Another Must-Read: The Speech

There's a fair amount of buzz over Trump's speech in Poland on Thursday, mostly stemming from a tweet by Caribou Barbie:

Trump Gives Speech to the People of Poland, Says 14 Words That Leave Americans Stunned https://t.co/8iKHEQemn9

— Sarah Palin (@SarahPalinUSA) July 7, 2017

If you haven't heard about the "fourteen words" thing, don't feel bad: I hadn't either, but then, I don't follow white supremacist sites. Nancy Goldstein's response:

"14 Words"= most popular white supremacist slogan in the world: "We must secure the existence of our people & a future 4 white children." https://t.co/0hUsMEdaSd

— Nancy Goldstein (@nancygoldstein) July 7, 2017

Betty Cracker looks a little more deeply into Trump's speech:

But the speech’s content deserves attention because of the worldview it reveals — a Bannonite dystopia in which white Christian countries are besieged by hordes of brown heretics. That vision flew mostly under the radar because Trump used “the West” as shorthand for white folks, and people interpret the phrase in different ways. But the message was clear and chilling if you’ve paid attention to the garbage ideology white nationalists allied with Bannon have pushed with varying degrees of success worldwide.

It should be no secret -- although it seems to have been soft-pedaled by the press lately, who are more concerned with documenting Trump's daily atrocities -- that a big part of Trump's appeal was to the racist contingent in white America. Sadly, it's a strain that's always been with us. (I'm sure I've remarked on what seems to a a hard-wired tendency among social animals to see the world as "us/them" -- group identity is very important in sociality, and has value, but we're supposed to be smart enough to think our way past that -- or at least, expand our definition of "us".)

It's all about dog whistles -- "in group" rabble-rousing. It's no coincidence that hate crimes and racially/ethnically motivated confrontations have risen sharply since the advent of Trump.

Welcome to Trump's America.

On Charleston

(And isn't it interesting how these mass murders are known by place names?)

The responses to this horror have been coming thick and fast, and rather than do my own analysis (which I was going to do, but as I said, "thick and fast" and a little much to keep up with), I'm going to rely on a couple of other commentators.

First, Jon Green at AmericaBlog has a good recap of the Republicans' attempt to dodge the race issue:

Roof traveled over 100 miles from his home in Lexington, South Carolina in order to target Emmanuel Church specifically. Roof’s Facebook photos showed him sporting and taking pictures with white supremacist flags, ranging from the Stars and Bars of the Confederacy all the way to the apartheid-era flags of South Africa and Rhodesia. The suspect’s former roommate was quoted by CBS as saying that Roof had been “planning something like that for six months,” and “said he wanted to start a civil war.” Roof reportedly told his victims, who were all black, that “you rape our women and are taking over our country.”

This was not a random, senseless act of violence. This was a planned, thought-out terror attack. It fits every one of our criteria for terrorism: Violence committed by a non-state actor with a clear political motive — in this case white supremacy. So, of course, mainstream conservatives — some of whom have a non-zero probability of being our next president — took to the airwaves to remind everyone that, despite the shooter’s clearly-stated motives, the attack really isn’t about race.

It’s actually an attack on Christianity.

Let's keep one idea front and center: this was about race. It was all about race. That's all it was about. The Republicans' problem is that they are, for some reason, reluctant to address racism as an issue -- unless, of course, it's about whites being discriminated against, which isn't really going to fly in this context.

The first one that I saw who labeled this an example of persecution against Christians was that font of wisdom, Rick Santorum. Now, of course, everyone's piling on, especially since President Obama commented on the shooting and the ease of acquiring guns. Don't be fooled -- Rick Perry knows it's about drugs:

Instead of talking about guns, Perry said, we should be talking about prescription drugs: “Also, I think there is a real issue to be talked about. It seems to me, again without having all the details about this, that these individuals have been medicated and there may be a real issue in this country from the standpoint of these drugs and how they’re used.”

He said that such drugs are responsible for high suicide and joblessness rates, adding that “there are a lot of issues underlying this that I think we as a country need to have a conversion about rather than just the knee-jerk reaction of saying, ‘If we can just take all the guns away, this won’t happen.’”

There's more -- pick a Republican presidential candidate, or non-candidate, or Fox News -- and brace yourself for a completely irrelevant reaction.

Another good summary/analysis comes from Digby, who surveys the off-the-wall responses -- this, from WSJ, is worth highlighting:

Today the system and philosophy of institutionalized racism identified by Dr. King no longer exists.

What causes young men such as Dylann Roof to erupt in homicidal rage, whatever their motivation, is a problem that defies explanation beyond the reality that evil still stalks humanity. It is no small solace that in committing such an act today, he stands alone.

Emphasis added.

I'm at a loss for words after that one. (But do remember one of the crimes punishable by death: existing while black.)

If you want to see a prime example of the evil that stalks humanity, read this rant by white-supremacist, arch-homophobe and Duggar defender Tony Perkins. Or at least, as much as you can without ruining your keyboard.

Read both Green's and Digby's posts. I can't do them justice through excerpts.

For Your Information

The FBI's 2011 compilation of hate crimes statistics. Useful to know.

Beyond Homophobia

It's just inhumanity.  I'm sure you've seen this story.  I'm not going to quote the summary the way everyone else is doing -- you can read it at the link.

I am going to say something that no one else seems to be saying:  this goes way beyond simple  homophobia (if such a murky and tangled disease can ever be called "simple).  This is unadulterated and gratuitous cruelty.

I really, truly hope that Greene bankrupts the county and everyone involved is blacklisted from ever working in social services again.  But then, I'm not always a very nice person.

Does anyone need any further evidence that we need to have our relationships recognized nationwide?

Update:  Here's a post with more context.  And even more from NYT.  And, from Joe.My.God, more detail, more links.  It's chilling.

As one if the commenters at J.M.G. points out, we're only seeing the complaint -- half the story.  However, the charges are so outrageous that I doubt very much that there's no basis -- you don't get to first base filing a complaint like on nothing, and the NCLR is not an organization to go off half-cocked.  I'd like to see if any criminal charges come out of this, because if there's any truth at all to the allegations, there are criminal violations here.

 

One Down

Via Joe Sudbay at AmericaBlog Gay, this news:

The U.S. Senate just passed, by a vote of 68 - 29, the conference report on the Department of Defense Authorization. That was the final step in the legislative process for this bill, which contains the hate crimes language.

The Defense bill now heads to the White House for President Obama to sign it into law. This will be the first pro-LGBT legislation to become law in the history of our nation -- but won't be the last, even in this Congress.

Immutable Characteristics: A Footnote

I can always count on Andrew Sullivan and his readers. This one's a sidebar, actually, a reader's response to this post:

I'm against hate crime laws - every single one of them. I also understand and respect the argument for them, even as I strongly disagree. But what you cannot coherently hold is that there should be hate crime protections for people of faith and no hate crime protections for gays. Even if you believe, erroneously, that homoesxuality is a choice, so, obviously, is religion. The GOP's current position - against hate crime laws only when they apply to gays (even with strong guarantees of freedom of speech and religion) - is pure animus. It's bigotry - and it's coming from the very top.

The "top" he's referring to is John Boehner, Minority Leader of the House of Representatives. We've already done Boehner's boner, and I've lit into Sullivan enough about his position on hate crimes laws.

The reader opines thus:

In a recent post, you wrote that "Even if you believe, erroneously, that homosexuality is a choice, so, obviously, is religion." I've heard that from a number of people recently, and I'm curious as to whether this is actually true. I certainly don't remember choosing to be an Atheist--as far back as I can trace, it simply fit in with what I believed and how I perceived the world around me. At what age did I choose to be an Atheist? What were my range of choices? Does the fact that both my parents were atheists decrease my choice?

I'm curious as to when you chose to be a Catholic. When you write about your belief and faith, I don't recall getting the sense of you weighing multiple options and choosing the best answer. Often, faith can be very, very difficult.

But, that misses the point of Boehner's statement, and misses any sensible reading of the issue: Boehner was repeating the anti-gay mantra that being gay is a choice, in the face of all evidence. (Or perhaps we're dealing with a little Thomist sophistry here: if you choose to be honest about being gay, and try to make a life as a gay person, then you've made a choice to be gay. You see the problem? It's condemning the "choice" to act on an intrinsic part of your personality. OK -- I don't want to go any farther into this -- my head will explode from the logical disconnects.)

If one is to believe recent findings from psychologists and geneticists, there may be a genetic component to the tendency toward belief. That's a very general category. Boehner's statement implies that there is a Baptist gene, and, as might be expected, there's no support for that one at all. As for this reader, the fact that both his parents were atheists may imply a predisposition toward non-belief, which seems a reasonable obverse to the idea of a genetic basis for belief.

The point is, of course, that safeguards for religious belief, and hate-crimes laws that increase penalties for violent crimes stemming from bias against another's beliefs, are not based on an immutable characteristic, simply because the choice of which faith to follow is a choice. It's a choice that's guaranteed in our Constitution. (It's worth noting here that none of the rights protected in the Bill of Rights are based on immutable characteristics.) It's not a rational choice, necessarily. In fact it's probably not at all rational, which is where I think Sullivan and his reader miss the boat: religious sentiment is an emotional experience. I was raised a Christian -- well, they tried, although it didn't stick very well. I came to Paganism because it felt like coming home. That's the key phrase -- "felt like." I knew a little bit about it -- I have a number of Pagan friends -- but it was after -- call it my "epiphany" -- that I began the serious study of the beliefs and traditions of my new faith. (It was never a question of whether the gods exist. It was a question of how I conceive of them. And there's an element of choice in those two statements. In addition to its other virtues, Paganism gives me some room to maneuver. I'm probably the Pagan equivalent of a Deist.) (Note: Let me also add a bit about how the story of the Lord's self-sacrifice at Samhain, when he willingly gives himself to slaughter and enters the Underworld, affects me more deeply than the story of the Crucifixion ever did. I don't know why -- it's essentially the same story, but there's an emotional load to the Pagan version that hits me right in the gut.)

Any guesses on whether John Boehner wants to protect my "choice" to become a Witch? How about if I call it "my immutable Witchhood"?

On Free Speech, With Some Comments on Hate Crimes

Time to take another poke at Andrew Sullivan. My first reaction to this post was pretty negative, but in some respects Sullivan has it right: Thio Li-anh, who was recently forced to withdraw from consideration for an NYU human rights course, does have a right to express her opinions, no matter how wrong and baseless they are. (And I'm sure you're asking yourselves "Can an opinion be wrong?" Yes, of course it can, if it's based on false information.):

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.

At its best, that's a naive assumption that ignores everything we've learned in the past thirty years or so. If it were true, we wouldn't have to be campaigning for equal rights now.

There's also the question of whether Thio is really an appropriate teacher for a human rights course, given her views on human rights. From her public statements that I've read, she's not willing to include gays in the "human" part of that concept, and she's woefully ignorant of the realities of "gayness," its origins, and its context.

Be that as it may, does she have a right to express her views? Of course. Although from what I hear -- and that's supported by this snippet: "Dr. Thio, for one, "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." -- she's not willing to extend that right to others if she disagrees with them. That's an interesting question for Sullivan: If Dr. Thio and her like are not willing to extend those rights to others, why should we extend those rights to them? They are not, after all, playing by the rules.

But should the university provide a forum for those views without protest? That's a little knottier, and a question, I suspect, that's beyond Sullivan's depth.

Sullivan's taking off from this post by Wendy Kaminer in The Atlantic, which is another abstract, in the ideal world sort of discourse on free speech. Kaminer does touch on the key issue, which she at least notes, although she doesn't discuss it at all:

In responding to her withdrawal, NYU law school dean Richard Revesz smartly finessed questions about her appointment by noting that while her views should not have disqualified her, despite their variance from the university's ideals, the quality of her arguments in support of her views were relevant to her evaluation. "Leading academic institutions benefit greatly from a diversity of perspectives, not from hiring only people who share the same views," Revesv observed (he is quoted at length at abajournal.com). "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."

Kaminer doesn't seem to have really read any of Thio Li-anh's statements. I did find a transcript of the notorious speech to Parliament defending section 337A, Singapore's anti-gay law. It's a mish-mash of flat assertions, appeals to "morality," misinformation, unsupported statements -- the standard right-wing scare speech. This is just an example:

Homosexuality is a gender identity disorder; there are numerous examples of former homosexuals successfully dealing with this. They claim a right of sexual reorientation. Just this year, two high profile US activists left the homosexual lifestyle, the publisher of Venus, a lesbian magazine, and an editor of Young Gay America. Their stories are available online. An article by an ex-gay in the New Statesmen this July identified the roots of his emotional hurts, like a distant father, overbearing mother and sexual abuse by a family friend; after working through his pain, his unwanted same-sex attractions left. While difficult, change is possible and a compassionate society would help those wanting to fulfill their heterosexual potential.

This is crap from the beginning. "Gender identity disorder"? Conflating two different typologies -- one of the right's favorite tactics. I'm a man. I've always been a man. I love being a man. I love other men for being men. None of us think we're women, nor do we want to be: we are not transexuals. Transexuals have an entirely different psychological make-up.

Ex-gays: This is another assertion as fact of something that is highly debatable at best. "Numerous examples" is an overstatement. "Ex-gay" proponents in the U.S. have claimed "thousands" of successful conversions, but have never been able to produce more than a handful, most of whom have relapsed at the first opportunity. Even Alan Chambers admits that his orientation hasn't changed -- he's just denying it expression. And of course, Thio didn't mention the fact that such conversions have been condemned by every reputable association of psychologists, psychotherapists, and other caregivers.

So if this is the caliber of Thio Li-anh's reasoning ability, I have to say that, in formal terms, she's not all that great, as well as being reality-challenged. She's arguing an agenda, and doing so using specious methods. I don't see how that qualifies her to teach human rights law.

As for the content of her remarks, I personally think she should have been allowed to teach the course -- and let the students nail her there, both on content and form.

Oh, and about hate crimes. Sullivan shows, once again, his essential shallowness:

And yet the authoritarian part of the left is often there, waiting in the wings. We need vigilance against them and their arguments, including the poisonous concept of hate crime laws.

Why he felt it necessary to throw in the reference to "the poisonous concept of hate crime laws" I think owes more to Sullivan's own issues than anything else. To put it in terms that even Sullivan should be able to understand, "hate crimes" are, by definition, a form of terrorism: their effect is to intimidate members of a group. Hate crime laws stipulate enhanced penalties for violent crimes motivated by bias. Enhanced penalties based on motivation are nothing new in Western jurisprudence -- the difference between murder and manslaughter is one of motivation. To equate enhanced penalties for violent crimes in this category with criminalizing thought, as Sullivan and others have done, is specious at best. I find it hard to believe that Sullivan would willingly put himself in the same class as James Dobson, Bill O'Reilly, Mat Staver, and their ilk. He really needs to rethink that whole thing, with some grounding in reality.

Don't misunderstand -- you should know by now that I have little patience with the PC left. I don't respond well to authority, no matter which end of the political spectrum it originates from. I suspect, however, that Sullivan and I have different criteria for assigning membership in that particular group.

Hate Crimes

Catching up on this one. Dave Neiwert has a couple of posts (here and here). He summarizes it better than I can:

There's a pattern here: Democrats -- either through spinelessness or surreptitious mendacity -- have a history of refusing to take the fight over hate crimes to the carpets. Every time they have the votes to pass one, they attach it to another piece of legislation, which renders it vulnerable to the seemingly inevitable euthanasia in committee. This either reflects an unexpressed wish to kill a hate-crimes bill, or a failure to recognize bias crimes as an essential matter, and write it off as a fight they can't win.

Indeed, it's mind-boggling that congressional Democrats seem incapable of connecting the big bright fluorescent dots in front of them when it comes to bias crimes -- that they lie, in fact, at the heart of the national cultural divide. This bill isn't just about gay rights. It's about the Jena 6 and noose incidents. It's about the tide of anti-immigrant hate crimes being committed against Latinos.

Bias crimes lie at the black beating heart of everything progressives have historically fought: injustice, bigotry, exclusion, and violence. These things are the enemies of democracy itself, and that is why we fight them. Effectively confronting and addressing them is an imperative: politically, ethically, morally.

So the sad if utterly predictable fate of the latest federal bias-crimes law really represents an act of cowardice. I suppose we can look forward, fifty years from now, to seeing subsequent generations of politicians finally step forward and recognize that this abysmal failure to adequately confront bias crimes was a gross historical mistake for which many thousands of Americans paid the price. After all, it's what the Senate did not long ago in confronting the legacy of a previous generation's purposeful failure to act against its version of hate crimes, lynching.

Read both posts -- as always, excellent analysis, although the conclusions are pretty depressing.

Update:

If anyone has any doubts that hate crimes legislation is necessary, read this post by Pam Spaulding.

Hate Crimes

I want those who are against hate-crimes legislation to read this and explain to me why this should be treated just like any other assault. There is ample documentation that hate crimes are worse and have much more far-reaching effects than those not motivated by bias:

Undoubtedly David Ritcheson's wounds were deepened by the grotesque humiliation he suffered at the hands of the thugs: they violated him with a plastic pole and scarred him by pouring bleach into and over him. But that kind of extreme violence is also part of the nature of hate crimes, as I explained in Chapter 5 of Death on the Fourth of July:

While data and studies have given us a pretty clear picture of the typical hate-crime offender, no one has ever compiled a psychological profile of the typical hate-crime victim. This is partly because these victims are notoriously difficult to study; most of them are so traumatized by the crimes that they often refuse to participate in such work.

Mostly, however, it's because hate crimes can happen to literally anyone and can occur at any time, in no small part because of the random elements in the perpetrators' victim-selection process -- that is, most victims are complete strangers to the offender, chosen only because of their perceived membership in the target group. Nearly any race, religion or sexual orientation can inspire bias-motivated violence, and indeed one need not even actually belong to the target group to fall victim to a hate crime; witness the not-insubstantial number of heterosexual victims of gay-bashing.

That said, it is clear that in twenty-first-century America, minorities are far more likely to be victims of hate crimes than anyone else. In 2001, for example, 10,898 of the 12,020 victims of hate crimes reported to the FBI were various kinds of minorities. A pattern of victimization risk also emerges from the data: race is the most common motivator, with African Americans the most vulnerable targets; Jews and gay men are the second- and third-most likely targets, respectively.

Perhaps just as significant, the data reveals that these are more likely to be violent crimes. Criminal-justice expert Barbara Perry points to FBI statistics that reveal wide disparities in the levels of violence between bias crimes and "normal" street crimes. "It is apparent that hate crime . . . is much more likely to involve physical threat and harm to individuals, rather than property," she writes:

Consequently, such victims are also more likely to be at the receiving end of excessively brutal violence. To the extent that hate crime perpetrators are motivated by fear, hatred, mistrust, or resentment of victims, for example, they are more likely to engage in extreme violence -- violence which is beyond that necessary to subdue the victim.

If I need to add anything to this, you're not playing with a full deck.