights" superceding individual rights. It's not only the rights of their adherents that are ignored --after all, if one subscribes to Catholic doctrine, then one is relinquishing a certain amount of decision-making ability, at least in theory -- but the rights of everyone else.

And if, as Digby points out, 98% of Catholic women have used birth control, it seems to me the bishops need to work on their sales pitch, and not expect the government to do their work for them.

"Hero of Truth?" Puh-leeze!

Ran across an interesting video at Crooks & Liars about the controversy over the "Ground Zero mosque," which is not at ground zero and is not a mosque.

Pay attention to Pam Geller, the lunatic who bears the most responsibility for the mess.

(I can't embed the video -- for some reason, Blogger won't accept the embed code and I can't figure out how to fix it. Follow the link above to see the clip.)

I can't do better than Nicole Bell's comment about Geller: "You should shut up simply because you wouldn't know the truth if it sat shiva for your integrity in your apartment."

What struck me is the expression on Geller's face: I've seen it on middle-class Jewish girls, WASPs from Long Island, Polish girls from Chicago's southwest side. I think it must be something the pick up in Princess school: they're being bitches, they know they're being bitches, and they know they're going to get away with it because they're Princesses.

Overall, I think this must be the most intelligent and fair bit of coverage I've seen in any medium of this whole thing. It's worth the twelve minutes.

For Those Who Throw Rocks

Specifically, at gay Republicans: this lengthy profile on Matt R. Salmon, son of a conservative Mormon politician from Arizona. It focuses a lot on family conflicts, but Salmon's comments about what he went through before he was able to accept himself are worth the read.

A Must-Read and Maybe a Few Comments (Updated)

From Mahablog, this excellent commentary on the "Ground Zero Mosque" controversy. O'Brien demonstrates one thing conclusively: so-called "conservatives" hate the idea of the Bill of Rights, and have no compunctions about lying their faces off to subvert it.

Update:  If Joe Lieberman is against it, ;you know it's the right thing to do.

"I'd say I'm troubled by it, but I don't know enough to say that it ought to be prohibited," Lieberman said on "Imus in the Morning" on the Fox Business Network. "But frankly I've heard enough about it and read enough about it that I wish somebody in New York would just put the brakes on for a while and take a look at this."

The key thing here is that he doesn't know enough to say anything, really.  But being the total tool he is, he's got to weigh in in the side of "wait and see."

This is even worse -- now he wants a religious litmus test for being able to put up a building:

The Connecticut senator, who's often been hawkish on national-security issues, has said the project should be put on hold until the developers of the project can be more fully vetted.

"I've also read some things about some of the people involved that make me wonder about their motivations. So I don't know enough to reach a conclusion, but I know enough to say that this thing is only going to create more division in our society, and somebody ought to put the brakes on it," he said. "Give these people a chance to come out and explain who they are, where their money's coming from."

Leaving aside the tinfoil hat element here, this is a pretty disgusting thing to say.  (Think about it -- he wonders about the "motivations" for putting up a community center.)

The issue seems fairly clear-cut to me:  a moderate Islamic group wants to build a community center on land it owns a few blocks from the site of the Twin Towers.  The community center will contain a place for worship, which is being labeled a "mosque," which, strictly speaking, it's not.  The right wing of the right wing is up in arms at the idea that a group that Osama bin Laden would like to wipe off the face of the earth might want to put a Muslim place of worship a couple blocks from "sacred ground" as an insult to the memory of those who died on September 11, 2001 -- some of whom, by all reports, were Muslim.

We were also told by the former hero of this wing of of the wingnuts, George W. Bush (who now, apparently, cannot be counted as a "true conservative"), that Osama bin Laden hates us because of our freedoms.  So the solution to this is to launch our own attack on those freedoms so he doesn't have to?  Excuse me?

Another Update

Read these remarks by NYC Mayor Michael Bloomberg -- the only politician I've seen who has confronted the issue squarely.

And of course, the "conservatives" have no sense of proportion, nor even the instinct for self-preservation that would save them from things like this:



Yeah, there is a constitutional tie-in here, although it's as thin as most of the Prop 8 proponents' arguments in Perry -- God (that's their god, not yours) forbid that Teh Gays should actually be allowed to travel across the country -- by train, yet -- being . . . um, gay. (Actually, that's just a thin excuse to repost this video, which is a stitch.)

This bit, via Bil Browning at Bilerico, is almost as good.

 It occurs to me that no one -- and I mean no one -- refers to riding a horse without a saddle as "barebacking."  As far as I and my Anglophone peers know, that's always referred to as "bareback riding."

Oh, wait -- this is a Republican from Indiana.  'Nuff said.

Food for Thought

Surfing around this morning and ran across this excerpt from Martin Luther King, Jr.'s Letter from Birmingham Jail:

I must make two honest confessions to you, my Christian and Jewish brothers. First, I must confess that over the past few years I have been gravely disappointed with the white moderate. I have almost reached the regrettable conclusion that the Negro's great stumbling block in his stride toward freedom is not the White Citizen's Counciler or the Ku Klux Klanner, but the white moderate, who is more devoted to "order" than to justice; who prefers a negative peace which is the absence of tension to a positive peace which is the presence of justice; who constantly says: "I agree with you in the goal you seek, but I cannot agree with your methods of direct action"; who paternalistically believes he can set the timetable for another man's freedom; who lives by a mythical concept of time and who constantly advises the Negro to wait for a "more convenient season." Shallow understanding from people of good will is more frustrating than absolute misunderstanding from people of ill will. Lukewarm acceptance is much more bewildering than outright rejection.

Digby quoted it in a post mainly about the continued assault on reproductive freedom, but if has, of course, much larger resonance.

My own pet cause, of course, is gay civil rights, but that's part of basic human rights as well -- in spite of what you hear from the likes of Peter LaBarbera and Mat Staver, we're human too.

And we've seen all to plainly that our biggest problem right now is not the anti-gay right -- people are justifiably disgusted at their rhetoric and tactics, and it's beginning to show. Our biggest problem is the "sympathizers" on the left -- the Obama administration, the Democrats in Congress, even those among us who counsel us to "wait until public opinion catches up with us." Got news: it won't unless we push.

Chalk it up in part to the fact (if you're willing to trust the polls, which in this case I think are pretty accurate) that so-called "hot button" issues like same-sex marriage just are not on most people's radar. They don't really care one way or the other, and while in theory at least most people support equal civil rights for gays, they don't care enough to get off their butts and go out and vote on it. In the case of our sogenannte political leaders (that's German for "so-called" -- somehow the English doesn't carry the sense of disdain that the German does), I suspect that, like the "liberal" press, they are simply afraid of the vilification from the right if they take a stand -- I mean a real stand, beyond mouthing platitudes. The assaults from the right are so vicious and so hateful and so extreme that they worry about their continued comfortable residence in the corridors of power, and they're probably right: James Dobson and his ilk have armies of voters who get themselves worked up over the lies they're being fed and head for the polls on command.

So we keep pushing, because there's a lot of inertia to overcome, and the Christianists are not going to stop.

Here's a piece by Michelangelo Signorile, writing in The Advocate, that underlines some of the points I've broached above, this time about DADT repeal.

Despite the seismic shift in public polls, with most showing more than 75% of Americans in favor of repeal, Democratic consultant Douglas Schoen wrote in The Washington Post that Obama’s promise to end DADT “may well be the right decision morally, ethically, and militarily. But it could have a dramatic and deleterious impact on Democratic fortunes in November.”

It’s a ludicrous statement, divorced from reality, and an example of what AmericaBlog’s Joe Sudbay called “political homophobia,” where politicians and analysts who claim to support gay rights nonetheless believe that fighting for gay rights will always damage political capital. It ignores the dramatic changes that in fact have occurred: The chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, the most senior military man in the nation, testified that repealing the law was “the right thing to do,” while a Republican senator long touted as a military authority was finally reduced to the status of an out-of-touch troglodyte.

We see it play out again and again -- it took the state of Illinois, which was the first state in the union to repeal its sodomy law, in 1961, thirty years to pass a gay-inclusive civil rights bill. And I mean thirty years after the first bill was introduced. Chicago and Cook County only beat the state by a couple of years, and when it comes right down to it, Chicago's a pretty accepting city. But no one wanted to do anything until the Mayor finally figured out that we vote.

Maybe we need to remind Congress of the same small fact -- and then put our votes where they count.

Dr. Thio: Further Comments

J. Ryan Golden, who was instrumental in the protests against Dr. Thio Li-ann's visiting scholar appointment at NYU Law School, was kind enough to provide further background on those protests, and some comments on Wendy Kaminer's piece at The Atlantic, which appears upon investigation to be even more poorly researched and poorly thought out than I had at first realized. I may have some additional comments on Mr. Golden's letter, but I will save those for later.

From J. Ryan Golden:

This letter is intended as a response to criticism I have received for opposing the appointment of Thio Li-ann to teach “Human Rights Law in Asia” at NYU School of Law. As I have always considered myself a libertarian, and do not consider myself as part of either the left-wing or the right-wing, some of the criticism has been very disappointing. Heck, I even once attended the Log Cabin Republican National Convention with a friend of mine. How many liberal men do you think could stomach that!

My involvement in the controversy began after I proposed to NYU Law’s gay student organization, OUTLAW, that they should formally demand she be removed from teaching any course that focused on human rights. The OUTLAW Board ultimately voted in private, and although a majority of the Board voted for aggressive action, the voting rules left them with insufficient votes, and they issued a public statement delineating this course of action:

“Nonetheless, the Board thinks it best to fight Dr. Thio's offensive views not by silencing her but by engaging in a respectful and productive dialogue about the boundaries of human rights”

As a former Board member, I was quite upset with this result. I created a group on facebook entitled “NYU Students and Alumni opposed to Thio Li-ann teaching human rights.” I even purchased facebook ads to promote the group, and within a few days hundreds of students and alumni had joined. Shortly thereafter, other NYU Law students helped create a petition to formally oppose her teaching human rights. This petition did not directly call for her to be fired, but there was an optional checkbox that the vast majority of people checked-including myself-that stated: “Additionally, I call on the Administration to rescind Dr. Thio’s appointment.”

Five days later, I received a call from the New York Times for an upcoming story. That same day Thio Li-ann sent her letter of resignation to NYU Law, and Dean Revesz sent a public statement to the New York Times.

Now that you understand the background of the controversy, I would like to defend my course of action. Most critics of the petition are concerned about the infringement of academic freedom, and thus the concept of freedom of speech more generally. It is my belief that OUTLAW’s course of action was strongly guided by advice they received from an openly gay law professor, Kenji Yoshino. He has since stated publicly to the press in Singapore that he told OUTLAW “I made it clear to them that my view was that the answer to objectionable speech was 'more speech' rather than censorship.” Unlike Professor Yoshino, I am not a constitutional scholar. However, I believe his advice was based upon a peculiar view of censorship, and a cursory review of Thio Li-ann as a scholar.

As an individual student at a private university, I do not believe creating a petition to oppose the appointment of a professor can amount to censorship or an affront on academic freedom. In Sweezy v. New Hamsphire, Justice Frankfurter stated that academic freedom “means the exclusion of governmental intervention in the intellectual life of a university.” And while the meaning of censorship varies widely, it typically involves the action of a higher authority, such as the government. It is paradoxical to state that the expression of freedom of assembly rights by private individuals amounts to censorship against an elite figure. While it may be true that if NYU had ultimately gave in to our demands, they would have been censoring her views, Thio Li-Ann independently chose to resign after facing opposition.

Moreover, academic freedom does not and should never give a professor carte blanche to espouse hateful and demonstrably false viewpoints. Like many conservatives and libertarians, I am also disappointed in the small proportion of non-liberal viewpoints in higher education. But that problem does not mean we should allow a professor to teach concepts that go way beyond simple irresponsibility into their own flagrant prejudices. Obvious examples are holocaust deniers, segregationists , and in this case, a professor of human rights who believes roughly 5% of the population is committing a moral wrong and thus does not deserve any human rights. The consensus seems to be that the law school would have responded for differently if Thio Li-Ann had made similar statements about a religious or racial minority. Why then is discrimination on the basis of sexual orientation different? NYU’s own policy of nondiscrimination puts sexual orientation on equal footing with race, religion, and sex.

The most publicized critique of the petition came from Wendy Kaminer of The Atlantic. Earlier in her life, she was heavily involved in feminist movements to censor pornography. Apparently she had a change of heart, joined the board of the ACLU, and recently wrote an article entitled “Law Students Flunk Academic Freedom 101” where she stated in regards to those involved with the petition “I wouldn't want one of these future lawyers ever advocating for me.”

One would think before writing this article a former advocate of censorship would have actually researched my claim that Thio supported fining a television Singapore program for displaying a gay family in a positive light. Instead she mentioned it, and put in parentheses: “(If the latter claim is accurate, it surely undermines her credibility as victim of censorship.)” Well I happen to have the transcript of Thio Li-Ann’s speech in Parliament. Speaking in regards to a citizen complaint about the TV program she stated: “Could the Minister elaborate on how to prevent similar future breaches, and how to ensure industry players make greater use of consumer advice in airing sensitive content? “ And earlier in her speech, she even advocated censoring the Internet! She stated “If private parties misuse the Internet to destroy people whose views they dislike, this will kill free speech. Our shared commitment to democracy will be eroded if abusive online content goes unregulated… I hope the Minister will consider the need to deter such anti-social attacks to prevent harassing malicious public online speech from undermining the Internet as a free and fair communications medium.”

Thio Li-Ann seems to think it is okay for the government to officially censor views of individuals on the Internet, but not okay for individuals to protest a professor/politician who uses, in her own words, “harassing malicious public” speech to oppress a minority population. She clearly envisions her own utopian society where the elite members of the government can control the boundaries of free speech, but private citizens are at their own peril.

Ms. Kaminer also stated “The refusal of law students even to hear opposing views, reflecting opposing moral codes, is particularly worrisome.” Unlike Ms. Kaminer, I actually heavily researched Thio Li-Ann. I heard her opposing views in much greater detail, and concluded they were not worth hearing again, especially since her salary comes in part from my own tuition dollars. Why should I subsidize what is no more than flawed religious-based hate speech disguised as an opposing moral code? And for those readers who may be Christian or deeply religious, I urge you to read her recently published book Mind The Gap where she goes into great detail about her moral code. The book is an absurd distortion of biblical text aimed at oppressing the gay population and uprooting the secular government of Singapore. I would provide some quotations, and perhaps I will at a later date, but the book is far more offensive than her speech before Parliament, and suggests that unless society rejects homosexuality it will face Armageddon.

Now that I have rambled on about Wendy Kaminer’s misguided article, I would like to conclude on a more positive note. While many individuals-including Kenji Yoshino-have expressed that they are upset that they lost a chance to debate Professor Thio at NYU, I believe a much larger opportunity was gained as a result of her decision to run away with her tail between her legs. You see, the gay population in Singapore knows much more about Thio Li-ann than we do. They know her statement that she feared for her safety was most likely fabricated based on her past exaggerations of hate mail. They know her arguments just fell apart when they faced real criticism in a country where her opponents could not be silenced. And they now are empowered to put 377A back on the table, and in a government setting where Thio Li-Ann no longer has a seat in Parliament.

Let’s all hope now that Thio Li-ann’s distorted views have been publicized worldwide, The Parliament of Singapore will make the right choice, and repeal what remains of 377A, a historical remnant of their British colonial history. Singapore is a secular society that deeply values their own culture-let’s just hope they recognize this legal artifact never had a rightful place there.

(Edited for style.)

Take a Look

I've updated this post on the reaction of the libertarian right to Dr. Thio Li-Ann's fiasco at NYU. (That's what I get for trying to post at work, where I am interrupted approximately every thirty seconds by the criminally confused.) Some comments I had simply forgotten to include the first time around.

Dr. Thio: Recap and Update (Updated Again)

Reader PietB called attention to this story at NYT as additional information on my post about Andrew Sullivan's post on Dr. Thio Li-Ann. Sullivan:

Thio Li-ann, a Singapore law professor, was forced to resign from an NYU human rights course after students protested what they called her anti-gay views.

It seems that the major form the protest took was that almost no one enrolled for her classes. There was, indeed, a petition signed by 748 people against her appointment, but I think real meat is the low enrollment. And note the word tricks here: they protested what "they called" her anti-gay views. By any objective measure, she's an anti-gay advocate who could put James Dobson to shame. Update: In that vein, please note that Dr. Thio was not "forced to resign." She withdrew her name because of the antipathy expressed by the students toward her repellent record on human, specifically, gay rights. Again, there's that low enrollment, which I understand was pathetic for a distinguished visiting professor.

As usual, I find myself with two prongs to this discussion. (Remember, there's never only one answer.)

First is Sullivan's reaction. Knee-jerk glibertarianism. Sullivan is too ready to condemn "the left" for doing what the right has done for years, which is taking those with opposed views to task. I'm not doing the "but your side does it, too" dance, because Sullivan is quite publicly appalled by the anti-gay stance of the rabid right in this country, but I don't recall him ever making the kind of sweeping denunciation of the authoritarian right-wing bigots here that he routinely makes toward the "authoritarian left." (I don't recall any instance of the left making up outright lies about their opponents, as is customary with Dr. Thio and her ilk. I provided a link to the notorious speech against repeal of 337A in my earlier post, but here it is again. It's pretty awful, just from a factual accuracy point of view, and the reasoning is based more on debater's tricks than anything else -- sort of what you'd expect from a law professor.) Sullivan's reaction to this sort of thing is "It's 'the left' doing it, so it must be anti-democratic," which is a stance that defies not only reason, but any shred of sanity.

To give credit where credit it due, Sullivan will be educated. It takes a lot, but he is open enough for that.

Another strand of this is the idea that she should be provided another forum for expressing her views, as repellent as they may be. Sullivan's post, as I noted, relies heavily on this piece by Wendy Kaminer. Let me point out that Kaminer's bias is evident in the last sentence of her first paragraph:

According to a petition protesting it, she had opposed repeal of a Singaporean law criminalizing homosexual conduct and "supported the imposition of a $15,000 fine on a free-access Singaporean television channel for presenting a gay couple and their child as a family unit." (If the latter claim is accurate, it surely undermines her credibility as victim of censorship.)

There's no reason to doubt the accuracy of that report. Dr. Thio has not disputed it any place that I can find, and to cast it in terms of "If it is accurate" to me reads as an attempt to undercut the credibility of testimony against Dr. Thio. What is accurate is that she has no credibility as a victim of censorship. She has not been censored. She's just been given to understand that her views are unacceptable to enough of those at NYU's law school that her appearance there would be a failure.

The major flaw in the Sullivan/Kaminer stance is simply that Dr. Thio has had ample opportunity to express her views on homosexuality and has taken advantage of it. Kaminer:

The refusal of law students even to hear opposing views, reflecting opposing moral codes, is particularly worrisome. I wouldn't want one of these future lawyers ever advocating for me. They're unlikely to learn how to argue effectively if they limit their law school debates to matters about which only presumptively reasonable people disagree. Uniformity of opinion breeds complacency, close-mindedness, and a tendency to mistake attitudes for arguments.

But the whole point is that her views are on record, and you can bet those students were aware of her views and her expression of them. As I pointed out in my previous post, her factual basis for her opinions is nonexistent and her reasoning is pure sophistry -- hardly qualifications to be teaching at NYU or anyplace else. (Perhaps in matters of pure, abstract, constitutional law she is a competent if not inspired teacher. I wonder if mere competence is enough.) I wonder what the reaction from the Kaminer/Sullivan camp would have been if a well-known gay rights activist had been invited to a guest lectureship at, say, Bob Jones University, only to withdraw after massive protests and denunuciations. Would we have heard snide remarks about the "authoritarian right"?

What makes me wonder if Kaminer really knows what she's talking about is simply that I've actually read Dr. Thio's 337A speech, which I discussed earlier. Dr. Thio disqualified herself as a teacher simply on the basis of the manner in which her "arguments" were presented and the fact that those arguments have, at best, a tenuous relationship with objective reality.

What I'm left with is that both Sullivan and Kaminer are saying, in effect, that those with radical views, unfounded in any sort of factual reality, should be provided a forum to express those views because they are radical and unfounded. This is, apparently, even more true if those views are offensive to a large portion of the prospective audience, and especially if that audience can in any way be typified as "liberal."

Update: Another comment: I've said before that I consider libertarianism a morally bankrupt political philosophy (and I won't go into the complete absence of intellectual underpinnings based on the ways human societies actually work), and neither Sullivan nor Kaminer have done anything to change my mind. Both seem to be, from their comments on this issue, just waiting for another chance to take a poke at "the authoritarian left" without every examining the realities of the situation under discussion. One has to wonder when The Atlantic became the final refuge of second-rate thinkers. Going back over this, I can't identify any real substance to Kaminer's text, and Sullivan's biases are embarrassingly obvious.

We now return to our previously scheduled program.

As for Dr. Thio's reaction to the controversy, it's no suprise that she attempted to take the moral high ground -- and failed. From the Straits Times:

In a response carried in the Insider Higher Ed portal, Dr Thio said: 'Everyone is entitled to their opinion, free conscience, free thought - that is a cardinal principle for every academic community.'

'We can be united in commitment to this principle, without slavishly bowing to a demanded uniformity or dogma of political correctness set by elite diktat. I cannot say I am impressed by this ugly brand of politicking which I hope is not endemic.'

'I think certain Americans have to realise the fact that there are a diversity of views on the subject and it is not a settled matter; there is no universal norm and it is nothing short of moral imperialism to suggest there is.'

Referring back to the $15,000 fine issue, Dr. Thio seems to believe that the idea that "everyone is entitled to their opinion, free conscience, free thought" has distinct limits, particularly for those who hold views opposed to her own. Now, she may make the argument that a free-access television station is not an "academic community," but why should such freedoms be limited to that milieu? That's not what democracy is about.

I'd also like to take issue with her comment about "moral imperialism." First, that is exactly what she is espousing, except that it's her concept of morality which much take precedence, at least in Singapore. She doesn't seem to like it when she can't have the game played by her rules.

There's also the fact that she's talking about a "morality" that is purely a social construct that has been ripped out of its original context, where it might have had some validity as a mechanism for social unification (there is evidence that the twelve tribes that became the nation of Israel were, in fact, a congeries of groups, not all of which were even Semites, that banded together under the banner of one God) and used as an instrument of social control in contexts in which it has become less and less valid, particularly as we learn more about human behavior, and even more particularly in this instance as we learn more about the origins and prevalence of same-sex attraction. (It's also, as I have stated before, a particularly shallow reading of morality that relies on a mechanistic view of people and doesn't come close to developing a basis for moral behavior.)

In short, the Sullivan/Kaminer whining about "free speech" is simply a matter of a shoe that fits on either foot. It's a much more complex question, even in this case, than either of them are really capable of dealing with, from all appearances.

As I see it, Sullivan and Kaminer are using Dr. Thio to attack those who are exercising their rights to free speech to protest Dr. Thio's appointment. The protests took a couple of forms, one of which proved very effective. PietB noted that she has lost face big-time because of the low enrollment in her classes. I suppose the Sullivan/Kaminer camp would hold the attitude that students should have enrolled because we not only must be willing to listen to offensive viewpoints, but must make a special effort to do so.

Sullivan remarked:

It seems to me that gay rights supporters should always, always, always defend the freedom of speech and association of our opponents. In a free and open debate, we will always win because our arguments are so strong.

No one has attacked Dr. Thio's right to express her views. She has been criticized for the content of those views, and the university was, quite rightly, I think, criticized for providing a forum for those views. Let me point out that we are in the age of the Internet -- it's not like anyone of any prominence (and large numbers of those with no prominence whatsoever) is lacking a public forum: the Internet is one big public forum, and maybe Sullivan should alter his conceptual basis of the universe to take account of that fact. Dr. Thio has exercised her right to free speech. That's not the question. The question is whether an American university must provide her yet another forum to express those views.

I found it particularly revealing that Kaminer quoted the remarks of Richard Revesz, dean of NYU's law school, without apparently understanding what he actually said:

"At the same time, our evaluation of Professor Thio's strength as a scholar might have been usefully informed by an assessment of the analytic cogency and methodological integrity of the arguments and evidence she marshaled for her position."

That sounds to me very much as though he's saying that if they had investigated a little more thoroughly and actually read any of her statements in terms of their "analytic cogency and methodological integrity," she never would have been offered the appointment to begin with. (And as for the evidence, I've already noted that what I saw was carefully selected to support her agenda, and in large part was either misinformation or complete fabrication.)

Damn -- I'm certainly not a law professor -- I don't even write for the Atlantic -- and I could spot the holes in her reasoning a mile away.

Lord save us from wishy-washy libertarians. I mean, if you're going to argue a position, make sure you've actually got a position to argue before you open your mouth.

(Footnote: I've heard from a correspondent in Singapore who is terribly embarrassed by Dr. Thio. As he put it, that's the part of Singapore that he didn't want me to know about, and earnestly wants me to understand that they're not all like that. In fact, most of them aren't.)

Limits on Free Exercise

No, this is not about good deals at the gym. I ran across this post from Andrew Koppelman late yesterday and wanted to comment on it because it touches on a topic I've addressed, although not substantively, in the past.

Koppelman's concern here, as you can see (because you did follow the link and you did read the post, didn't you? And do go back and read the posts Koppelman links to -- they're important here) is religious exemptions written into civil rights laws, specifically laws legalizing same-sex marriage.

Religious exemptions from antidiscrimination laws are fairly costless, I’ve argued: as long as the religious dissenters are idiosyncratic outliers – and they generally will be, based on the scant number of accommodation claims we’ve seen – they’ll have no effect on gay people’s opportunities, and so they can harmlessly be left to live out their ideals in peace.

What Koppelman is missing here is that we are not dealing with a few outliers -- we are dealing with a well-organized and amply funded group ($40 million to support Prop 8; $165 million on the attempt to repeal marriage in Massachusetts) who are not prepared to play fair.

In another post, Koppelman refers to something that bothered me about Gov. John Lynch's proposed amendment to the New Hampshire marriage statute and that directly contradicts Koppelan's assumption:

Some are uncomfortable with the practice of singling out religion in this way, but the narrowness of the religious exemption is precisely why it is so clear that we can afford it. If a broader set of people were able to bring exemption claims, then we would have a less tractable conflict. In the contemporary United States, the claims for a conscientious right to discriminate will almost always be religious claims. Only a small minority of discriminators will be able to defend themselves on this basis. Most employers do not want to announce that they discriminate on the basis of sexual orientation, and so this defense is unavailable to them. (Emphasis mine)

This is exactly what Lynch's amendment jumped right into, feet first. (For my comments on Lynch's language, see here; scroll down to "New Hampshire Note." A follow-up is here.) I remarked at the time that the language was overbroad, as well as being redundant: in effect, it made any association with any group claiming to be "religious" in nature grounds for legalized discrimination in any aspect of daily life.

Religious freedom is guaranteed in this country under the Establishment Clause and the Free Exercise Clause of the First Amendment, and the courts have generally bent over backwards to accommodate claims of religious discrimination: that's not something we like in this country. By the same token, as I've said any number of times, there are limits to any right, no matter how fundamental it is. Part of the process of democracy is establishing those limits, which is something we've done over the course of time and something the religious right has been challenging. Thus, the Catholic Charities were organized as a separate entity legally somewhat removed from the Catholic Church specifically to enable it to accept government funding to carry out its work without violating separation of church and state. Suddenly, Catholic Charities makes a big deal out of abandoning its adoption services because placing children with gay parents would violate its religious doctrine. (They may have been refusing to do so for years, but the key factor here is that we'd never heard of it until they began screaming "religious discrimination" and bailed, which only happened within the past couple of years.)

To go back to Koppelman's original post, I think he's misreading the situation in New Hampshire:

There are people who are reprehensibly embracing self-aggrandizing fantasies that are hurting real people. But I’m sorry to say that they’re not the Christian conservatives. They are the people on my side, the gay rights side, who are willing to sacrifice the hopes of New Hampshire gays who want to marry, out of pure malice toward their political opponents.

Can I call this an overstatement? My reading of the situation in New Hampshire is not that anyone is interested in beating up the religious conservatives, no matter how much they deserve it, nor to I think malice is involved (unless one chooses to read the legislature's annoyance at being dictated to by the governor as "malice," which is a stretch). I think there is a legitimate concern over extending religious protections beyond what is reasonable or workable. Let's face it, Lynch came up with that language as political cover, and it is overbroad -- including that amendment as written would lay the groundwork for years of litigation, count on it. (And I do not discount the idea that Lynch did it on purpose -- he opposes the statute but doesn't really have any legitimate grounds for a veto.) The limits that I mentioned above seem to me to be perfectly workable -- the distinction between providing a public accommodation that is subject to antidiscrimination laws and one's personal religious beliefs has been fairly clear in the past, and it's only the effort by the religious right to take more and more territory that has blurred it. Koppelman is rather ingenuously buying into this campaign by assuming that religious objections to recognizing same-sex marriages will be few and far between (although I'll be the first to admit he might be correct, which would be wonderful) and all perfectly legitimate, and condemning those who quite rightly want to maintain a workable status quo as "bigots," when the history of the religious right argues just the opposite.