“Fundamentally Dishonest”: The Self-Contradictory Argument All Republicans Are Making On The Indiana Discrimination Law
Now that it’s becoming a national story, all the Republican candidates are going to have to take a position on the new Indiana law that for all intents and purposes legalizes discrimination against gay people. (If you’re in the market for a lengthy explanation of what the law does and doesn’t do and what the implications are, I wrote one yesterday.) And they all look to be coming down in the same place—one that’s fundamentally dishonest about the law and its implications. They’re essentially trying to have it both ways, supporting the establishment of a right of discrimination for religious business owners, but claiming that they are supporting no such thing. Here’s Jeb Bush talking to Hugh Hewitt yesterday:
Bush: I think if you, if they actually got briefed on the law that they wouldn’t be blasting this law. I think Governor Pence has done the right thing. Florida has a law like this. Bill Clinton signed a law like this at the federal level. This is simply allowing people of faith space to be able to express their beliefs, to have, to be able to be people of conscience. I just think once the facts are established, people aren’t going to see this as discriminatory at all.
Hewitt: You know, the Religious Freedom Restoration Act was signed in 1993. It’s been the law in the District of Columbia for 22 years. I do not know of a single incidence of the sort that Tim Cook was warning about occurring in the District in the last 22 years.
Bush: But there are incidents of people who, for example, the florist in Washington State who had a business that based on her conscience, she couldn’t be participating in a gay wedding, organizing it, even though the person, one of the people was a friend of hers. And she was taken to court, and is still in court, or the photographer in New Mexico. There are many cases where people acting on their conscience have been castigated by the government. And this law simply says the government has to have a level of burden to be able to establish that there’s been some kind of discrimination. We’re going to need this. This is really an important value for our country to, in a diverse country, where you can respect and be tolerant of people’s lifestyles, but allow for people of faith to be able to exercise theirs.
Just to be clear, the Indiana law is not like the federal RFRA, in both the context in which it was passed and its particular provision. The Indiana law specifically applies to disputes between individuals, whereas the federal law discusses only personal conduct the government is trying to regulate. (The federal law came about because of a case where two Native Americans were denied unemployment benefits because they had used peyote in a religious ceremony.) But in any case, Republicans like Jeb are trying to pretend that we can satisfy everyone, and that the Indiana law does so. But we can’t, and it doesn’t. We have to make a choice.
What Bush is doing here (and what Indiana Governor Mike Pence and the rest of the Republicans defending this law are doing as well) is a misleading little two-step. Their argument is: 1) We must allow religious people to discriminate; and 2) This has nothing to do with discrimination. But both those things can’t simultaneously be true. You can call it “simply allowing people of faith space to be able to express their beliefs” or “people acting on their conscience,” but the whole issue is that the act of conscience that they want to undertake is also an act of discrimination. That’s because the particular acts of conscience we’re talking about are those that are not in the realm of speech or worship but in the realm of commerce, and they involve another person.
The cases in question are essentially zero-sum conflicts of claimed rights. Janet wants to have an anniversary dinner in a restaurant; Mike, the restaurant owner, doesn’t want to serve gay couples. There are only two possible outcomes: Janet and her partner get served, in which case Mike has to give; or Mike gets to refuse that service, in which case Janet has to give. You can dress up Mike’s motivations any way you want—”sincere religious beliefs,” “act of conscience,” whatever—but that doesn’t change the fact that one person is going to win and the other is going to lose.
The liberals who object to the Indiana law are making their choice clear: Janet’s right to be treated equally trumps Mike’s desire to discriminate, even though that desire is based on religious beliefs. The conservatives who support the law are taking the opposite position: If it’s based on a religious belief, Mike’s right to discriminate trumps Janet’s right to be treated equally. I happen to disagree with the conservative position, but I would respect it a lot more if they’d just come out and admit what their position really is. Instead, they’re trying to claim that there’s no conflict between Janet and Mike and they aren’t taking a side.
But they are. These kinds of conflicts are the whole point of this law, the reason why Republicans wanted to pass it and would like to see others like it. Of course, nobody wants to say they support “discrimination.” But if that florist in Washington or that photographer in New Mexico whom Bush is defending have a policy that says, “We will accept the business of straight couples but not gay couples,” then they’re discriminating. Republicans want to make sure that business owners have a legal right to discriminate against potential customers in that fashion. They ought to just admit it.
By: Paul Waldman, Senior Writer, The American Prospect, March 31, 2015
“Willfully Chose To Reject Changes”: Indiana Republicans Were Warned About Their Anti-Gay Bill
Governor Mike Pence promised Tuesday to “fix” a controversial law with anti-gay undertones in an attempt to stop the constant hammering the state has received since he signed the Religious Freedom Restoration Act into law last week.
“I don’t believe for a minute that it was the intention of the general assembly to create a license to discriminate or right to deny services to gays, lesbians or anyone else in the state, and it certainly wasn’t my intent, but I can appreciate that has become the perception,” Pence said.
But advocates for changes to the law said if Pence didn’t know this would turn into a public-relations dumpster fire, he was either willfully ignorant or simply didn’t care.
Gay-rights advocates said they flagged the problem with the lack of protective language early in the process and pushed minor amendments to the bill, they say, would have largely resolved the issue.
It is unclear whether Pence himself knew about the amendments, but two people familiar with the lobbying effort behind the pro-LGBT measures said it was clear very early in the process that the governor did not want any changes to the bill.
“Pence and his party insisted that the bill not be balanced,” said Indiana Representative Ed Delaney, a Democrat and the author of an amendment that would have added the sentence “the protection of civil rights; or the prevention of discrimination; is a compelling government interest” to the bill.
Delaney said Pence’s office either didn’t know or didn’t care about the amendments.
“He’s created this problem,” Delaney said.
Another amendment would have exempted civil rights laws from RFRA—a change modeled after similar laws in Missouri and Texas. (Indiana’s civil rights laws do not protect LGBT individuals—but several local municipalities, like Indianapolis, have laws on the books that extend civil rights protections to the LGBT community).
Both amendments were rejected by the Republican-led Indiana legislature.
Pence’s retreat—just Sunday he said the law would not be changed—signified that Indiana’s culture warrior had, once again, bit off more than he could chew.
As the uproar started, Pence staff thought the issue would fade, according to a source last week familiar with a conversation between Pence and his aides. So while Pence expressed surprise at the vitriol created by the law, LGBT advocates said he should have seen it coming.
“There is no surprise in this,” Dale Carpenter, a constitutional and civil liberties law professor at the University of Minnesota Law School.
“They chose to reject those changes in the committee and again on the House floor that suggests to be the legislative intent here is to allow religious freedom to impact anti-discrimination laws,” said Tyler Deaton, senior advisor at American Unity Fund, a pro-gay conservative group.
Pence insisted in an uncharacteristically defensive interview on This Week last Sunday the bill was about religious liberty, not discrimination.
“There’s been shameless rhetoric about my state and about this law and about its intention all over the Internet,” he said. “People are trying to make it about one particular issue.”
“Shameless rhetoric” aside, there are plenty of reasons to be skeptical of Pence’s explanation, starting with the actual signing of the bill.
And it had everything to do with the “particular issue.”
In a photo of the private signing ceremony, Pence is surrounded by a small group of people—including the three wise men of the anti-gay marriage movement of Indiana: Micah Clark, executive director of the American Family Association of Indiana; Curt Smith, president of the Indiana Family Institute; and Eric Miller, executive director of Advance America.
Delaney said the presence of those individuals at the signing ceremony spoke volumes about the intent of the law.
“Is Mike Pence the only person who hasn’t read their press releases?” Delaney asked. “He knows what they wanted to do.”
Pence, himself, has a long, proud record of opposing gay rights during his tenure in Congress.
It also isn’t the first time he carried it into the governor’s mansion, where it has had some pretty embarrassing results.
A push for a constitutional ban on gay marriage in Indiana ended in failure but only after the Pence team tried to censor the opposition.
When gay-marriage proponents posted their displeasure with the measure on Facebook, Pence’s staff simply deleted the messages.
Initially, Pence and his staff said they just deleted comments that were obscene— but later fessed up to removing only the comments that disagreed with the governor’s position.
“On careful review, it appears that this was not always the case and some comments were being deleted simply because they expressed disagreement with my position. I regret that this occurred and sincerely apologize to all those who were affected,” Pence wrote in a Facebook post at the time.
Adding insult to injury the measure failed, giving Pence a black eye just a year into his governorship.
This is a slightly different response than Pence was used to during his time in Washington.
As a member of Congress he had no problem opposing rights for the LGBT community.
He voted for a constitutional amendment to ban gay marriage and against the Employment Non-Discrimination Act, which would have added LGBT as a protected group on the federal level from discrimination in the workplace.
When the federal amendment to ban gay marriage failed to pass the House in 2006, Pence proclaimed it a “successful failure.”
“We poured a little more concrete in the footings of a building that will be built,” Pence said at the time, according to the Associated Press.
He was lauded as a hero by the right for his positions on social issues—receiving multiple “True Blue” awards from the Family Research Council for “his commitment to the family and sanctity of human life.”
The Indiana Family Institute, which was instrumental in crafting the RFRA bill, has likewise awarded him the “Friend of the Family Award.”
But being a culture warrior as governor, as he has found out, has higher stakes.
“He could afford to be a culture warrior because it wasn’t impacting an entire state’s economy,” Deaton said, referring to the burgeoning “boycott Indiana” campaign. “And now he has a different burden on his shoulders and this is turning out to cost the state tens of millions of dollars on the bottom line, thousands of jobs. This is really problematic for a governor.”
By: Jackie Kucinich, The Daily Beast, March 31, 2015
“It Doesn’t Make Any Sense”: Two Suicides Rock Missouri Politics
Last Thursday, on the one-month anniversary of the suicide of his boss, Missouri’s Republican auditor and a candidate for governor, Spence Jackson took the day off.
Tom Schweich’s suicide came amidst what had become a brutal campaign for governor and shocked the state’s Republican Party.
The circumstances surrounding his death, including nasty, anti-Semitic rumors, pitted donors and party elites like former U.S. Sen. Jack Danforth against Missouri Republicans like former U.S. Attorney General John Ashcroft and former U.S. Sen. Kit Bond who were calling for party unity.
Jackson, Schweich’s spokesman, was in the middle of that fight.
And last week, Jackson took his own life.
Police say it was the fear of losing a job, not political whispers, that may have haunted him the most in his final days.
Until about three weeks ago, Jackson, like a loyal soldier without a commander, continued to carry the torch in Schweich’s memory.
Only moments after Schweich’s funeral, Jackson was one of the first to call for the resignation of John Hancock, the chairman of the Missouri Republican Party who Schweich believed had orchestrated an anti-Semitic “whisper campaign” against him (Schweich was Episcopalian, but had Jewish heritage).
Jackson pushed the late auditor’s side to reporters and influencers in the state party as he and others tried to shame Hancock out of the office.
But, Hancock—who has vehemently denied the allegation that he was pushing an anti-Semitic message against Schweich—has not stepped down, and on Friday, Catherine Hanaway, who Schweich was challenging in what had already become a brutal Republican primary for governor, reemerged on the campaign trail.
On Friday, Jackson was back in the auditor’s suite in an office building across the street from the state Capitol for part of the day.
But after lunch, Jackson did not return to work, police here said.
Those who knew him said when Jackson left the office, he turned out the light and closed his door.
But on Friday afternoon, he left his lights on, the door open and his things as they were.
At some point later in the day, Jackson returned to his apartment only a couple miles away from his workplace.
There, he penned a note and left it in his living room before disappearing into his bedroom where police say he fatally shoot himself with a .357 Magnum revolver, which was found with him in his bed.
It was not until Sunday night, when Jackson’s mother was in Jefferson City to meet with him in advance of a scheduled doctor’s appointment on Monday, that Jackson was found dead in his apartment by police responding to a “check well-being call.”
Jackson, who had worked as a Republican communicator for nearly two decades, had served in former Gov. Matt Blunt’s administration as a personal spokesman for the governor and then for the Missouri Department of Economic Development. When Blunt decided to not seek reelection and Democrat Jay Nixon was elected to take his place, Jackson was let go and left without a job.
“I am so sorry. I just can’t take being unemployed again,” Jackson apparently wrote, according to Captain Doug Shoemaker of the Jefferson City Police Department.
David Luther, a spokesman for John Watson, Nixon’s temporary appointee as auditor as he seeks a full time replacement to fill out Schweich’s term though 2018, told reporters on Tuesday that senior staff had been told last week that, “if there was a change in the interim auditor, that might impact them.”
But, Luther said, nothing was specific, and nobody had been told they would soon be out of a job.
“Everybody was going to continue to be under employment, but in the political landscape, those things can change,” Luther said. “No one had been told their job was in jeopardy, but knowing that there would probably be a change down the road, I’m sure they were all understanding of that.”
Jeff Layman, a fraternity brother of Jackson who attended Missouri State University with him 25 years ago, said he was “heartbroken over the loss.”
“Spence was kind, caring and loyal; but most importantly, he was like a brother to me. Spence was a savvy political communicator who was passionate and intense about his politics. I will miss his huge smile, infectious laugh and larger than life personality,” Layman said on Monday.
Jackson’s coworkers and other Schweich staff members would not speak on the record for this article. But, speaking privately, one Republican who knew both Schweich and Jackson said the two had “emotional highs and lows” and “wore their emotions on their sleeves.”
Still, the fear of losing a job, at least immediately, should have been unfounded, the Republican said: “Nothing was going to happen immediately. He had a job and people were looking out for him to find something next. It doesn’t make any sense.”
By: Eli Yokley, The Daily Beast, March 31, 2015
“Give Up, Evangelicals”: The Republican Party Isn’t Going To Help You
Evangelicals are not thrilled about a third coming of Bush. Concerned that former Florida Governor Jeb Bush will receive the GOP nomination thanks to his credit with the party establishment, Evangelical leaders around the country are in talks “to coalesce their support behind a single social-conservative contender,” The New York Times’ Trip Gabriel reports. Evangelicals do not believe that Bush “would fight for the issues they care most about: opposing same-sex marriage, holding the line on an immigration overhaul and rolling back abortion rights,” and fear that another bruising round of Republican primaries could lose the GOP the presidential race by failing to unite the party’s base.
Evangelicals have good reason to be worried. Despite Evangelicals’ willingness to throw their support behind establishment candidates—they enthusiastically voted for Mitt Romney and John McCain—the United States seems to resemble the Evangelical vision less and less. Since the mobilization of the Christian right as a useful voting bloc back in the 1980s, Evangelicals have enjoyed careful courtship from the Republican establishment, as evident in Senator Ted Cruz’s mating dance with right-wing Christians at his Liberty University announcement speech on Monday. But despite being Republicans’ “biggest, most reliable voting bloc,” in the words of Republican National Committee faith engagement director Chad Connelly, Evangelicals appear to have received relatively little from their arrangement with the GOP.
Next month, the Supreme Court will tackle same sex marriage, and all signs indicate that the justices will legalize same sex marriage nationally. The last bastion of hope for Evangelicals in such a circumstance would be religious freedom legislation like the bill recently signed into law by Indiana Governor Mike Pence, which would allow, inter alia, Christian businesses to refuse service to gay customers. These laws represent a kind of retreat from calls for gay-marriage bans, a shield of isolation around small enclaves of Evangelical sentiment that were ultimately incapable of winning the larger political fight. Likewise, despite the willingness of GOP candidates to speak to Evangelical concerns about abortion—29 percent of Evangelicals consider it a “critical issue” for our country—Roe v. Wade has not been overturned, and abortion is not illegal in a single American state. Instead, states have taken to fiddling with regulations relating to waiting periods, counseling, invasive ultrasounds, and parental notification in order to construct makeshift de-facto bans. Pornography, despite the best efforts of Evangelicals over several decades, is not banned. Evolution, too, persists in public schools, along with sex-ed; indeed, the only broadly Evangelical-backed political project that seems to have a prayer at the moment is comprehensive immigration reform, the success of which will largely depend upon keeping people like Ted Cruz out of office.
Some Republicans, like former Fox News host Mike Huckabee, are upfront about the fact that Evangelicals have been taken for a ride by the GOP. “They’re treated like a cheap date,” Huckabee told Politico during a 2013 interview, “always good for the last-minute prom date, never good enough to marry.” Evangelicals are always game to hit the polls, in other words, when the GOP needs to pull out a win: but that doesn’t necessarily mean Republicans will be invested in pushing Evangelical issues once they get into office, or that they’d have any success if they tried.
Faced with the inability of their alliance with the Republican Party to produce much more than militarism and deregulation, neither of specific moral interest to Evangelicals, the Evangelical polity itself has begun to split, with some clinging to the triumphalist rhetoric of the past, in which America was a Christian nation and Christianity was an American religion, while others have moved on to lobbying for cells of legal protection from the country’s rapidly shifting moral landscape. For this reason, Religion Dispatches’ Sarah Posner notes, most Evangelicals would “rather hear the candidates talk about religious freedom, not offer overwrought displays of piety blended with patriotism.”
If Jeb Bush is interested in capturing the Evangelical vote, he could promise to push for laws that protect religiously motivated employers from legal censure should they choose to refuse business to LGBT clients. The fact that these laws have been a struggle even at the state level (Arizona governor Jan Brewer, no fan of same sex marriage, still vetoed such a measure last February, while Utah’s Republican-controlled legislature settled on a compromise earlier this month) suggests that they would be even more of a headache at the national level. But if history has revealed anything about the relationship between Evangelicals and their Republican allies, it’s that the promises made and positions telegraphed during campaigns don’t have to be kept.
Still, it seems that the rift between establishment Republicans and Evangelicals will be injurious to the GOP in the long term. As time passes, leveraging the necessary political force to reverse many of the decisions that most rankle the Christian right, including Roe and same-sex marriage, will become even more challenging, making it less likely that an Evangelical favorite could do much to roll these policies back even if elected. And, as failures on that front continue, Evangelicals will likely keep seeking out alternative candidates to rally around, further fracturing a GOP base already tugged in strange directions by the Tea Party. Any Evangelical darling (Huckabee, for example) would likely turn out unelectable in a national election, meaning that Evangelical success will add up to an easy win for Democrats, and another round of disappointments for the Evangelicals themselves. In short, the romantic alliance that was sold to Evangelicals when the Moral Majority helped deliver Ronald Reagan to the White House appears finally to have unraveled altogether.
Which ultimately might be an improvement for Christian politics. As Kevin Kruse notes in his forthcoming book One Nation Under God: How Corporate America Invented Christian America, the alliance between Christian voters and politicians on the right was largely a calculated product born of plush industrialist funding and the handy rhetoric of the McCarthy era. But with the threat of Soviet aggression dissolved and the political promise of the Republican-Evangelical coalition played out, perhaps Evangelicals will be able to look beyond a frustrating alliance in which their interests were always low priority. The faith and family left, as the Pew Foundation has termed it, awaits their support.
By: Elizabeth Stoker Bruenig, The New Republic, March 31, 2015
“The Ballad Of Lester Maddox”: Supporters Of Discrimination Have Always Cloaked Their Views In Appeals To Personal Liberty
Once upon a time, a restaurant owner refused to serve people who were different. He said he did so in the name of freedom, not discrimination.
The time was 1964, the place was Georgia, and the man was Lester Maddox. He was the owner of The Pickrick restaurant and one July day he chased out three black patrons, waving a pistol. This made him something of a local celebrity and a national symbol of resistance to the big government imposition of civil rights. But he always insisted that he was not motivated by racism but simply defending the rights of private property and his personal beliefs.
“This property belongs to me—and I’ll throw out a white one, a black one, a red-headed one or a bald headed one. It doesn’t make any difference to me.”
Maddox became a hero to conservative populists—most of whom were Democrats at that time in the South, because of a hangover from the Civil War a century before—and he rode the wave of resistance to desegregation all the way to the Governor’s mansion two years later.
“History doesn’t repeat, but sometimes it rhymes,” Mark Twain allegedly said. And there are no perfect parallels between Lester Maddox and the florists, bakers and other small business owners who have been invoked as a reason to protect the religious liberties of those who could legally refuse to serve gay and lesbian weddings. But amid a national debate about gay civil rights a half-century later, as we fitfully evolve toward the promise of a more perfect union, it is useful to listen for echoes of old arguments because they can clarify our current conversations.
We’ve had an age-old argument in our nation between the powers of the federal government and states’ rights. It goes back to the ratification of the Constitution (ironic, because many of the states’ rights advocates since have presented themselves as the purest defenders of the constitution) and found expression in the heated debates between John C. Calhoun and Daniel Webster, and Jefferson Davis and Abraham Lincoln that ultimately exploded into civil war. The arguments resurfaced again in the 1960s over civil rights and desegregation. And so it goes.
But the de facto defenders of slavery and segregation rarely framed their arguments as endorsements of inequality. Instead, their argument was often uplifted, framed as a defense of lofty ideals. Sometimes these were rooted in theological objections—defense of slavery and defense of segregation was at one point imbued with the hue of religious belief. But more often it was framed as a fight between individual liberty and government tyranny, with no irony intended.
George Wallace, the conservative populist Democratic Governor of Alabama who heatedly defended segregation was a case in point. He famously thundered in his inaugural address that “It is very appropriate that from this cradle of the Confederacy, this very heart of the great Anglo-Saxon Southland, that today we sound the drum for freedom as have our generations of forebears before us time and again down through history… In the name of the greatest people that have ever trod this earth, I draw the line in the dust and toss the gauntlet before the feet of tyranny, and I say segregation now, segregation tomorrow, segregation forever.”
But he also made more subtle arguments against civil rights, rooted in private property: “This civil rights bill will wind up putting a homeowner in jail because he doesn’t sell his home to someone that some bureaucrat thinks he ought to sell it to.”
And yet he insisted, “I never made a statement in my political life that reflects on a man’s race… my only interest is in the restoration of local government.”
Apple CEO Tim Cook grew up in George Wallace’s Alabama and as he wrote this week in The Washington Post, “I remember what it was like to grow up in the South in the 1960s and 1970s. Discrimination isn’t something that’s easy to oppose. It doesn’t always stare you in the face. It moves in the shadows. And sometimes it shrouds itself within the very laws meant to protect us.”
It’s this “shroud” line that’s most relevant here. Even old Lester Maddox, looking back on his life in a 1975 memoir, reflected that “I knew then, as I know now, that I was trying to protect not only the rights of Lester Maddox, but every citizen, including the three men I chased off the property.”
This seductive self-justification doubles as self-deception. It’s a trope that tied libertarians up in knots for decades, trying to mediate their own twin imperatives of property rights and individual liberty. But time has made those choices clearer, as conservatives celebrate the now self-evident moral clarity of Martin Luther King, who declared that he was “embarrassed” when Maddox was elected Governor. This was understandable, given that Maddox called desegregation “ungodly, un-Christian and un-American.”
Maddox, if he is remembered today, is perhaps best known as a refrain in the ‘70s-era satirical Randy Newman song “Rednecks,” which proclaims, “well, he may be a fool, but he’s our fool, and if you think that you’re better than him you’re wrong.” The song goes on to jab at the hypocrisy of self-righteous northern critics who denounce the South while ignoring the segregation that hides under their own noses in cities like New York, Chicago and Boston. But as with all satire, the song contains a serious point that echoes on today: when conservative populism rears its head, liberals often make divisions worse by denying the respective humanity and individuality of the people with whom they disagree, compounding resentments that can turn into political backlash that endures for decades.
What’s sinister is the Orwellian mislabeling of the impulses behind resistance to civil rights progress that aims to ensure equal protection as a defense of liberty. And while it’s become fashionable for conservatives to honor Martin Luther King and venerate past civil rights fights, it’s nothing more than an attempt to benefit from historical amnesia unless they are willing to apply those lessons to present day debates. That means respecting the core conservative value of individual freedom in reality rather than just rhetoric.
In the Ballad of Lester Maddox, the lyrics change but the melody remains the same. It echoes across the decades, age-old arguments where freedom to discriminate becomes the emotional litmus-test of liberty. Direct parallels may miss the point, but ignoring these echoes blinds us from the ability to see current events in light of history and to anticipate what arguments will look like generations from now.
By: John Avlon, The Daily Beast, March 31, 2015
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