Repairing Our Democracy and a Return to ‘Republican Virtue’

If men were angels, no government would be necessary. — James Madison, “Federalist No. 51”

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As those who have followed the debate about health care will remember, Supreme Court Justice John Roberts sided with four liberal judges in issuing a majority opinion that the individual mandate behind Obamacare, the key component of a bill that compelled uninsured people to become insured, was constitutional if it was viewed as a congressional tax. This critical moment punctuated decades of failure with regard to health care legislation and positioned Roberts as one of the more moderate, fair-minded judges on the bench in an age when partisanship and compromise were becoming a lost art form in politics. In essence, amid political rancor, when his fellow conservatives were fighting tooth and nail to obstruct Obama and his programs at every turn indeed, the Democrats rammed through Obamacare without a single Republican vote Roberts saved the legislation. Although the law was far from perfect, those with a forward-thinking vision realized that health care reform was desperately needed because of runaway costs and the fact that profit-minded, not patient-minded, insurance and pharmaceutical companies had acted with near impunity for half a century.

Life on the Fringe

Now that Senate Republicans have shirked their responsibility and voted to acquit President Donald Trump, despite most of them being in agreement that he committed impeachable offenses, to hold the man accountable and drive home the fact that no one is above the law, now that we have seen three years of the president of the United States attacking the press, attacking free speech, denigrating women and almost every ethnic group in the nation, suggesting that we shoot migrants and laughing about it, courting the support of white supremacists and further ginning up racial tensions across the country, not to mention the sustained threats to the constitutional rights of all Americans, perhaps now it is our democracy that needs saving. While I certainly don’t agree with Roberts on a lot of issues, repairing what has been damaged by Trump and the GOP will take people like him, conservatives and liberals, stepping up and doing the right thing for the betterment of the nation. We have had scant little of that kind of bipartisan action the last 10-plus years.

One could argue that while the political divisiveness has always been a prominent feature of government in America, it really picked up steam in the mid- to late-2000s with the advent of the Tea Party and the populist, know-nothing movement that began to take over the Republican Party and slowly move it away from the center under people like Ronald Reagan and George Bush Sr., to the fringe under newly christened stars of the GOP, an “every man” blue collar worker nicknamed Joe the Plumber and Sarah Palin. Almost in lockstep, as the Republican Party turned away from the center, the far left did the same thing.

One really had a feeling that after Palin and presidential candidate John McCain lost the election and with the lofty “hope and change” message of unity and solidarity that Obama brought to his pre-election and presidential speeches, the passage of the Affordable Care Act and the Supreme Court decision to legalize gay marriage in all 50 states, it seemed that the nation may have turned a corner. But what actually happened is that Obama, either because of his liberal values, the color of his skin or some combination of those two, precipitated a kind of conservative backlash, made even more heated and insidious by the 24/7 Republican news cycle that piped in commentary that catered, and still caters, to the lowest common denominator of white, blue-collar fear. (The late John McCain, by the way, whiffed on picking Palin to run with him, but he was another example of a Republican leader with courage and integrity who could have worked to turn the nation more toward the center had he won the election. Before he died, of course, McCain also did not escape Trump’s ire, and Trump could not resist insulting the veteran even in death.)

In any case, the idea that we, as a nation, had turned a corner was an illusion, and when Donald Trump entered the national discourse prior to the 2016 election, the stage was already set. Existing quietly under the surface of all the progressive fervor during the Obama years lurked the prejudiced, anti-immigrant, anti-gay demons of our past. The populist right from the mid-2000s never went away, and in 2016, they found a new hero in Trump, despite having virtually nothing in common with the billionaire real estate mogul and reality TV star.

The Republican Party has fallen even further into the mire. As if failing to impeach a guilty president wasn’t enough, the current GOP and their president have attacked the country’s constitutional principles and core values at nearly every turn, from tripping over themselves to nominate Trump’s now-multiple picks after illegally refusing to provide so much as a hearing for Obama’s Supreme Court selection, to kowtowing to the president and letting him lie and make outlandish claims without censure, rebuke or recourse, and attempting to roll back protections in the First Amendment and using it as a tool to loosen regulations and increase discrimination.

Ironically enough, shortly before the Senate impeachment trial was about to commence and thus, shortly before Republicans in Congress were about to embarrass themselves again and take another turn away from justice, it was Roberts who offered some instructive words in what has been, by all accounts, a deeply troubling presidential term.

‘Debate and compromise’

In his annual report about the work of the federal courts, Roberts told a “sadly ironic” story about how John Jay, one of the co-authors of “The Federalist Papers,” along with Alexander Hamilton and James Madison, was attacked by an angry mob in New York and because of his injuries, was apparently unable to continue contributing to the series of essays, which were written as a vigorous defense of the Constitution and the democratic principles of our republic.

Roberts wrote:

… We have come to take democracy for granted, and civic education has fallen by the wayside. In our age, when social media can instantly spread rumor and false information on a grand scale, the public’s need to understand our government, and the protections it provides, is ever more vital.

As Adam J. White, with the American Enterprise Institute, wrote about what Roberts had to say, the United States needed to display “self-restraint, goodwill, and moderation” in order to get back to a place of republican virtue,” which, according to the late Irving Kristol, means:

… curbing one’s passions and moderating one’s opinions in order to achieve a large consensus that will ensure domestic tranquility. We think of public-spiritedness as a form of self-expression, an exercise in self-righteousness. The Founders thought of it as a form of self-control, an exercise in self-government.

And this also includes

probity, truthfulness, self-reliance, diligence, prudence, and a disinterested concern for the welfare of the republic.

Supreme Court Justice Neil Gorsch, one of Trump’s nominees, added to these ideas when he said that we should

… talk to one another respectfully; debate and compromise; and strive to live together tolerantly. … (The) essential goodness of the American people is a profound reservoir of strength … cannot be taken for granted (and) … need(s) constant tending. … (We have) the duty of having to listen to and tolerate other points of view … (and) democracy depends on our willingness, each one of us, to hear and respect even those with whom we disagree.

These values have been all but lost in the current political climate, and by quoting conservative sources, I am, as a progressive, attempting to demonstrate that compromise, civility, the sharing of good ideas, no matter where they come from, and, yes, even, virtue, should transcend party allegiance if we are to return to a place where integrity in politics matters.

A Better Way

Integrity in politics matters to Mitt Romney, another Republican who gives me hope that politics in America isn’t a lost cause. Romney, who stood alone among the GOP in his public admission that Trump was guilty, made a stunning speech today outlining why the evidence compelled him to vote to remove the president from office, noting Trump committed “an appalling abuse of the public’s trust.”

If Romney’s actions were just an anomaly and integrity doesn’t actually matter anymore, if decorum and virtue don’t matter anymore, if American politics is just destined to become a vast, wild-west frontier of insults, flame wars and misinformation, then, by all means, we can continue on a path of intellectual dishonesty, tribalism and identity politics, where the national discourse gets more fragmented and where winning an argument for your team is more important than moving the nation forward in an ethical way that benefits everyone.

But if virtue in politics and government does still matter, as I hope it does, then it seems that both our elected officials and the electorate need to walk it back and ask: If this approach isn’t working and it’s not what can we do differently and how can we be better, individually and collectively? How can we compromise and work together to change the spirit of the conversation and make it more positive? Conservatives are not the enemy, and liberals are not the enemy. Partisanship and a failure to compromise. Cynicism and apathy. Cowardice. Dishonesty. Hypocrisy. And intolerance. These are the real enemies that haunt our republic.

[Cover image: “Checks and Balances” by DeviantArt user RednBlackSalamander.]

Monetized patriotism

By ‘nationalism’ I mean first of all the habit of assuming that human beings can be classified like insects and that whole blocks of millions or tens of millions of people can be confidently labelled ‘good’ or ‘bad’(1). But secondly — and this is much more important — I mean the habit of identifying oneself with a single nation or other unit, placing it beyond good and evil and recognising no other duty than that of advancing its interests. Nationalism is not to be confused with patriotism. Both words are normally used in so vague a way that any definition is liable to be challenged, but one must draw a distinction between them, since two different and even opposing ideas are involved. By ‘patriotism’ I mean devotion to a particular place and a particular way of life, which one believes to be the best in the world but has no wish to force on other people. Patriotism is of its nature defensive, both militarily and culturally. Nationalism, on the other hand, is inseparable from the desire for power. The abiding purpose of every nationalist is to secure more power and more prestige, not for himself but for the nation or other unit in which he has chosen to sink his own individuality. – George Orwell

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I don’t use words like “disgusting” very often because overusing strong adjectives tends to devalue their meaning, but when we find something that is genuinely repellent — say, when the U.S. Department of Defense provides more than $6 million to 16 NFL teams for advertising about supporting the troops and the teams accepting the cash — I think “disgusting” is apropos. I think pretty much the same when recalling the many examples of the exploitation of patriotism in the entertainment and sports industries and the borderline nationalism that purveys many sectors of public life. See Toby Keith. See the WWE’s Tribute to the Troops. See American Sniper. See virtually every American sports event after Sept. 11, 2001.

In that vein, Charles Pierce has given us an excellent play-by-play of the “messy business” of propaganda and how sports has not only cheapened the idea of patriotism by insisting that Americans can’t gather for an afternoon baseball or football game without obligatory rituals and renditions of the national anthem that have essentially become meaningless by repetition, but has now effectively “commodified” patriotism:

Most veterans you will see on the field in an NFL stadium, or standing on top of a dugout between innings, are genuinely worthy of the country’s admiration. They’ve earned every cheer they get. They also have earned decent health care and a chance at an education and whatever counseling they need to get beyond what they’ve experienced. What they don’t deserve to be are front people through whom the rich get richer, to be walking advertisements for the services that they already have paid back in full. This is a transaction grotesquely inappropriate for their sacrifices.

For God and country … and guns. Lots of guns.

So, there’s this:

hobbylobby

which was apparently @HollyRFisher’s way of supporting Hobby Lobby, who describes herself on Twitter thusly:

Christian. Wife of an Army combat-infantry vet. Mom of 3. #ProLife #2A #Benghazi #ImpeachObama #tcot #wvpol #wvsen #Israel #HTTR #WhoDey #Reds

And then there’s this strikingly similar pose from an equally nutty fanatic of a different religion side by side with our good friend Holly:

hobbylobby2

Whoever said the following, which is often falsely attributed to Upton Sinclair, was prescient:

When fascism comes to America, it will be wrapped in the flag and carrying a cross.

But this statement from Halford E. Luccock in the 1938 work, “Keeping Life Out of Confusion,” is just as poignant:

When and if fascism comes to America it will not be labeled “made in Germany”; it will not be marked with a swastika; it will not even be called fascism; it will be called, of course, “Americanism.”

Correlation between wealth, religion

I want to return to some statistics to which I referred earlier because the point that I’m about to make was lucidly confirmed as I was recently revisiting Christopher Hitchen’s anti-theistic polemic, “God Is Not Great: How Religion Poisons Everything.”

The data is, admittedly, old from 2002, but since we are still being implicated by the events precipitated on Sept. 11, 2001, they are still, more or less, useful. The figures are from the Pew Research Center and present the not-surprising evidence that America leads by wide margins every single other wealthy, modernized nation in the percentage of people who say religion is, not just important, but very important to their lives. Fifty-nine percent of Americans said religion was very important to their lives, while on the same question, 30 percent responded affirmatively in Canada, 33 percent in Britain and 11 percent in mostly godless France. On the other hand, in many parts of Asia, Latin America, Africa and the Middle East, where localized violence or deprivation or corruption are common realities of daily life, religion has a large stranglehold over the populace and leadership. For instance, Nigeria is at 92 percent, Pakistan at 91 and Indonesia at 95.

The conclusion is clear. As Pew points out,

Americans’ views are closer to people in developing nations than to the publics of developed nations.

Pew also found that

wealthier nations tend to place less importance on religion — with the exception of the United States.

And as Hitchens notes, with much less sterility:

… as I write, a version of the Inquisition is about to lay hands on a nuclear weapon. Under the stultified rule of religion, the great and inventive and sophisticated civilization of Persia has been steadily losing its pulse. Its writers and artists and intellectuals are mainly in exile or stifled by censorship; its women are chattel and sexual prey; its young people are mostly half-educated and without employment. After a quarter century of theocracy, Iran still exports the very things it exported when the theocrats took over—pistachio nuts and rugs. Modernity and technology have passed it by, save for the one achievement of nuclearization.

This puts the confrontation between faith and civilization on a whole new footing. Until relatively recently, those who adopted the clerical path had to pay a heavy price for it. Their societies would decay, their economies would contract, their best minds would go to waste or take themselves elsewhere, and they would consistently be outdone by societies that had learned to tame and sequester the religious impulse. A country like Afghanistan would simply rot.

And it has rotted, or at least, remained inert for decades. For another example, see Somalia, which has been wrecked by Islamic extremists for years.

But before readers begin to point out that the majority of countries on the list with both high percentages of devout believers and high occurrences of violence and servitude are predominantly Muslim, America again being the exception, many in both lists, those with less devotees and more, are European and Latin American. While many of the European nations function quite ably, in some cases much better than the U.S., without religion at center stage, much of Christian Latin America is woefully impoverished, with a wide chasm between the haves and have-nots.

The larger point is that religion, taken to its extreme, as it is in many of these countries, chokes free thought, free government, democracy and well, everything else. This is the disconcerting reality that Pat Robertson, James Dobson and many others would hope to bring to this country: devout House members, devout Senate members, a devout president and devout local elected officials all the way down the rung. What would be left but to declare, once and for all, a theocracy? And we only have to look beyond our shores for proof of what such a reality might bring. We can only be thankful that believers in America today don’t believe in holy writ quite as much or as fervently as believers of different holy books, or the same book, elsewhere.

Paranoia activity

This is like the Boston tea party for people that decided, let’s say, I don’t know, two and a half months ago, that they didn’t want to pay taxes anymore. The tea part is just a metaphor [on screen: a Fox News reporter pointing to boxes at one of the tea parties containing a million tea bags]. Let me get this straight. To protest wasteful spending, you bought a million tea bags. Are you protesting taxes or irony? — Jon Stewart, The Daily Show

A friend asked a couple days ago whether I was still writing about the Tea Party some, and I said I hadn’t in awhile, but hey I’m always happy to pop the cork now and then.

I think this pretty well sums up what is happening in conservative/libertarian/Constitutionalist circles around the country:

Credit: 2009 Creators Syndicate

CNN recently released a poll highlighting demographics among Tea Party supporters, the results of which were by and large not surprising. Here’s a TPM story about it and the basics:

  • 80% are white (with 8% not responding to the question)
  • 60% are male
  • 40% are college graduates
  • Over a third make $75,000 or more
  • 50% live in rural areas
  • 77% label themselves conservative
  • 96% are Republican-Independent
  • 87% say they will vote Republican for U.S. House

What is slightly surprising, but not shockingly so, is that 40 percent of those polled were college graduates. Now, I didn’t expect them all to be illiterate yokels — I’ve debated with a number of folks over a reteaparty.com, and many aren’t dim bulbs by any stretch (They also don’t like the Tea Bagger label) — but I did think the number would be more in the 30 percent range. Still, 60 percent aren’t college graduates, so that says something.

Also not surprising is the fact that 66 percent of Tea Party supporters made more than $50,000 per year, while only 42 percent made that much across all people who were polled.

Of course, the rise of the movement itself is not surprising, as we have a progressive president who has taken drastic measures — some experts say not drastic enough — to attempt to right the economic ship. It has risen despite the fact that Obama has stated nearly until he’s blue in the face, that any tax increases would not affect people making less than $250,000. It has risen on the tailwinds of ridiculous charges of Nazism, socialism, fascism or Communism, terms often used interchangeably for some reason, to describe the same person or his policies by folks like Mark Levin, Michael Savage and others who often squelch any potentially meaningful political discourse into name-calling and arguments that break no new ground and just echo the tired arguments of all the others.

All of this to make the ultimate case, as I understand it, that America should get back to the Constitution and the grand ideals of the Founders. While that’s a sexy notion and helps sell books, one problem exists with that. Readers of the Constitution or “Paradise Lost” or “War and Peace” can’t drop their authors into the 21st-century and make assumptions about what they might think on topics of the day. The Founders lived in a different America, and it’s an America that will never exist again. It was a more brutal time, a much larger country, and we were under the heel of the British. The Founders really didn’t have representation in Parliament; we have representation, whether we agree with those representing or not. The Founders were not making any claims against big government; they were fighting for the right of self-government itself.

Proponents of larger government intervention versus less did exist then as now, most notably from the Federalists and Jeffersonian Republicans, and some of them would be shocked at how big our government has become, but even the most conservative among them understood that the country would change with the times, and thus they had enough foresight to know the Constitution would need amending. The claim that all the Founders, or even most of them, were ultra conservative or libertarian has no basis. They did pen the bits about separation of church and state, free speech, freedom of the press, and religion, after all.

The only argument of the Tea Party that is even halfway analogous would be arguments against upped taxes. But obviously, while taxes was one grievance against Britain in the colonies, they it wasn’t the only issue.

So, the crux of what is happening, as I see it, is that people are angry (about something, the country’s debt, bailing out corporations, etc.) and don’t know what to do, so they wail on the government, and folks like Levin, Savage, Beck and the gang are pawning their wares and playing off those frustrations like door-to-door salesmen. So, one question may be: Why don’t I share in their frustrations? Because while I am as angry that Wall Street and the corporations were bailed out as anyone else, I don’t see our government’s reaction to it as a permanent mark of things to come. We aren’t anywhere near crisis mode regarding our government. Obama will be elected, or he won’t. The talking heads will continue railing against Obama or a Republican will get elected and the vitriol will shift toward whichever progressive in Washington is trying to bring us ever out of the stone age.

But that’s enough ranting for now. Here’s something to strum your satirical lyre:

Christianity and the nation’s founding

In a New York Times Magazine preview titled, “How Christian Were the Founders?,” Russell Shorto writes about members of the Texas State School Board’s attempts to paint a more Christian picture of the United States’ founding via changes to the state’s social studies curriculum guidelines, guidelines which the article contends,

will affect students around the country, from kindergarten to 12th grade, for the next 10 years.

because of that state board’s influence on how other states choose its curriculum material.

… Tom Barber, who worked as the head of social studies at the three biggest textbook publishers before running his own editorial company, says, “Texas was and still is the most important and most influential state in the country.” And James Kracht, a professor at Texas A&M’s college of education and a longtime player in the state’s textbook process, told me flatly, “Texas governs 46 or 47 states.”

In the article, Shorto speaks with numerous members of the Texas state board and with college professors and other experts. In fact, for the most part, the only non-experts to which Shorto speaks, are, you guessed it, the very ones who will have such a weighty influence over what students are taught for the next 10 years.

While some amendments the state board has considered — one which would ask students to study Americans who have contributed much to our history (Ed Kennedy was omitted, while Newt Gingrich was included, for instance. For the record, Hillary Clinton was included, but one could make a convincing case that Kennedy had far more influence in Washington in his 30 years of service) — drew seemingly along party lines, other amendments dabbled into religious territory.

The majority of the article dealt with this conundrum: Is America a Christian nation (or should it be) and should our textbooks present that case?  Noted atheist Sam Harris in his, “Letter to a Christian Nation,” meant “Christian nation” in the more nebulous sense based on pure numbers: as of 2008, about 76 percent of Americans claim to be Christian in one way or another. Fifty-one percent are Protestants (Thus, reducing the number even farther of actual Evangelicals who might be in favor of more fervently merging government and religion).

Cynthia Dunbar, current visiting associate professor of law at Liberty University School of Law in Lynchburg, Va., is one member of the Texas State School Board who seems to think this is and should be a Christian nation in the second sense. Shorto visited one of her lectures, and in The Times article, he writes:

Her presence in both worlds — public schools and the courts — suggests the connection between them that Christian activists would like to deepen. The First Amendment class for third-year law students that I watched Dunbar lead neatly merged the two components of the school’s program: “lawyering skills” and “the integration of a Christian worldview.”

Dunbar began the lecture by discussing a national day of thanksgiving that Gen. George Washington called for after the defeat of the British at Saratoga in 1777 — showing, in her reckoning, a religious base in the thinking of the country’s founders. In developing a line of legal reasoning that the future lawyers in her class might use, she wove her way to two Supreme Court cases in the 1960s, in both of which the court ruled that prayer in public schools was unconstitutional. A student questioned the relevance of the 1777 event to the court rulings, because in 1777 the country did not yet have a Constitution. “And what did we have at that time?” Dunbar asked. Answer: “The Declaration of Independence.” She then discussed a legal practice called “incorporation by reference.” “When you have in one legal document reference to another, it pulls them together, so that they can’t be viewed as separate and distinct,” she said. “So you cannot read the Constitution distinct from the Declaration.” And the Declaration famously refers to a Creator and grounds itself in “the Laws of Nature and of Nature’s God.” Therefore, she said, the religiosity of the founders is not only established and rooted in a foundational document but linked to the Constitution. From there she moved to “judicial construction and how you should go forward with that,” i.e., how these soon-to-be lawyers might work to overturn rulings like that against prayer in schools by using the founding documents.

Shorto correctly observes:

Besides the fact that incorporation by reference is usually used for technical purposes rather than for such grandiose purposes as the reinterpretation of foundational texts, there is an oddity to this tactic.

Though it was less erudite than Dunbar’s lecture probably was,  I once read a letter to the editor in which the writer indicated that we are, indeed, a Christian nation based on The Declaration. But several problems exist with this line of reasoning. First, as the article notes:

“The founders deliberately left the word ‘God’ out of the Constitution — but not because they were a bunch of atheists and deists,” says Susan Jacoby, author of “Freethinkers: A History of American Secularism.” “To them, mixing religion and government meant trouble.” The curious thing is that in trying to bring God into the Constitution, the activists — who say their goal is to follow the original intent of the founders — are ignoring the fact that the founders explicitly avoided religious language in that document.

Another problem exists with Dunbar’s “incorporation by reference” case: The Declaration of Independence is just that. It’s a declaration. It’s not law. As Shorto’s article states, it’s undeniable that the early history of this country oozes with religious overtures, from the Pilgrims to Anglicans to Quakers Baptists and many others. And while one cannot study American history without encountering religion along the way, one can study the founding and the Constitutional Convention without injecting religion into the equation. As Shorto notes:

In fact, the founders were rooted in Christianity — they were inheritors of the entire European Christian tradition — and at the same time they were steeped in an Enlightenment rationalism that was, if not opposed to religion, determined to establish separate spheres for faith and reason. “I don’t think the founders would have said they were applying Christian principles to government,” says Richard Brookhiser, the conservative columnist and author of books on Alexander Hamilton, Gouverneur Morris and George Washington. “What they said was ‘the laws of nature and nature’s God.’ They didn’t say, ‘We put our faith in Jesus Christ.’ ” Martin Marty says: “They had to invent a new, broad way. Washington, in his writings, makes scores of different references to God, but not one is biblical. He talks instead about a ‘Grand Architect,’ deliberately avoiding the Christian terms, because it had to be a religious language that was accessible to all people.”

I am not opposed to religion courses with the sole purpose of studying the story of religious influence and growth in the country, and even history textbooks that include some discussion of religious groups if its relevant to a certain topic, like religious condemnations of slavery in the 19th-century, for instance.

But the Founders knew full well that at the time that the majority of the people in the country were and would be Christians. Heck, many who took part in the Constitutional Convention were Christians in some sense of the word. Here’s a full rundown. Many of the most notable ones (Jefferson, i.e.), however, were deists, and one can’t deny that. Many were products of the Enlightenment and rationalism. But the Founders, even those who believed in Jesus, were far ahead of their time and had the foresight to realize that a free society must both protect people’s right to worship … and their right not to worship. They were all-too familiar with a near-theocracy in Great Britain, in which the Church of England was (and still is) the official national church. The Founders sought to create a place more free from whence their ancestors came.

Unfortunately, the evangelical crowd is seeking to reverse that, and that should make anyone with an appreciation for the Constitution and this diverse country pretty ashamed. So, to reiterate, this isn’t a Christian nation in the sense that many evangelicals wish it were, nor should it be. If it was, it would be a theocracy, and I don’t think folks who are fighting to reinsert Jesus and the creation story into textbooks fully understand the implications of seeing their goals carried out to their fullest ends. If they did, they would view modern day Iran, the former Islamic caliphate in the Middle East, the Crusades or the current wave of Islamic nutcases who want to establish a modern caliphate, and they would shutter.

Big whiff of theocracy

Iran, headed by Supreme Leader Ayatollah Khomeini and President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, is planning to charge five people in connection with recent protests against the government with, no joke, warring against God. Eight people were killed Dec. 27 on the day of ritual Shi’ite mourning in protests against the established leadership led by supporters of Mirhossein Mousavi. Make no mistake. Iran is a theocracy in which Khomeini regularly leads the country in prayer in talks with his populace, which are commonly dubbed, not speeches, but sermons.

Now, suppose this was the case in America. Many folks these days think the United States either is, or should be, a Christian nation. Indeed, Sam Harris wrote a book called, “Letter to a Christian Nation,” with this thought in mind. Of course, Harris knows that America isn’t literally a Christian nation because that would mean it’s a theocracy, but he was working from the assumption that most people in this country profess some form of Christianity. In fact, that number is at about 76 percent, as of 2008. Here’s some stats on the topic.

What would this mean for America to actually and literally be a “Christian nation?” We would first have to define what that would mean. Would we mean that the country was led by a majority of evangelical, biblical-literalist Christian lawmakers? Or that the president was an evangelical and only some of the legislature was evangelical? Or that the president and lawmakers were mixed in their respective religions, but the general populace consisted of a majority of evangelical Christians?

I do and always have taken this to mean that, like Iran, a complimentary example of a theocracy, that the president himself would have to be an evangelical, and that government bodies, from the U.S. Congress, down to state and local bodies, would conduct their business under the auspices of the dominant religion. So, literally, I take it to mean a state governed and regulated by a religion. A certain segment of our population seems to think our country was founded on Judeo-Christian beliefs. Here is what James Dobson had to say in an April 15, 2009 interview with Sean Hannity on America as a Christian nation:

HANNITY: Dr. Dobson, the president said, as we all know, that America is not a Christian nation. Every other president had suggested we were. Our founders and framers suggested we were. What did you think when you heard that, and how would you answer him and tell him otherwise?

DOBSON: Well, Sean, it would — I would really like to hear the question asked and answered in a different way. Whether or not we’re a Christian nation is not the issue. The issue is did we have Christian roots and has that influenced, the Judeo-Christian value system, influenced our law, our constitution, and our way of life. And it has, and he implied that there was a kind of theological equivalence between Christianity and all the other religions of the world on that issue, and that’s not true. The United States has been from the beginning greatly influenced and primarily influenced by the Judeo-Christian system of values. And that is still accurate.

Of course, folks always have to add the “Judeo” part because to say simply “Christian beliefs” would be wrong in every degree, and they know it. Adding the Judeo part makes it more general and, in part, accurate, but not much more. The evangelical brand of Christianity that we see today, in part, began with the moral majority camp, which got its start in the late 1970s. The Founders, and I can probably say this until I’m blue in the  face, were not evangelicals at all, but most of them were deists, which meant they did not believe in a personal god. They believed in a god who set the world in motion and did not interfere in human affairs. This would rule out both Jesus and Yahweh, both of which intervened in human affairs.

Sure, many Christians lived here early in our history and immigrated to escape the Church of England and other tough circumstances, but our documents are, at their core, secular. Obama, in the above reference, was speaking of the current population of America, which consists of Christians, Muslims, Jews, non-believers and many others. Article XI of the Treaty of Tripoli said that the U.S. “is not in any sense founded on the Christian religion.” The following was enacted under one of them, and one of my favorites, President John Adams:

The 1796 treaty with Tripoli states that the United States was “in no sense founded on the Christian religion.” … This was not an idle statement, meant to satisfy muslims– they believed it and meant it. This treaty was written under the presidency of George Washington and signed under the presidency of John Adams.

Thus, to think that this is a Christian nation, in the most literal sense, is false. To believe that this should be a Christian nation subjugates every person, believing or not, in this country and creates a timorous and dictatorial atmosphere, the extreme of which we can observe in Iran on a daily basis, where “warring against God” is not merely a moral indictment, but a legal one.

And that would be a dangerous leap to make.

Mexican families wiring money north?

Want a pretty good benchmark for when you know times are tough in the United States? When folks in poor parts of Mexico are actually sending money northward to assist unemployed relatives in the States.

The New York Times reported Nov. 15 the cases of several families who previously had received money from their United States-based relatives, but when those relatives lost their jobs, those in Mexico started chipping in and sending what they could north over the border via wire transfer. According to the article,

During the best of the times, Miguel Salcedo’s son, an illegal immigrant in San Diego, would be sending home hundreds of dollars a month to support his struggling family in Mexico. But at times like these, with the American economy out of whack and his son out of work, Mr. Salcedo finds himself doing what he never imagined he would have to do: wiring pesos north.

The article notes a telling fact: it’s easier to get by on very little in Mexico than it is in America. The Avendano family, living in Miahuatlán, scrape by via a kind of subsistence farming on their own land. To help with their finances, Sirenia Avendano sells chili rellenos around the neighborhood.

Sirenia Avendano wept as she spoke of sending money to her sons in the United States.

Sirenia Avendano wept as she spoke of sending money to her sons in the United States.

Speaking of his two sons, whose hours and tips were cut at the Florida restaurant in which they work, Javier Avendano said,

We have an obligation to help them. They’re our sons. It doesn’t matter if they are here or there.

An aquaintance of mine who runs, with the help of his wife and family, a Mexican grocery store and restaurant here in town once told me of his own struggles to reach America. He took the dangerous jaunt across the border many years ago, was once an illegal, and has long since gotten his citizenship. He has children in the local school district and has deep roots in the county in which I live at this point. The last time I checked, he was still sending money back home to his parents.

As I have said many times and will continue to say, stories like those of my acquaintance and of the Avendanos speak to the fact that illegal immigrants aren’t monsters, as Lou Dobbs, Rush Limbaugh and others would have us believe. They are human beings with families and folks who love them. Should we do away with our naturalization laws and open to borders completely? Definitely, we shouldn’t do away with the laws, but enforcing the border with a 1,000-plus mile fences seems like a comic book, implausible, inhumane and abhorent solution. There is such a thing as country citizenship, in Mexico, in other Latino countries and here. Should we accept the fact that the ones who are here probably aren’t leaving unless the situation here gets worse than it is in Mexico? Probably so. The wholesale excavation of these people is completely out of the question and is absolutely, logistically impossible.

So, what do we do? First, and I hope the Obama administration doesn’t oversee anymore raids. We should stop the inhumane raids, separating children from their parents. Focus on the employers who are willingly or not, hiring illegals. If they unwillingly hire them, that is, presented the potential employee with proper paperwork and the illegal lies or presents false information, dish out a lesser penalty to the employer. If the employer willingly hires illegals because it’s cheap labor or for whatever other reason, throw the book at them.

This issue has become one cause that I’m willing to champion over and over again. For too long, I’ve heard the talking heads and folks who apparently have a cold stone for a heart, rant on and on about how immigrants are turning the country brown, that we should close the border and that immigrants are taking “real” Americans’ jobs (whatever that means), and it’s really nauseating.

Talk about nauseating. This quote is too ill-conceived to let slip through the cracks. On the supposed “brown” dilemma, check out what Frosty Wooldridge had to say about the immigration problem in California:

The brown toxic cloud strangling Los Angeles never lifts and grows thicker with every immigrant added. One can’t help appreciate the streets of Paris will soon become the streets of LA. However, Paris’ streets erupted while LA’s shall sink into a Third World quagmire much like Bombay or Calcutta, India. When you import THAT much crime, illiteracy, multiple languages and disease—Americans pick up stakes and move away. It’s an unlivable nightmare.

It’s chilling to me that viewpoints such as this ignorant drivel still persist in what was once, in its infancy, such a progressive, forward-looking country. Arguably, and regrettably from my view, we haven’t been all that progressive since the 18th century, but that’s for another debate.

But I digress. Next, I’ll look at this topic somemore, as it relates to Lou Dobbs’ recent resignation from CNN and a recent, related New York Times editorial. I am currently working on adding content to a new WordPress-powered Counting Crows site, so that would explain my lack of posts in the last week or so. But I’m back in the saddle. … I hope. 🙂

Our forward-thinking Founders

I recently finished reading “Decision in Philadelphia: The Constitutional Convention in 1787” by Christopher and James Lincoln Collier, and for anyone who has not read it, I would highly suggest it as an introduction to what happened behind closed doors that summer, which eventually resulted in what we know as the document that binds us and guides us as a nation.

The book’s conclusion, which included a brief explanation or thesis about how the axioms presented in the U.S. Constitution fit into and implicate how we conduct business as a nation in modern times. It’s conclusion reminded me of a discussion I had with (seemingly) the entire bloc of Tea Party supporters, of which, that post can be found here.

My main premise in that post was to suggest that no one really knows what the Tea Party movement is about. Is it about a strict adherence to the Constitution? Is it anti-tax? Anti-big spending? Anti-Democrat? People showing up in 18th century garb at rallies across the country didn’t exactly clarify matters. Another point that I hope was clear in my post and in other posts on this blog, here and here, is that it’s awfully hard to know precisely on which side of current national issues the Founding Fathers would have come down on. We can probably get close, but they were people of their own times attempting to forge a document that would live beyond them. And they most certainly did, but to say that we can take modern questions like, should we bailout the automakers or should we offer universal health care, and place them onto the Founders, seems to me anachronistic and reading back onto them modern concerns. The truth is, as I see it, they would likely be extremely surprised to see how much liberty we have taken thus far with their — our — document. The authors of the aforementioned book acknowledged this problem.

Take the Colliers’ interpretation of how the Founders would have viewed the modern incarnation of the Supreme Court:

The power of the Supreme Court to interpret the Constitution is what has given the document the flexibility necessary to deal with changing conditions. Yet it is certain that the delegates would have been horrified to see how broadly the Court has used its interpreting power. They believed, at bottom, that if final power had to lie anywhere, it ought to be in the legislature, which they saw as the primary voice of the people. They certainly did not expect the judiciary to be dealing with day-to-day details of school ssytesm, prisons, and fire departments as they do today.

Also, after FDR, we see a string of presidents taking military action and intervening in affairs overseas with troops without first asking for Congress’ approval. George W. Bush would obviously be the worst agressor in recent years.

Here is what Encarta says, which notes that Congress in years past has simply “relinquished” powers to make war to the president:

U.S. presidents after World War II have assumed most of the authority to send U.S. troops into battle. The Korean War (1950-1953), for example, was regarded by the U.S. government as a police action rather than as a war, and President Harry S. Truman never sought a declaration of war from Congress. And in 1964 Congress passed the Gulf of Tonkin Resolution, which effectively ceded to President Lyndon B. Johnson the ability to wage war against Vietnam. Congress passed a similar resolution on January 12, 1991, authorizing President George H. W. Bush to use force against Iraq in the Persian Gulf War.

And the Colliers’:

What, finally would the Founders have thought of the tendency of recent American presidents to commit troops to battle without formal permission from Congress? They would almost certainly have been astonished and outraged. They were determined not to give a potential tyrant an armed force to use as he wished. (Not to call him a tyrant; that would probably be inaccurate, but this is precisely what George W. Bush did). Had they seen a president sending troops out on his own in pursuit of his foreign policy objectives (Again: See Bush) they would have taken immediate action to stop him.

My larger point is this: If we want to take a literalist reading of the Constitution and say such things as, ‘It’s socialism that the president will now be the largest shareholder in GM or that it’s socialism to attempt to bailout the banks,’ we might as well begin taking the entire building down brick-by-brick. Or, even that such things as Medicaid and Social Security are unconstitutional (as some in my debates with the Tea Party supporters were claiming), we might as well start from ground zero and begin the country over again. We are one of the country’s the world looks to for leadership, and it’s much too late, centuries late, to begin debating, off the rantings of Glenn Beck and others, that the entire edifice is now faulty and unconstitutional.

The Framers, Madison, Washington, Gouvenor Morris, Hamilton, Gerry, Randolph, the Pinkneys (Charles and Charles Cotesworth) and many others were some of the greatest minds to ever land on this soil. Though they might have been astounded or enraged that we would now make some of the policies that we are making, they were forward thinking enough to realize that circumstances in the 18th century would not be the circumstances in the 21st century, including some of the very provisions they laid forth in the Constitution. That’s why they made it flexible enough to be amended and interpreted.  They, I think, trusted that great minds would also follow their own, doing what was best for this country and, subsequently, for the international community.

Tea bagging at its finest

This is sort of a continuation of this post about the apparent phenomenon known as “tea bagging,” which is an action of protest against what some feel has become a government system of overtaxation vis-à-vis the Boston Tea Party, in light of the recent large stimulus package and corporate bailouts.

Reteaparty.com says this about the organization:

PEAC is a political action committee that campaigns on behalf of issues, candidates, and potential candidates that promote honesty and Constitutional leadership.  Currently, PEAC has launched campaigns to draft three unconventionally honest candidates: Rand Paul, Andrew “The Judge” Napolitano, and Peter Schiff.  Additionally, PEAC has launched ReTeaParty.com, to organize a national Tea Party and fundraiser for the Goodwill on July 4, 2009, to promote the cause of honest and Constitutional government, voluntarism, and to organize an historic display of protest against our lack of representation.  At ReTeaParty.com, thousands of people sent their representatives a Tea Bag in the mail on April 1, 2009, as a sign of our unrest over D.C.’s foolish solutions and overspending. — reteaparty.com

And during a recent broadcast by FOX News, the organization’s founder, Chad Peace (PEAC?), had this to say:

It’s not a reaction to any one person in particular it’s not a reaction against Obama or Pelosi or against Dodd or Barney Frank — any of these guys in particular. It’s against the whole idea of Washington that they can take our money and solve our problems for us.

And here we come to the hang of it all: the very reason why the Republican ideals of personal liberty and small government married to notions of moral uprightness do not work. Many on the right attempt to coerce folks in leadership or pray for them or lobby them or whatever on social issues like abortion, gay marriage and stem cell research, hoping federal or state governments would, indeed, solve our problems. They believe federal and state governments can and should solve what they perceive to be our social ills. Government should preserve the institution of marriage. It should uphold certain moral codes that would prohibit heinous dabblings in abortion and embryonic stem cell research. Government should get drugs off the streets and prosecute drug dealers to the fullest extent of the law. State laws should keep the sabbath holy by disallowing the purchase of alcohol on Sunday (and in some states, disallowing even retail purchases before 1 p.m.!) Government should more fully represent our moral values, they say.

And in the same breath, what do we see? The same folks turn an about-face, and speak out against gun control, against big business regulations and against taxes. Thus, they favor big government in some areas and those of moral or social concerns, but not others like taxes or gun control. But they can’t have it both ways, and the logic just does not add up. Small government taken to its fullest end would mean this: the legalization of controlled substances, the continued or even a relaxing of gun control laws, allowing states to decide gay rights, relaxing regulations on abortion and stem cell research and some states disbanning their ridiculous blue laws. True, big government would mean the opposite. But both Dems and Reps want to pick and choose which causes they will champion.

Now, I come to the issue of the tea baggers. Obviously, it’s ludicrous to fain any comparison to folks today protesting taxes to those of the Revolutionary War era protesting taxation without representation by the British government. We have taxation with representation, and taxes are quite necessary to get things done. If there were no taxes, the country as we know it would crumble. If the tea baggers are protesting the stimulus plan and the bailouts, fine, but I fear this movement is another incarnation of those who throw the word “freedom” around like it’s a Hacky Sack. Witness this video:

httpv://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CpKdZrIhSIE

Richard Behney, tea party organizer in Indianapolis, who clearly is trying to equate himself and piggy back on the fame of Joe the Plumber (By now, if phlegm is not forming in your gut and ready to spew upward, something is wrong), said,

To hear that a segment of our society and our politicians want to come in and take everything away and spread it around, umm, that’s when I said enough.”

Later, he said, “This is a freedom-loving, American thing,” when talking about the movement, noting that “they’re (politicians in Washington) all part of the problem and it’s time to stand up for freedom.”

What incoherency is this? What the hell does freedom have to do with anything? Throughout this whole debacle, has our freedom ever, ever, ever been in question? Or is this slick-haired baffoon just throwing out those four or five right wing buzz words that might give him instant cred with ignorants, including words like freedom, America, God, independence and country? I posit the latter.

As an addendum, this particular rally on April 15th is supposed to feature a guy playing Thomas Paine, who was, I must note, a deist, and whose arguments would fly in the face of Glenn Beck’s and (probably) Richard Behney’s belief that the Bible is true, for Paine believed nothing of the sort, and that’s quite evident from reading “The Age of Reason.” (Side note: Deism isn’t valid either, for it says that, while God exists, he is out there somewhere, did not author the Bible and is sort of an impersonal watcher on the world and personal events. He watches “from a distance” as the song goes. Thus, if he isn’t personally engaged in this world, it seems to follow that he is irrelevant and of no consequence for us.) Further, it’s a bit of an insult to the legacy and great work of Paine to have these types of  folks parading his name around as if he would agree with them on every point. He would probably agree with them on very few points. But that’s where the idiocy of this generation has gotten us.