Opinion
The Republican 'defund Obamacare' disorder shows their denial of political reality
The Republican party is not in a good place right now. They are historically unpopular (particularly House Republicans); they have no discernible governing agenda; they are under assault from their own supporters; they continue to say stupid things that upset key voting groups … and – guess what? – things are about to get even worse.
Case in point: the ongoing GOP obsession with Obamacare.
It's now been three and half years since the legislation was signed into law; more than a year since it was upheld by the US supreme court, and nearly 10 months since Mitt Romney, running on a pledge to repeal it, was defeated in the 2012 presidential election. Yet, rather than accept the reality of Obamacare, the GOP's effort to ensure that millions of Americans are prevented from receiving healthcare coverage and remain forever mired in financial and personal anxiety because of their lack of insurance continues unabated.
How to accomplish that, of course, is the hard part – particularly since Democrats control the Senate and the bill's namesake is sitting in the Oval Office. Indeed, because of this political reality, Republicans have appeared lately to be putting aside their strategy of shutting down the federal government in October unless Obamacare is defunded.
But don't pop those champagne corks too soon. Instead, they are now debating the idea of refusing to raise the debt limit in return for a White House agreement to "delay" implementing Obamacare. This is the political equivalent of "we're not going to hold our breath until we turn blue and collapse now; instead, we're going to wait a few additional weeks and then we're going to hold our breath until we turn blue and collapse."
Now, granted, if the GOP wants to knock themselves out (literally), who are we, as non-crazy and rational people, to stop them? Knock yourself out, GOP!
The problem, however, is that while shutting down the government would be bad for the country and disastrous for the GOP, it's not the desired political Armageddon. Refusing to raise the debt limit – well, that's something else altogether. So, instead of holding its breath, collapsing and perhaps suffering a nasty cut, the GOP would prefer to hold its breath, collapse and fall on a plunger – a la Alec Guinness in Bridge on the River Kwai – and blow up the whole goddamn bridge. (In this analogy, the bridge is a stand-in for the US economy.)
In fact, it's hard to imagine a greater self-inflicted wound that Congress could impose on the nation than not raising debt limit. It would put at risk the full faith and credit of the United States and do grievous harm to the US economy.
The GOP's new "defund Obamacare" strategy actually increases this terrifying possibility. By avoiding a government shutdown in October, Republicans will dodge the immediate political minefield of their own making. But at the same time, if Republicans agree to pass a budget and keep the government up-and-running (while getting nothing in return from the White House), it will further increase the pressure on the Republican leadership of Speaker John Boehner and Senate minority leader Mitch McConnell to get something, anything, out of the White House when the debt limit ceiling needs to be raised.
The problem, of course, is that the President Obama has made clear he has no intention of negotiating over the debt limit – a mistake he made in the summer of 2011 that he dares not repeat again. That immovable obstacle makes the GOP's efforts to defund Obamacare a largely fruitless exercise.
Democrats aren't going to deal and they know (or, at least, strongly assume) that Republicans will give in eventually – and they are probably right. The GOP has negotiated itself into a completely untenable position: namely, one in which the last hostage they can take (the debt limit) they have no real intention of killing and no real interest in doing so.
Of course, that doesn't mean they won't shoot the hostage by accident or out of rank, careless stupidity. That's what makes this game so dangerous. But for Republicans, the danger is even greater – because while debt default can perhaps be avoided long-term, catastrophic damage to the GOP likely cannot. If Republicans let the nation default on its debt, they will pay a very heavy political price for doing so. It is almost certain that the American public will hold the GOP responsible.
But if Republicans give in on the debt limit/defund Obamacare strategy, they will not only have failed to stop Obamacare this fall, but they will also have failed to stop Obamacare, period. The law's healthcare exchanges go into effect 1 October, and the law becomes fully enacted on 1 January 2014. Once that occurs, the train will have left the station and there will be no turning back.
For those Americans who can't get health insurance or have an ounce of social empathy for their fellow citizens, this is an altogether good thing. For Republicans, it will be yet another sign of their impotence and their failure as a political party. And it will be made worse if Boehner and McConnell are forced to rely on Democratic votes to pass a clean debt limit extension.
The incandescent rage from Tea Partiers at yet another bout of failed brinkmanship will not be directed at Obama; it will be directed at their own leaders.
It's already happening. This week, Tennessee Senator Lamar Alexander joined Lindsey Graham and Mitch McConnell in finding himself under assault from a Tea Party primary challenge. Alexander is hardly a moderate (he even penned an op-ed this week defending his conservative bonafides), but in the increasingly radicalized GOP, he's considered something of a Rino (Republican In Name Only). His crime: an apparent willingness to seek "compromise" with Democrats.
At the same time, conservative groups are now funding ad campaigns against Republicans in both the House and Senate for refusing to embrace the Tea Party's suicidal defund Obamacare strategy. For Republicans who are in safe seats or in red states the biggest threat they face today is not from Democrats, but from their own supporters – and even more directly, from potential primary challenges. Considering how many "establishment Republicans" have lost Senate and House primaries to outside-the-mainstream Tea Party candidates in the past two election cycles, this is no idle threat.
So, while this intra-party challenge reduces the desire of Republicans compromise, it also makes them that much more vulnerable politically when they are forced to do so. It's not difficult to imagine that when the smoke clears from this fall's budget showdown and debt limit hostage-taking that Republicans will find themselves mired in full-scale civil war with Tea Party radicals who are even further emboldened to push their no-compromise agenda on the party.
Keep in mind, that's the best possible outcome for Republicans. The worst one is that they blow up the US economy.
Some Republicans are nuts, but the party leaders are not
There are extreme Republicans, but the leadership is not about to allow the party to go the way of the Whigs
News watchers these days have to strain their head not to hear a story about Republicans going off the deep end. Whether it be the asinine attempts to derail Obamacare in Congress, impeachment talks, or harsh voter identification laws passed in North Carolina, some of the more extreme members of the Republican party are front and center.
The question is whether or not these very conservative members are taking control of the Republican party and perhaps throwing it the way of the Whigs. I don't just mean as talking-heads on Fox News. I mean leaders of the party.
I can think of two ways we can figure this out. First, we can look at who is leading the party in Congress, since they are elected by their fellow congressmen. Second, we can look at who the party is most likely to nominate in 2016.
On the first point, it's important to remember that most congressmen have little power, even if they scream from the high tops. Loud members of this group include former Congressmen Dennis Kucinich and Anthony Weiner. They may have appeared a lot on television, but didn't hold much sway when it came to legislating. The key is to look at who chairs committees. These are the people who usher legislation through the US government. Those who hold the purse strings. The people who set the agenda. The people who hold sway.
It used to be that seniority was the main determinant of committee chairmanship, but that's changed over the past 20 years. Other factors such party unity and the ability to fundraise are more important in determining chairmanships, which make it a good measure of where the center of power is. Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell is actually slightly more toward the middle than the median Republican. Per DW-nominate scores, which is based on roll call voting, even the more conservative Minority Whip John Cornyn is within a standard deviation of his party's center.
The chairmen of the important committees also tend to be more moderate. Senators Grassley of Iowa, Hatch of Utah, and Shelby of Alabama are all more moderate than the caucus as a whole. In fact, Grassley is the 7th least conservative Republican in the Senate. Only the conservative Jim Inhofe of Oklahoma, who is still more moderate than Marco Rubio, is to the right part of the caucus.
This extends to the House as well. There is no score for Speaker Boehner, but Majority Leader Eric Cantor is more moderate than the potential 2016 presidential nominees per Nate Silver. Majority Whip Kevin McCarthy is right in the middle of the Republican caucus per DW-nominate scores. The chairmen of the Appropriations, Energy and Commerce, Transportation, and Ways and Means are all more moderate than the caucus as a whole. This includes Fred Upton of Energy and Commerce, who is more moderate than 80% of his caucus. Only Pete Sessions of the Rules Committee is more conservative than the caucus of a whole.
Probably more important is who the party's presidential nominee is. This person projects the image of a party, and if (s)he wins, chooses the national party's leadership. President Obama is a non-extreme liberal whose multiracial background echoes a party welcoming to moderates and a growing diverse population. The latter is part of the reason there have been calls for a Marco Rubio nomination.
Since the party reforms of the 1970s, a candidate backed by the establishment hasn't lost the nomination. Even after the anti-establishment Tea Party surge of 2010, a relatively weak Mitt Romney was able to corral the nomination thanks to establishment support.
So who is the Republican establishment apparently supporting now? New Jersey Governor Chris Christie. For the time being, the "selection" of Christie suggests a Republican leadership that isn't about to go off the deep end. It tells the story of a party leadership that wants to win the White House and will do what it thinks is necessary to win.
Christie is not currently loved by the grassroots, though as Nate Cohn points out he can likely overcome the generally inaccurate early primary polling data. On the key issues that are important to the Republican base such as abortion and gay marriage, he's not "moderate". Christie is certainly no liberal on taxation issues. That's likely why the Republican leadership is backing him, when they wouldn't do the same for former New York City mayor Rudy Giuliani. He's presentable to the different parts of the Republican base when it comes down to it, even if the numbers don't say it right now.
Still, Christie is not that conservative on the whole. Yes, Christie is pro-life, anti-gay marriage, and just vetoed gun control legislation. Abortion, however, is something most Americans are split on. Christie also signed a law banning gay conversion therapy, and he signed 10 different gun control laws recently. In other words, Christie is a kind of ideological hodgepodge. This can best be seen by looking at ideological ranking systems. This takes the subjectivity out of trying to parse out where exactly a candidate stands.
As Nate Silver did originally, you can average scores across different systems to get a good idea of where a candidate stands. In the case of Christie, he'd be the most moderate Republican candidate in the past 50 years.
Christie's scoring on the two rankings we have available place him more toward the center than any other candidate to win a Republican nomination since 1964. Some of you might say that Christie is more conservative than these scores indicate. But it seems to me that for every issue where Christie takes a conservative stand, he takes a moderate stance. So that while he's conservative on taxes, he's for campaign finance reform and green energy.
The point is he's more toward the center than previous nominees. He no doubt will move somewhat towards the right, once he wins a second term in November. Still, even a hard turn right would still leave him as relatively moderate. A Republican leadership that was looking to move more towards the right would not be interested in nominating this man or nominating the committee chairmen they are in congress. This is a party that wants to win. It's a party leadership that at least right now is following the historical pattern of wanting to nominate a more moderate candidate, after losing the the presidential election in two consecutive cycles.
All of this point to a party that, on an electoral level, is still functioning. These are signs of a party that isn't going away anytime soon and may win back all elected federal branches by 2016.
guardian.co.uk © Guardian News and Media 2013
Banish the trolls, but web debate still needs anonymity
Huffington Post risks stifling lively exchanges with its insistence on real names, writes John Naughton
So the proprietor of the Huffington Post has decided to ban anonymous commenting from the site, starting in mid-September. Speaking to reporters after a conference in Boston, Arianna Huffington said: "Trolls are just getting more and more aggressive and uglier and I just came from London where there are rape and death threats. I feel that freedom of expression is given to people who stand up for what they say and [are] not hiding behind anonymity. We need to evolve a platform to meet the needs of the grown-up internet."
Quite so. I can see heads nodding in agreement. After all, much anonymous online commenting seems to be stupid, nasty, vicious and ignorant. And that's just the stuff that isn't tangential to the topic of the article being commented on. If people have to take responsibility for what they say in public, then they will surely behave better.
That seems like common sense. Whether it is supported by evidence is, however, uncertain because at the moment there isn't much research, and what there is seems to be mostly anecdotal. The most striking study I've come across is the experiment conducted by the (South) Korea Communications Commission from July 2007. From that month onwards, anyone wanting to comment on any of the 146 Korean websites with more than 100,000 members was required by law to submit resident registration or credit card details.
The hypothesis behind the requirement was that people would behave better online if they were easily identifiable. But it didn't turn out that way. At any rate, the commission announced recently that it was withdrawing the registration requirement because it had been ineffective in preventing people from posting abusive messages or spreading false rumours. When the regulation was introduced in 2007, malicious comments accounted for 13.9% of all messages posted on internet threads. But a year later, bad behaviour had reduced by less than 1%.
Without knowing the details of the Korean experiment, the metrics used to measure bad behaviour, etc, it's difficult to know how seriously to take this result. Personally, I'm sceptical, if only because much of the pathological behaviour that we've observed online – from violent threats, grotesque abuse, "lynch" mobs and bullying to gossip, slander and character assassination – corresponds pretty closely to what psychologists and historians have learned over the centuries about human behaviour offline. Put simply: if people believe that they will not be held accountable for their behaviour, then they tend to behave badly.
This is no consolation to those who, like Huffington, want to run websites that seek to encourage user engagement without having to spend large sums of money paying moderators to keep order and enforce civility. But obliging commenters to use their real names will have costs as well as benefits. Chief among the former will be a significant reduction in the volume of commenting, at least in the short term, which in turn will adversely affect the site's advertising revenues. The hit might be worth taking, however, if in the longer term the quality of the discussion on the site visibly improves.
For site owners who fear that real-name commenting represents a risk too far, there is a halfway house: pseudonymity‚ ie a system in which commenters are allowed to choose their own user names, but have to associate them with a valid email address (which in the last analysis could be used as an identifier). Last year, Disqus, a company that provides an online discussion and commenting service for websites, published some useful research on the behaviour of different types of site user.
The purpose of the research was to address the criticism that there is no substantive difference between pseudonymous and anonymous commenters. Disqus begged to differ, arguing that whereas real names are for authentication (establishing who you are), pseudonyms are for expression: they imply "a choice of identity" and therefore have a communicative function. The company looked through its database of 60 million users and 500m comments to see how commenting practice differed between users who were completely anonymous, those who used pseudonyms and those who had registered via Facebook (and therefore were obliged to use their real names).
The metrics used in the Disqus study are crude but the results are nevertheless intriguing. Pseudonymous users produced significantly more "quality" comments (assessed by numbers of times a comment was "liked" and replied to) than either anonymous or real-name users. And they were much more prolific commenters: 61% of the 500m comments came from pseudonymous users, compared with 35% from anonymous users and a mere 4% from the Facebook-registered crowd.
And the moral of the story? Think twice, Arianna Huffington, before insisting on real names.
guardian.co.uk © Guardian News and Media 2013
Creating chilling effects on speech is a feature, not a bug, of the surveillance state
We've discussed a few times how the pervasive surveillance efforts of the NSA and others have tremendous chilling effects on how people communicate and how they act. We've discussed how this is a "cost" to the program that not many, especially those…
Remembering my time at the 1963 March on Washington
As we celebrate the 50th anniversary, we must ask: what would the Rev Martin Luther King think of Obama's presidency?
In 1963, a teenage woman civil rights worker in Albany, Georgia, said, "If you're not prepared to die here then you're not facing reality".
Any of us who participated in the 1963 March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom will celebrate its 50th anniversary with a combination of sweet nostalgia and mixed feelings about its "legacy". For me, and so many others, the event itself was redemptive and personally transforming. It had been a terrible year for African Americans and civil rights activists, a blood-drenched inventory of violence that included the jail beating of Fannie Lou Hamer and assassination of Medgar Evers. So on that Wednesday, 28 August, when 300,000 Americans from right across what I call the "decency spectrum" descended on an almost deserted Washington, it was as if a Norman Rockwell painting had come alive.
They – we – had come by bus, plane, train, car and hitch-hiker's thumb to demonstrate to ourselves and a watching world that there was a better, more righteous America than the Birmingham of Bull Connor who had set the dogs and fire hoses on black children. Our emotions – and amazing self-discipline – ran high. White Washington right on up to the White House was scared silly of all us black and white folks mixing together. Apocalypse was confidently predicted. The nation's capitol had "its worst case of invasion jitters since the First Battle of Bull Run", as a contemporary newspaper put it.
Wandering on the crowd's fringes, I talked to city cops and National Guardsmen – the Pentagon had mobilized almost 20,000 troops for the feared riot – who were white-faced scared to the point of hysteria. Businesses had shut down; liquor was banned; jails were emptied to make room for the anticipated mass arrests; emergency room doctors were called in on their days off.
But, against the doomsayers, an almost supernatural peace and good will reigned. Strangers became lifelong friends. A lot of us were astonished at how beautiful and strong we felt. On that hot, sunny day a genuine rainbow coalition of Quakers, Catholics, atheists, black and white church and social justice groups, labor unions, socialists and God-fearers poured into Washington because we felt that it was terribly important to be there.
Everyone who marched has their own special memory. Although the event comes down to us mainly as the Rev Martin Luther King's "I have a dream" speech to the huge throng standing in the sweltering heat or sprawled cooling their toes in the Mall's reflecting pool, I remember it as one big picnic with everyone in their Sunday best and on their best manners firmly clasping hands in King's "beloved community". The anger that had brought us together was for, at least this day, something else.
But it wasn't all kumbaya. More than half the American public viewed King as a dangerous troublemaker, a pariah. In the White House, a bet-hedging President John Kennedy and his attorney general brother Bobby, rightly fearing the loss of Dixiecrat votes in the '64 presidential election, pleaded with King and the organizers to delay, postpone or tone down the event. The FBI's racist chief J Edgar Hoover did everything in his power to smear the black leaders as communist subversives. Even the main African-American organizers – notably the gay socialist Bayard Rustin, A Philip Randolph of the Brotherhood of Sleeping Car Porters and King himself – dreaded the possibility that such a concentration of angry blacks and civil rights workers might end in a riot.
Privately, behind the scenes, there was a real split between the older, traditional civil rights leaders (NAACP, CORE, Urban League, Southern Christian Leadership Conference) bent on de-radicalizing the movement so as to give the Kennedys elbow room to pass Civil Rights and Voting Rights bills – against the (very) young foot soldiers of SNCC, the Student NonViolent Coordinating Committee, whose willingness to suffer fractured skulls and hair-breadth escapes from lynchings had provided much of the movement's moral and physical energy.
It had been a slow time coming. As long ago as the 1940s, Randolph had threatened President Roosevelt with a similar march if the government did not enact an anti-discrimination bill. Then the second world war intervened, which gave us the all-black Tuskegee Airmen and also created a new, less deferential type of black soldier demanding to be treated at least as civilly as white military base commanders dealt with their Nazi prisoners of war.
I came to the '63 march by a strange route. London-based, I was returning to the United States after a seven-year absence and had the good luck to follow in the footsteps of the Guardian's US correspondent WJ (Bill) Weatherby whose sympathy for the black liberation struggle had left behind strongly positive vibes for me to take advantage of. In Detroit, a racially hot city that had seen bloody riots and soon would again, I worked (and reported) alongside Malcolm X's brother Wilfred X. This gave me an "in". From then on I was passed hand to hand along a "black pipeline" of civil rights activists until I passed through Selma, Alabama to Albany, Georgia and on to Rustin and King's march.
Malcolm X and King played a strange game, each working opposite sides of the same street. Malcolm's voice, via radio and pirated tapes, hurled a defiant challenge to King's Gandhian nonviolence. "By any means necessary!" his voice crackled. "Whoever heard of a revolution where they lock arms and singing We Shall Overcome? You don't do that in a revolution. You don't do any singing; you're too busy swinging!" And the Detroit masses of blacks roared their approval. Meanwhile, King plowed his own ground preaching love and brotherhood. In my opinion, each shrewdly knew what the other was up to: Malcolm raising the stakes with his angry rhetoric made King, who most Americans really didn't like or approve of, at least mildly acceptable.
On the podium at the Lincoln Memorial, a furious debate went on right up to the last moment. SNCC's John Lewis, representing bold young activists, wanted to make a fiery speech warning Kennedy that "We will march through the South, through the heart of Dixie, the way Sherman did. We shall pursue our own scorched earth policy and burn Jim Crow to the ground..." His elders shut him up. They also banned the "inflammatory" writer James Baldwin from appearing.
Although black women were the backbone of the voting rights movement, none of the official speeches were by women.
Nonetheless, sheer love flowed from the march – but also hate. There was an immediate gruesome backlash. The next month, as if in retaliation, four KKK members dynamited Birmingham's 16th Street Baptist church killing four little girls on their way to hear a sermon "The Love That Forgives". All over the South racist cops and white supremacist groups stepped up their beatings and shootings. And, of course, only weeks later Kennedy was murdered in a racially inflamed Dallas.
John Lewis, now a Georgia congressman, is the only survivor of the March's original organizers. He has lived long enough to see an African American in the White House and a black attorney general – no small victories. Lewis has also lived long enough to see that even a black president can be tone deaf to the spirit of King's life. If King, an apostle of non-violence and advocate for the poorest of the poor, were alive today, what would he make of President Obama's careless-with-life drone assassinations, his bullying of journalists and whistleblowers, his assent to slashing Social Security via his Scrooge-like "deficit commission"? Without irony, the current 50th birthday organizers have invited Obama to speak from the very same podium where King made history.
guardian.co.uk © Guardian News and Media 2013
In Washington 'The game becomes more important than those for whom government should exist to help'
In the wake of all the talk surrounding Mark Leibovich’s controversial book about Washington, This Town, I was asked how that city has changed since I first lived there nearly 45 years ago. The question makes me feel a little like Grandpa Simpson,…
[Image via the World Economic Forum, Creative Commons licensed]
CATO Institute report says poor Americans have it too good
Conservative think tanks have spawned a cottage industry churning out dubious studies purporting to show that poor families are living high on the hog on public benefits, a claim that anybody who has actually experienced poverty in America would find…
New Jersey's ban on ex-gay therapy is a victory over religious nuts
As of this week, gay conversation therapy is outlawed in the state of New Jersey. Kids who are either gay or suspected of being gay cannot be forced by their parents to endure homophobic corrective therapy, which assemblyman and bill sponsor Tim Eustice correctly calls "an insidious form of child abuse".
Not only does conversion therapy fail to actually "convert" gay kids into straight ones, but, according to the American Psychological Association (which disavows the practice), it often leaves lasting scars, leading to mental health issues and substance abuse. California is the only other state in the nation that has attempted to ban conversion therapy, but that ban is caught up in ongoing legal battles.
Conversion therapists argue that their practice helps young people who are struggling with their sexuality, and that choosing the therapy is a First Amendment issue. Outlawing conversion therapy, they say, is one step on the "slippery slope of government infringing upon the First Amendment rights of counselors to provide, and patients to receive, counseling consistent with their religious beliefs".
Religious freedom is a constitutional right. But it's not the only one. Too often, the religious "freedom" of a parent comes at the expense of their children's basic human rights and rights to equal protection under the law. Kids are not simply extensions of their parents. They are individual people, and while they should be guided and directed and for the most part under the legal authority of their parents, their own rights to personal safety, health care and freedom from abuse should not be subsumed in some bizarro-world version of religious liberty.
Parents in the United States have remarkable latitude when it comes to determining how they will raise their children. There's often good reason behind that: The state doesn't actually know what's best for every family, and a diversity of individuals are going to have a diversity of needs. The overwhelming majority of parents want what's best for their kids and are in the best position to assess their own child's interests. And state interference with parenting practices has historically targeted minority groups and often violated the rights of children. Generations of Native American youth, for example, were taken from their families and placed in boarding schools, often run by churches, which were explicitly purposed to impart Christian European-American ideals onto the students and strip them of their heritage and traditions. The "education" of these children went on for centuries, and was part of a broader concerted effort to culturally annihilate Native Americans. Missionaries played a handy role, and the US government also got on board, opening schools of its own and funding the cultural genocide.
This isn't ancient history. Enrollment in these schools hit its peak in the 1970s. Today, Indian children in many states are still disproportionately removed from their homes and placed in white foster care. African American children, too, are more likely to be placed in foster care than white children.
It's easy to look at governmental interference into family life and determine that it tends to be racist and harmful to kids. The underlying problem, though, isn't any state intervention at all; it's the lack of holistic advocacy for the best interests and human rights of children. The focus on parental rights obscures the rights of the children themselves, and often means that where families don't fit into a middle class, white Christian ideal, parenting is suspect.
Kids are removed from loving homes if, for example, the family is in financial straits and there are no shelter beds available one night. Homeless moms are prosecuted for placing their kids in school districts where the kids don't "belong". What would actually help kids, of course, isn't removing them from their families. It's making an effort to keep families intact and prioritizing the needs of children – making sure that they have a roof over their head, healthy food, a decent education, knowledge of their own culture and the parents who love them.
Recognizing the basic human rights of children means outlawing practices that are abusive to those children, even if such practices are done under the guise of religion, tradition or culture. Parents may have a right to raise their children in accordance with a particular set of religious beliefs, but that right ends before the point a child endures psychological or physical harm. Unfortunately, in the United States, parents (and particularly Christian parents) have far too much leeway when it comes to using religion as an excuse to harm their kids or deny them care. Extreme examples of parents who rely on "faith healing" often make the news when their children die after illnesses are not cured by prayer alone. Too often, those parents receive light sentences, like one couple who received probation after their first child died from an easily treatable illness, simply because the couple believed God told them not to ask for medical help. During the probationary period, their ten-month-old baby also got sick and died after they refused to seek out medical care for him as well. It's unconscionable.
These issues, of course, aren't always quite so clear cut. Take, for example, the Supreme Court case in which an Amish family fought for the right to remove their children from school after the 8th grade, despite a Wisconsin law requiring that children attend school until they are 16 years old. The Amish religion requires that their children are raised without "worldly influence", but attending high school would violate that precept. The court sided with the parents, yet it wasn't the parents who were attending the school and whose religious beliefs where thereby challenged; the religious right violated was, apparently, the rights of parents to have total control over the beliefs of their children and the exposure of those children to the outside world. Children have a right to education; does it not violate their rights to allow their parents to remove them from school? And on the other hand, children also have a right to be raised in their own cultures and households, barring abuse – can't compulsory education infringe upon that right?
So I don't mean to suggest that there are always easy answers when it comes to the rights of children and the rights of parents to make decisions for their children. But some cases are easier than others. There are a great many religious fundamentalist parents who homeschool their children, offering very little in the way of actual education but much indoctrination, leaving their children ill-prepared to function in the real world. The kids themselves have no say in the matter, and there's little government regulation of home-schooling to ensure that kids educated at home actually receive an education. Plenty of homeschooling parents do a great job educating their kids. But lots of others don't. Teaching your kid that Adam and Eve rode around on dinosaurs and that they don't need to know math past simple addition may not rise to the level of abuse, but it's a violation nonetheless.
Typically, courts hold that religious freedom covers educational choices, but doesn't extend to the right to allow your child to die from lack of medical care. Bizarre interpretations of "religious freedom" do, however, sometimes mean that parents aren't prosecuted as strongly for neglecting their children or letting those children die if the neglect was motivated by a religious belief rather than malice or simple idiocy. Many states have laws on the books that give religious exemptions to parents, deeming it not actually neglect or abuse if you deny your kid medical attention and he suffers serious harm or even dies. You also probably have the right to not vaccinate your child, even though that puts him at risk and threatens others as well.
Some mainstream religious groups and leaders even promote physically assaulting children as a necessary aspect of Christian parenthood. Christian couple Michael and Debi Pearl are the authors of the best-selling book "To Train Up a Child," which advocates beating children from infancy on, using "the same principles the Amish use to train their stubborn mules". The book is widely read in homeschooling Christian communities, and has been tied to the brutal beatings and deaths of many children.
Yet it's hard to have the moral authority to say "don't hit your kid" when no state bans corporal punishment in the home. Many allow it in public schools. While children of course sometimes need to be physically restrained to keep them from being a danger to themselves or others, physically striking them as a form of punishment violates their basic right to live free from violence, and is increasingly understood to do more harm than good. We're not talking about swatting your kid's hand away to keep her from touching a hot stove. We're talking about using violence as punishment: you've been bad, so you will be intentionally and purposefully hit in physical retaliation by a person who is much larger than you and has total legal authority over you. More than 30 nations outlaw corporal punishment, and aren't exactly facing epidemics of out-of-control children or good non-abusive parents going to jail en masse. Kids in the US could use some of those same basic rights.
Too often missing from the debates of religious freedom and parental rights is the right of the child to be afforded basic protections, let alone equal ones. Children have a right, wherever possible, to be raised by their biological parents. Children have a right to be raised within their own culture, and not stolen from their families because those families don't meet the dominant-culture ideal. And children have a right to live free of violence, even where their parents believe committing acts of violence against their children is a God-given privilege.
The New Jersey law banning conversion therapy is one step in the right direction of protecting children from abuse. It will undoubtedly be challenged by those who think that kids are parental property and not human beings entitled to bodily integrity. Hopefully, though, it will serve as a model for future legislation protecting the most basic rights of children – and hopefully, the peddlers of "religious freedom" as cover for misogyny, homophobia and abuse will eventually see their schick uncovered.
guardian.co.uk © Guardian News and Media 2013
[Young man with Gay Pride flag via Shutterstock]
Elmore Leonard: Master of verbal tics and black humor
Acclaimed American writer who praised plain writing achieved literary daring across 60-year publishing career
Although the death of the American writer Elmore Leonard – on Tuesday, aged 87, in Detroit, from complications from a recent stroke – is certainly a matter for sadness and regret, the writer would not want to be responsible for anyone speaking of the news "sadly" or "regretfully".
One of his much-circulated 10 Rules for Successful Writing – in which he distilled the approach that brought him six decades of bestsellerdom – was that dialogue should never have any descriptive modifier. "'Leonard is dead,' they said," is something like the way the news should be communicated, according to his stylistic strictures, which always emphasised simplicity. Another is "try to leave out the parts that readers skip".
If there was a Leonard formula, it was remarkably efficient. The publication this year of the paperback edition of Raylan, his 45th novel, means that he achieved a 60-year publishing career that began with The Bounty Hunters in 1953. It was a literary longevity approached by only a few other novelists, including Agatha Christie and Georges Simenon.
In common with them, Leonard is generally classified as a crime or mystery writer, but he began and ended his career with stories more or less belonging to the genre of the western. He was strict about the definition of that form: stories set on the frontier of the American old west, such as The Bounty Hunters and its immediate successors. However, he retained many characteristics of the western – standoffs between law officials and bounty hunters, protagonists living on geographical and moral borders – when his books moved east and into a different genre.
With The Big Bounce (1969), Leonard found his dominant voice as a writer: comic crime stories, generally set in either his main hometown of Detroit – where he moved aged nine – or Florida, where he wintered. The key to the appeal of these books was their black humour. Revealingly, Leonard commended Ernest Hemingway for the economy of his sentences, but felt that Hemingway was prone to earnestness.
Leonard's characters both made jokes and were the butt of them. In his crime novels, he satirised most aspects of the criminal justice system. A flight attendant smuggles gun-runners' profits in Rum Punch; a notoriously draconian judge is savagely anatomised in Maximum Bob; and, in Swag, an honest used car salesman turns to robbery to supplement his income, coming up with "10 rules for successful robbery", which can be read as a larcenous companion to Leonard's list of rules for writing.
The plots, though, were largely a mechanism for Leonard to get his characters talking – the literary skill at which he excelled. A man who insisted that his prose style was achieved by leaving out what fancier writers left in was notable in his dialogue for putting in the things that many novelists left out: the hesitations, repetitions, sawn-off phrases. "She's gonna be, lemme see, sitting in the Caffe Rapallo at noon. Ezra Pound Garden at three, Vesuvio's at five. What we worked out," runs a surveillance report in Pronto, where an American on the run in Italy is advised to blend in by learning to "dig architecture, history, art, different related kinds of shit. You know what I'm saying?"
This ear for speech – resembling a tape-recorder set only to capture jokes, slang and verbal tics – made Leonard a natural target for Hollywood, even though most of Hollywood's shots at his novels missed, until the glorious Get Shorty (1995), with John Travolta as loan shark Chili Palmer and Danny DeVito as a tiny, whiny movie star. Ironically, Leonard finally got the film he deserved with a story which – possibly because of his earlier experiences in film-making – drew sardonic parallels between mobsters and movie moguls.
For most of his career, Leonard was undervalued by critics, both because of his consistently high sales and his facility with dialogue: some critics distrust speech-led novels as shooting scripts for future movies. Only in his later years did he get the credit he deserved, with testimonials from writers with lit-cred, including Martin Amis, and the imprimatur of two of the coolest movie directors of our time: Quentin Tarantino, who turned Rum Punch into the movie Jackie Brown (1997), and Steven Soderbergh, who adapted Out of Sight (1998).
This new cultural credibility seemed to give Leonard a greater literary daring, departing far from the American crime franchise he had established in fascinating experiments including Cuba Libre (2001), a historical novel set during the Cuban wars of independence, and Pagan Babies (2000), a dark story featuring a missionary priest in Rwanda.
The fickleness of readers and reviewers means that a long literary life is often doomed to end in obscurity or at least decline. Leonard, though, remained in print with both old and new books – he was reportedly well advanced on his 46th novel when he died – and in demand. Justified, a hit American TV series about a deputy US marshal in Kentucky, was based on Pronto and other Leonard stories and encouraged the author to write what became his final published book: Raylan, fittingly, was, in atmosphere, something like the westerns that had launched his career.
As shown by his frequent praise of plain writing, Leonard disliked the idea of style. In his way, though, he was a high stylist, able to capture in around 200 pages how American low-life looked and sounded.
For new university students, Jerry Garcia has always been dead
As professors, we realize that our students stay the same age, but we don't. Keeping up with the latest is tough
Every fall the same thing happens: I say "salvete!" (hello in Latin) to a classroom of college students. The students are roughly the same age as they were last year, the year before, and all the other years back to the 1990s when I started teaching.
But I'm older, now the age of their parents. Sometimes I console myself that at least I'm not the age of their grandparents, but I know it's only a matter of time.
At many a training session for faculty, mention is made of the Mindset List, which seeks to reveal the world view and values of today's 18-something year olds. Tom McBride and Ron Nief, an English professor and a now-retired administrator at Wisconsin's Beloit College, started compiling the list in 1998 to gently remind ageing professors like me that saying "groovy!" probably wouldn't get us very far with students.
The list for the Class of 2017 (freshmen born in 1995) came out today. Like previous lists, this year's remarks on the ephemerality of pop culture figures, the mutability of language and the myriad of ways that technology is intertwined (entrenched) in our lives.
To students entering the class of 2017, Jerry Garcia has always been dead.
They don't hear "chicken pox" and think "extremely painful and unpleasant childhood rite of passage". But Chicken Little? Oh yeah, that kid who got knocked out of American Idol a couple years ago.
To the class of 2017, Java doesn't mean coffee but software.
GM is something eco-people say we shouldn't eat.
Lockdown drills are as routine as fire drills: these students were babies when the Oklahoma City bombing occurred and toddlers when the Columbine High shooting happened.
Their family pet has a microchip and they've had an "electronic lifeline" (a cell phone) to mom and dad since middle school.
In their lifetime, the US has, as the new list says, "always been trying to figure out which side to back in Middle East conflicts". They get their news by following the Twitter feeds of activists (and Beloit alumnae) like Maryam and Zainab al-Khawaja (who is currently in prison in Bahrain) or from their own family members in Syria.
Students in the class of 2017 know you do everything on the internet. They chat on Skype and pay via Paypal. Wikipedia has always been there to look things up on.
See a student using a smart phone in class? They may not be texting a friend in the next row or in Kathmandu but "reading the assignment they should have read last night, or ... recording every minute of their college experience".
If you are 40-something-ish like me, reading such items in the most recent Mindset List is bound to make you feel old.
As I'm heading towards middle age, I've concluded that any attempt to keep up with my students is futile. I have to face the facts that I make cultural references (Davy Crockett and the pioneers) that no students understand.
I am, though, a classicist. Studying the ancient Greeks and Romans teaches you that some things never change. Young people (the horserace-loving Pheidippides in the 5th century BC, Aristophanes' satiric comedy, Clouds; the dandy curling and perfuming his hair to increase his sex appeal in Ovid's Art of Love) have always been baffling the older generation with their newfangled pursuits.
Wanting his son to learn something useful, Strepsiades, Pheidippides' father, packs him off to the Phrontisterion ("thinking factory") where the young student learns a bit more than had been bargained for from the resident teacher, Socrates.
The class of 2017 may think "tablet" means an iPad sort of device and not "something you take in the morning" per the new Mindset List. But as I tell my students, a tabula was the wax board that Roman school boys learned their declensions on. Wiped clean it was a tabula rasa or "blank slate", a phrase that has come to signify an open mind ready to be writ on by experience.
Those entering university today know a lot. Perhaps it's my job now to teach them an old truth: everything new can be old again.
Glenn Greenwald: Detaining my partner was a failed attempt at intimidation
Glenn Greenwald: The detention of my partner, David Miranda, by UK authorities will have the opposite effect of the one intended
At 6:30 am this morning my time - 5:30 am on the East Coast of the US - I received a telephone call from someone who identified himself as a "security official at Heathrow airport." He told me that my partner, David Miranda, had been "detained" at the London airport "under Schedule 7 of the Terrorism Act of 2000."
David had spent the last week in Berlin, where he stayed with Laura Poitras, the US filmmaker who has worked with me extensively on the NSA stories. A Brazilian citizen, he was returning to our home in Rio de Janeiro this morning on British Airways, flying first to London and then on to Rio. When he arrived in London this morning, he was detained.
At the time the "security official" called me, David had been detained for 3 hours. The security official told me that they had the right to detain him for up to 9 hours in order to question him, at which point they could either arrest and charge him or ask a court to extend the question time. The official - who refused to give his name but would only identify himself by his number: 203654 - said David was not allowed to have a lawyer present, nor would they allow me to talk to him.
I immediately contacted the Guardian, which sent lawyers to the airport, as well various Brazilian officials I know. Within the hour, several senior Brazilian officials were engaged and expressing indignation over what was being done. The Guardian has the full story here.
Despite all that, five more hours went by and neither the Guardian's lawyers nor Brazilian officials, including the Ambassador to the UK in London, were able to obtain any information about David. We spent most of that time contemplating the charges he would likely face once the 9-hour period elapsed.
According to a document published by the UK government about Schedule 7 of the Terrorism Act, "fewer than 3 people in every 10,000 are examined as they pass through UK borders" (David was not entering the UK but only transiting through to Rio). Moreover, "most examinations, over 97%, last under an hour." An appendix to that document states that only .06% of all people detained are kept for more than 6 hours.
The stated purpose of this law, as the name suggests, is to question people about terrorism. The detention power, claims the UK government, is used "to determine whether that person is or has been involved in the commission, preparation or instigation of acts of terrorism."
But they obviously had zero suspicion that David was associated with a terrorist organization or involved in any terrorist plot. Instead, they spent their time interrogating him about the NSA reporting which Laura Poitras, the Guardian and I are doing, as well the content of the electronic products he was carrying. They completely abused their own terrorism law for reasons having nothing whatsoever to do with terrorism: a potent reminder of how often governments lie when they claim that they need powers to stop "the terrorists", and how dangerous it is to vest unchecked power with political officials in its name.
Worse, they kept David detained right up until the last minute: for the full 9 hours, something they very rarely do. Only at the last minute did they finally release him. We spent all day - as every hour passed - worried that he would be arrested and charged under a terrorism statute. This was obviously designed to send a message of intimidation to those of us working journalistically on reporting on the NSA and its British counterpart, the GCHQ.
Before letting him go, they seized numerous possessions of his, including his laptop, his cellphone, various video game consoles, DVDs, USB sticks, and other materials. They did not say when they would return any of it, or if they would.
This is obviously a rather profound escalation of their attacks on the news-gathering process and journalism. It's bad enough to prosecute and imprison sources. It's worse still to imprison journalists who report the truth. But to start detaining the family members and loved ones of journalists is simply despotic. Even the Mafia had ethical rules against targeting the family members of people they felt threatened by. But the UK puppets and their owners in the US national security state obviously are unconstrained by even those minimal scruples.
If the UK and US governments believe that tactics like this are going to deter or intimidate us in any way from continuing to report aggressively on what these documents reveal, they are beyond deluded. If anything, it will have only the opposite effect: to embolden us even further. Beyond that, every time the US and UK governments show their true character to the world - when they prevent the Bolivian President's plane from flying safely home, when they threaten journalists with prosecution, when they engage in behavior like what they did today - all they do is helpfully underscore why it's so dangerous to allow them to exercise vast, unchecked spying power in the dark.
David was unable to call me because his phone and laptop are now with UK authorities. So I don't yet know what they told him. But the Guardian's lawyer was able to speak with him immediately upon his release, and told me that, while a bit distressed from the ordeal, he was in very good spirits and quite defiant, and he asked the lawyer to convey that defiance to me. I already share it, as I'm certain US and UK authorities will soon see.
Obama has not delivered on May's promise of transparency on drones
An escalation of drone strikes in Yemen highlights the fact that the US public is still in the dark about this use of lethal force
The past two weeks have seen an escalation in drone strikes more dramatic than any since 2009.
The media estimate that more than 37 people have died in a series of strikes in Yemen. The US government has refused to officially acknowledge the strikes surge or reports of potentially unlawful deaths – just as it did, for years, refuse to confirm reports of the more than 300 drone strikes in Pakistan. On drones, secrecy is business as usual – and it carries on.
Earlier this summer, however, there was hope for a different way forward. In late May, the White House released more information about US drone strikes than it ever had before. Following a major address on national security by President Obama, the government pledged to keep sharing "as much information as possible".
In fact, since May, the White House has not officially released any new information on drone strikes (though leaks still abound). While NSA surveillance has taken center-stage, the government's policy of secrecy and obfuscation on drones persists, too. Past critics of the drone program – ranging from Senator Rand Paul (Republican, Kentucky) to Senator Ron Wyden (Democrat, Oregon) – should take notice. It is time to renew and expand the demand for answers about who is being killed.
Instead of acknowledging the new strikes and describing a coherent policy and legal approach, the government has again chosen to selectively disclose information that raises more questions than it answers. Thus, an unattributed leak to the New York Times on Monday served up a major policy change in the form of a morsel, with little elaboration, that a recent terrorist threat has "expanded the scope of people we could go after".
So, the question of whom the United States believes it can kill in drone strikes remains, as it ever was, full of unknowns. A handful of bullet-points on the government's "policy standards" for using lethal force, which the White House released in May concurrently with the president's national security speech, initially appeared to provide some guidance. But it expressly does not apply in "extraordinary circumstances", and since the embassy closures of earlier this month could be interpreted as providing such justification, the memorandum may not be relevant to the latest spate of strikes in Yemen.
The White House could clarify this issue; better yet, it could move beyond conveniently malleable policy standards and describe how the government applies existing international law. Instead, the White House has again chosen to operate secretly and under rules of its own creation, which may permit killing individuals under a concept of "imminence" (of threat) that departs radically from all conventional interpretations of the law.
Even more damning is that, in the absence of any commitment to investigating credible allegations of unlawful deaths, the United States appears indifferent to the question of who is actually dying in drone strikes. President Obama admitted in May that four US citizens had been killed, three of whom – including 16-year-old Abdulrahman Aal-Awlaki – he admitted were not intended targets. But the president did not define the identities of the more than 4,000 other people killed, or specifically address reports that a significant number of the dead – in assessments varying between 400 and nearly 1,000, according to the Bureau of Investigative Journalism – were civilians.
When the president acknowledges four deaths of US citizens, but not 4,000 deaths of non-Americans, he signals to the world a callous and discriminatory disregard for human life. Perhaps only a fraction of these 4,000 deaths were unlawful. But acknowledging and investigating these deaths is a matter of dignity and justice – for the survivors of strikes, their communities and their countrymen.
When deaths are found to be unlawful, victims' families and survivors have a right to reparation. Refusing to investigate deaths is a matter of disrespect both for international law and for the public's right to know the full truth.
Many critics, before President Obama's May address, feared that foreign governments would follow the US to lead and conduct secret drone strikes without regard for international law. They should still be concerned about the precedent the US government is setting: refusing to investigate or be held accountable for wrongful deaths.
The risk now is not just that the late May reforms on drone strikes were half-measures, but that they were calibrated to merely reassure the public, defuse criticism, and avert longer, harder scrutiny of whether the government's actions are lawful and right. A token dose of transparency may remove the sting of government secrecy, but it does not cure the disease.
Copyright © 2025 Raw Story Media, Inc. PO Box 21050, Washington, D.C. 20009 |
Masthead
|
Privacy Policy
|
Manage Preferences
|
Debug Logs
For corrections contact
corrections@rawstory.com
, for support contact
support@rawstory.com
.