Sotomayor

The buzz around Justice Sonia Sotomayor’s recent nomination, as well as the ongoing hearings, has brought to the forefront the issue of gender and race in the currently U.S. Supreme Court, which does not appear terribly representative of the country it deigns to serve.  But critics and journalists are missing the boat with respect to a determinant factor of identity, going beyond race and gender.  There’s a glaring omission from this debate.

While the racial milestone that will be made with her appointment to the court will certainly be significant, an important trend (perhaps the most important trend) in the court itself will be broken by her ascendancy. That is, she will be the first Catholic on the Court who is not a conservative.

(from: Southern Appeal)

While every is scrutinizing the race, gender, and whiteness of the Court, and how it affects the decisions that it makes, the religious denominational breakdown of the Court has been the leading (and perhaps sole) indicator based on identity as to how the Court has voted.  That is to say: All the Roman Catholic Justices are conservative (from moderately-tempered Kennedy, Clarence Thomas, John Roberts, Samuel Alito, to the barking mad Scalia), whereas all the other non-Catholic Justices (Ginsburg, Stephens, Breyer, and the now-departed Souter) are more liberal in their decisions.

Since the end of the Rehnquist Court in 2005, the the sides in decisions of the Court could be nearly always determined by Catholic affiliation (or non-affiliation).  For instance, Justice Kennedy is occasionally a “swing vote” between the liberal and conservatives of the court, but almost always sides with his Catholic buddies.  A few exceptions have occurred, such as Kelo v. City of New London, but such exceptions largely prove the rule.

With Sotomayor on the Court, all that will change!  LIberal Catholics around the country can rejoice that finally a non-conservative Catholic will represent and advocate their ideological perspective in the future.  A wall will be broken, a stereotyping of Catholics as socially backwards, intolerant curmudgeons will end, and “progress” will be upon the U.S. Supreme Court.

Question: Should liberals now fear that Sotomayor will abandon her hitherto liberal instincts, and start taking orders from the Vatican? (See B.E. Howard’s question to Kennedy)

Giving Warren even more mainstream cred is not just a cost-free nod to evangelicals. It’s a boost for someone who actively opposes Obama’s agenda and who is eager to influence secular affairs.

That mainstream cred may be cost-free to the evangelicals, but it comes at a deadly cost to the LGBT community…

(Mikko Allane, emphasis mine):

The problem, as many commentators have noted, is that we’re not disagreeing about abstract ideas — we’re disagreeing about civil and human rights.

I would argue that we’re disagreeing about most basic human right of all — the right to live a life free of violence.

Because words are where violence begins. And in America, violence against gays, lesbians, and transgendered people most often begins in hateful and intolerant words spoken in right-wing churches like Rick Warren’s Saddleback. Warren has compared gay and lesbian people to pedophiles and perpetrators of incest (you can watch the CNN video of his remarks here). His words may often be cloaked more politely, but in his intolerance, Warren is really no different than James Dobson, Jerry Falwell, Fred Phelps, or other peddlers of anti-gay hate.

And the seeds of that hate are growing faster than ever.

This year, the FBI reported a 1% decline in hate crimes in the United States. At the same time, they revealed a 6% increase in hate crimes against gay, lesbian, and transgendered people. In the past few months alone, shocking murders have been reported across the country from Oxnard, CA to Brooklyn, NY, and most recently, San Francisco.

That’s a powerful statistic.  Hate crime on average has gone down while hate crimes against the LGBT community have gone up.  Crimes including gang rape (Vanessa, Feministing):

Last Saturday in San Francisco, a lesbian was beaten and repeatedly raped by four men, while the perpetrators “made comments indicating they knew her sexual orientation.” They then left the 28-year old naked outside of an abandoned apartment building, who was helped by someone living nearby.

Its impossible to imagine Obama inviting the leader of a white supremacist group attempting to gain mainstream appeal.  I can understand what Obama is going for by inviting an evangelical to the inauguration.  The problem is that the cost outweights the benefits.  He’s helping a wolf get his sheep costume on in the hope that they can work on common problems like fighting hoof and mouth disease and too much logging in the woods.  To do this he’s ignoring the sheep who go missing.

Violence against gay/bi/trans people continues to burn and Obama is helping the man with the gasoline.

So apparently Wright can be given the hook when Obama’s doing political risk assessment, but not Rick Warren. You can draw your own conclusions as to why it’s now possible, even in light of the incredible mother lode of evidence of the extreme anti-gay views of Rick Warren, that Barack Obama doesn’t feel politically inconvenienced enough to dump the Saddleback bigot.

Two reasons jump out at me.  One, that team Obama expects Warren to behave during the inauguration.  The idea is for a voice of the religious right to champion causes he shares with the incoming administration.  Obama is consensus building.  Which leads us into the second reason. Obama isn’t a liberal, no matter how fiercely he was championed by liberals (myself included) and vilified by conservatives.  He is a centrist (albeit an unusually pragmatic one with definite liberal leanings).  As such he has a much wider and more optimistic view of “his base”.  Barack Obama wants to bring evangelicals to the table.  By bringing one of their own to the stage and emphasizing where they are natural allies, perhaps he believes he’ll be able to bridge the many gaps between religious conservatives and the political mainstream.

Since there isn’t likely to be an uninvite with all that at stake, time will tell how well this move plays out.  From the painful experience of being a Democratic, Obama is supremely unlikely to mollify the religious conservative leadership no matter how much he reaches out.  But perhaps this one symbolic act in January will speak the rank and file faithful louder than their conservative religious leadership’s weekly sermons and daily rants.  Perhaps it will be worth the alienating the people who worked so hard to get him into office.

Write to Marry Day!

Arguments in favor of California’s Proposition 8 are a fascinating study in hate apologetics.  Just as with the “life begins at conception” anti-choice movement or the pro-creationism lobby, from the start there is an intense pressure to hide the religious foundations beneath the nearest available logic-like substitute.  It comes down to an often hilarious yet very sobering look into the kind of people who think discrimination belongs in the California state constitution.

The favored defenses of institutionalized bigotry are:

• Cultural Definition/Clarity
• Protecting the Institution of Marriage, Social Role of Traditional Families, Etc
• Claiming Same Sex Relationship are Unnatural
• OMG They Will Make Our Children Gay
• Majority Rule vs Courts
• Protecting Religious Freedom

The first argument goes something like this (DocDodson’s first comment):

Marriage law in this culture represents one thing.
A man and a woman. For clarity another word must be used to represent any other type of union. Specifications reject confusion. Now, Let’s do talk about religion. If you attend a church, would it be a church of God in Christ, or a church of Satan? What if you walked into a building that just said church, and became trapped? You thought it was one thing, but you got trapped in another. Deciet is a horrible thing. Misrepresentation of values, a crime.

I can see why DocDodson is afraid, who would want to become trapped forever in a building that “just said church”?  Its painfully easy to dismiss the idea that straight people might become so confused by marriage in a post prop-8 world they might accidentally marry someone of the same sex.  The cultural definition provides more to go on.  This argument is remarkably similar to the Southern Way of Life arguments against racial equality:

The Southern way of life divided the world into white and black – sacred and profane.  In this sacred way of life, all who were white were viewed as fully human and all who were black as less than human.

The anti-gay movement and the support for proposition 8 shares a lot in common with the racist campaign against equality during the civil rights era, as this brilliant video hack shows (via Amanda at Pandagon):

By taking the Morman Church’s campaign against equality regardless of sexual orientation and substituting in “interracial” for “same-sex”, they’ve effectively shown the true colors of those who claim to champion family values.

Which leads us to the next three arguments, which often go together.  The basic idea is that Same sex marriages somehow:

• Effect opposite sex marriages
• Go against the purpose of marriage, which is to further society (ie make more people)
• Provide an Immoral/Unnatural/Icky Environment for Children

The first point is the easiest to tackle.  One can simply look to Massachusetts, which has a complete lack of “Well, gay marriage is now legal” statements in divorce proceedings.  The opportunity to point out the utter nonsense of this argument is not one to squander.  At its heart is the idea that the actions of some can affect the morality of unrelated persons.  The reasoning is remarkably close to the heart of many pro religion-state marriage partisans:  Its about removing temptation so the weak do not succumb to what they view as sinful.  We need look no further than the tendency of Republican officials – paragons of morality – to seek out prostitutes and other sexual activities they rail against in public.  It is religious conservatives of all stripes who seek to institute a nanny state.

The second point is often lightly dealt with by referring to childless marriages, and offering to institute a deadline for producing offspring for marriage licenses to remain valid.  Anyone foolish enough to walk into this arguing that would be fine by them can be shamed by bringing up the example of infertile couples.

Against the third point there is some encouragement to find in popular culture (Apple Trailer: Breakfast With Scot). This boils down to two implied arguments:  That homosexuality is learned behavior (which feeds into the paranoia about children even being taught same sex couples exist), and that homosexuality is ok “for adults who already are gay, but not for children!”.  The clear implication being that despite all the assurances to the contrary, people who use this argument are really wearing their homophobia on their sleave.  The best thing to do is to bring the discussion back to the biological basis of sexual preference, and to argue so as to bring out their homophobia into the light, where you can then counter that they have no place forcing their fear and hate on the general public.

To quote Comparative Religious Ethics again:

The Southern way of life divided the world into white and black – sacred and profane.  In this sacred way of life, all who were white were viewed as fully human and all who were black  as less than human.  Therefore Southern white morality did not require whites to treat blacks with the same dignitiy that they treated each other.  For a black person to enter the sacred space of white society, except under strictly controlled conditions, was to pollute that space.

The fear and hate of homophobia, combined with the disapproval of religious authority, has had a similarly violent impact on homosexuals.  When people are viewed as hateful, less than human, or a sinful influence, they become objects of aggression.  Opposition to same sex marriage is innately eliminationist in its expression.

We now arrive at the last two arguments for proposition 8, wherein the anti-gay movement tries to have it both ways at once (preservingmarriage.com):

One the one hand, the anti-gay contingent is intent on insisting their religious freedom to believe homosexuals are sinners are at risk, and need to be protected.  They are however quite comfortable with ensuring their beliefs restrict all same-sex couples from enjoying the same rights as straight couples.  With regard to their perceived vulnerability to a flood of lawsuits demanding churches marry homosexuals, there doesn’t seem to be any evidence to back up this kind of fear (mormonapologetics.org, emphasis mine):

But will it happen? Will churches be forced to perform gay marriages, even when it contradicts their religious convictions?

No one can see the future, but we can look to the past for similar situations. The closest comparison I can think of is the legalization of interracial marriage. I’ve searched and searched, but I can’t find a single case where a church was forced to perform an interracial marriage. From a broader perspective, the same argument could be applied to civil rights as a whole. The civil rights era created anti-discrimination legislation which was applied to public and private institutions, but churches were (and still are) exempt from such laws. The LDS church was free to deny priesthood status to blacks until it decided on its own to end the practice. The government never attempted to force the LDS church to change its policies regarding blacks, even though those policies were racist and discriminatory. The church was never threatened with the loss of tax exempt status for those policies.

History shows that churches will be free to practice their religion, even when such practices are discriminatory. There is, therefore, no reason to believe the hysterical arguments now being put forth with respect to same sex marriage.

Further down in the same thread, there is a link to a California law professor debunking the legal threat:

Kaimi Wenger, a law professor addressed this question in a discussion of the legal issues in California, and his conclusion was that it is unlikely that the Church would be required to perform same sex marriages.

http://ldshomosexuality.com/?p=168

Given that churches have in the recent past successfully barred interracial marriage, I doubt they’ll have much trouble being just as bigoted when it comes to same sex marriage.

This leaves the desire of the anti-gay mob to force their religious beliefs on all Californians.  And they are increasingly acting not just like a mob, but like the mob (SFGate via August):

Leaders of the campaign to outlaw same-sex marriage in California are warning businesses that have given money to the state’s largest gay rights group they will be publicly identified as opponents of traditional unions unless they contribute to the gay marriage ban, too.

ProtectMarriage.com, the umbrella group behind a ballot initiative that would overturn the California Supreme Court decision that legalized gay marriage, sent a certified letter this week asking companies to withdraw their support of Equality California, a nonprofit organization that is helping lead the campaign against Proposition 8.

“Make a donation of a like amount to ProtectMarriage.com which will help us correct this error,” reads the letter. “Were you to elect not to donate comparably, it would be a clear indication that you are in opposition to traditional marriage. … The names of any companies and organizations that choose not to donate in like manner to ProtectMarriage.com but have given to Equality California will be published.”

No word on whether or not in addition to being “outed”, supporters of gay rights would wake up next to a disembodied horse’s head:

Equality California executive director Geoffrey Kors said Thursday he has heard from two other business owners besides Abbott.

“It’s truly an outrageous attempt to extort people,” Kors said.

A church is acting like the mafia to protect institutionalized inequality and hate.  Their excuse for doing so is mind boggling:

She called the tactic “a frustrated response” to the intimidation felt by Proposition 8 supporters, who have had their lawn signs stolen and property vandalized in the closing days of the heated campaign.

Individuals act out inappropriately and the response is to extort business owners?  WTF?

Its an incredibly stupid move, and one we can help backfire simply by bringing more attention to it.

I’ll close with this video (through Feminist Law Professors via Samhita at Feministing):

I’d like to draw your attention to a particular scene at the end where one of the “No on 8″ counter protestors attempts to debate with the “Yes on 8″ supporters.  Unable to defend their desire to impose their views on others, they break into a chant, drowning out the lone “No on 8″ activist, literally turning their backs on him.

There is literally no room for nuance on an issue like this.  Supporters of Propostion 8 are on shaky ground with only veiled appeals to theocratic tendencies to lean on.  In contrast the opponents of Prop 8 have their shit remarkably together, and are willing to engage in smart and reasoned discourse.

Equality California has an Action Center and a helpful Ways to Get Involved page.  It also isn’t too late to donate.

Vote No on Prop 8!

Political battles are often nuanced fights, in which an issue is wrapped up with personal history, racism, sexism, mysterious backstories, internal power struggles, party politics, and more.  “Sides” are seldom clearly distinguishable as purely right or wrong, true or false.  Politics is a muddled business in this way.

But one fight going on in the U.S. – most notably in California – is really quite simple.

Proposition 8 is a constitutional amendment to the California Constitution that, if passed, “eliminates the right of same-sex couples to marry”.  Voters of that state will cast ballots on November 4th to determine whether they wish to revoke a right for a segment of the population.

There is little nuanced about California’s Proposition 8 (and Florida’s Proposition 2 and Arizona’s Proposition 102).  These are refreshingly clear fights for full human rights of folks who happen to belong to the GLBTQ community.

The fight is about whether fear is going to continue to drive how we live, how we see each other, how we interact as a people.

The fight is about whether hatred is going to be the lesson taught to our youth, whether we’re going to teach them how to shun, whether we’re going to instill injustice in their hearts.

The fight is about whether religion will again be used, in an all-too-familiar way, to create an “other” who we can point our fingers at.  Christians will have to demonstrate whether they actually have read and understand the hypocrisy of the Pharisees, whether they accept or reject spiritual decay.

The fight is about whether the United States is a place where there exists a separation of church and state, whether we wish to become a theocracy, or whether our values truly are better than the foreign religious fundamentalists so often decried.

The fight is about whether citizens who proclaim the virtue of “small government” will actually realize that principle, whether they will respect a person’s right to privacy, or whether they will thrust a lengthened arm of the law into their own bedrooms.

Write to Marry Day!

The fight is about whether we will maintain the bondage on the dignity of each individual, whether we will repudiate our own civil rights, or whether liberty for one means liberty for all.

In essence, the fight is about whether we will be a civilized people, that uses our institutions to learn how to live together in peace, or use those institutions to create divisions and foster discrimination.  Rarely are people given such clear choices in the voting booth that will declare their equitableness, or their iniquity.  There is no nuance here, only the opportunity to embrace our own humanity.

Massachusetts is also a state where Gay Marriage has been legal for quite some time. Looking over at the fight brewing in California makes me a little nostalgic. MA has its fair share of theocrats too.

This is something we need to be clear about. Anyone opposing the freedom of consenting adults to enter into the bonds of marriage with each other is doing so to impose their religious views on the entire country.  This line from the Wall Street Journal caught my eye:

Mormon leaders, on the church’s official Web site, ask their followers to support the California ballot measure to reinforce church teachings that “marriage between a man and a woman is ordained of God.”

There is just no justification on this green Earth for using a ballot measure – an instrument of state – to enforce church teachings.  None.  This shit burns me up.  Sarah Palin, the Republican VP candidate is eating it up:

The issue has come up in the presidential campaign, with Republican Sen. John McCain’s running mate, Alaska Gov. Sarah Palin, suggesting this week that she would support a constitutional amendment to ban gay marriage nationwide.

She’s signaling just as clearly as she can that if elected, she’ll use her power as Queen of the U.S. Senate to begin pushing her Bible on our laws.

Its getting to a point where its just too much to take.  Check out this video of a McCain/Palin supporter (via an especially pertinent and brilliant post at Pandagon):

Its marked the first time I’ve felt strongly “This person shouldn’t have the right to vote”.  This thought startled and upset me as soon as I had it, since I strongly believe everyone has the right to vote (and ought to be encourage to).  Faith in this sense is not a virtue.  It is a liability.  It is a knife through the heart of reasoned discourse.  Watching that video, do you think it remotely possible to discuss positions and substance with that woman and get anywhere at all?  Everything comes down to this black and white binary of whether it fits into her personal religious view, and there is no room for anything other than the comfortable dogma she knows by rote.

What it comes down to is this rage and this conviction I have.  That however I feel about the election, I want with every ounce of me to resist a small but vocal segment of this country dragging us all deeper into their theocratic pit.

to the theocrat:

this is the land of the free

you won’t tread on me

]]> http://revolutionaryact.org/2008/10/theocrats-dont-tread-on-me/feed/ 1 http://revolutionaryact.org/2008/09/bill-carrico-jesus-nation-state-police-chaplian-controversy/ http://revolutionaryact.org/2008/09/bill-carrico-jesus-nation-state-police-chaplian-controversy/#comments Tue, 30 Sep 2008 19:38:23 +0000 Dan http://revolutionaryact.org/?p=144 I saw an ad for the november 1st rally on facebook:

Six Virginia State Police Chaplains were just forced to resign by the Kaine Administration because they prayed publicly “in Jesus name.” In response, 86 Virginia Pastors have taken a pledge to mobilize their people to vote, and now we’re standing up for Jesus with these chaplains.

That caught my eye, so I decided to dig a bit deeper.  Turns out no one was forced to resign.  They chose to.  (Washington Times):

At least six of the Virginia State Police’s 17 chaplains have resigned following a request they offer only “nondenominational” prayers during department-sanctioned public events and ceremonies, police said Wednesday.

The request was made by state police Superintendent Col. W. Steven Flaherty earlier this month and has been decried by Virginia House Republicans as a violation of the First Amendment and an attack on Christianity. One Republican delegate said chaplains were told they could not invoke the name of Jesus, but a state police spokeswoman denied the assertion.

To “require those troopers to disregard their own faith while serving violates their First Amendment rights and prevents them from serving effectively as chaplains,” said House Majority Leader H. Morgan Griffith, Salem Republican. “These men had little choice but to resign.”

To better understand the dispute we ought to take a look at one of the men behind it:

However, Delegate Charles W. “Bill” Carrico Sr., a former state trooper, said he has spoken with some of the chaplains, who said the colonel’s request was not put in writing and was treated as an order.

The chaplains were told that “they cannot reference the name of Jesus Christ,” said Mr. Carrico, Grayson Republican. “That’s against their beliefs and against the dictates of their conscience.”

Bill Carrico is the owner of In Jesus Name I Pray.org (registered on the 22nd to his state email address: DelCCarrico@house.state.va.us).  He serves in the Virginia House.  He recently attempted to run for the US House, and held off an aggressive challenge (and a close vote) from a Democratic challenger.  He also put forth a bill (which passed the state house and failed in the state senate) to allow religious prayer on public property:

Amends the current religious freedom provisions of the Virginia Constitution to “secure further the people’s right to acknowledge God”; to permit prayer and the recognition of “religious beliefs, heritage, and traditions on public property, including public schools”; and to prohibit the Commonwealth and its political subdivisions, including public school divisions, from composing school prayers or requiring individuals to “join in prayer or other religious activity.”

The second half being a cover.  His real concern is in pushing Christianity further into the political mainstream.  Bill Carrico believes this is a Christian Nation (emphasis mine):

Patrick Henry once said “It cannot be emphasized too strongly or too often that this great nation was not founded by religionist, but by Christians; not on religions, but on the Gospel of Jesus Christ. For this very reason people of other faiths have been afforded asylum, prosperity and freedom to worship here.”

Bill has an unsurprisingly poor understanding of the consitution:

Other religions have the right to worship here, however just because they are offended by what we were founded upon doesn’t give them the right to take away our constitutional freedoms.

The separation of church and state is no where in the constitution and was a letter from Jefferson to the Danbury Baptist suggesting that the state should never be allowed to run the church.

The first ammendment to the constitution clearly reads:

Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion

Arguing this is a Christian nation runs directly counter to the spirit and letter of the first ammendment.

The dispute on its surface is an argument over whether public officials can offer demoninational prayer in an official context.  Underneath is a strategy by Dominionist politicians to paint America as a Christian nation, which serves as a political foundation for easing more theocratic laws into the books.

(One wonders how would the same chaplains react if it had been a Hindu prayer in an official context?)