“No, Eric Cantor Did Not Lose Because He’s Jewish”: There Were No Other Elephants In The Room
Eric Cantor’s primary defeat by David Brat, an economics professor at Randolph-Macon College, sent the pundits scurrying. Shocked and bewildered, they searched around for theories to makes sense of what they had not anticipated happening. Hundreds of articles were written and dozens of explanations were offered.
One of the more fascinating threads that emerged from the cacophony of ideas put forward in the days following the primary was the effort to find a Jewish dimension to the story. Cantor, the House Majority Leader, was the highest ranking Jewish lawmaker in American history, with aspirations to be Speaker of the House. When one adds to that the fact that Brat is a religious Christian who speaks frequently of his faith, the temptation to uncover a Jewish angle became irresistible. The New York Times, the Washington Post, the leading Jewish weekly the Forward, and a variety of other publications duly turned out articles examining, from every perspective, the Jewish and religious sides of the election.
The problem was that there was no Jewish angle, at least not one of any consequence.
David Wasserman, a normally sensible political analyst, got things going with a much-quoted statement to the Times suggesting that anti-Semitism was at play in Cantor’s defeat. Cantor was culturally out of step with his redrawn district, according to Wasserman, “and part of this plays into his religion. You can’t ignore the elephant in the room.” Sensationalist headlines soon followed. The Week, a news magazine, ran a story entitled “Did Eric Cantor lose because he’s Jewish?” And the Forward ran an opinion column with the headline “Did Eric Cantor Lose Because He’s Jewish? You Betcha.”
But there was no elephant in the room. There wasn’t even a mosquito in the room. Nobody could turn up a single statement or piece of literature coming from the Brat campaign or anyone else that was even remotely anti-Semitic. And sensationalism aside, the ultimate consensus of virtually everyone was that anti-Semitism was not a factor of any kind in Cantor’s loss.
Conservatives, including Jewish conservatives, cried foul, charging that the point of the coverage was a deliberate attempt by liberals to smear Republican voters as bigots. Perhaps, although my own view is that it reflected media sloppiness and obsessiveness more than political conspiracy.
Another claim was that even in the absence of explicit anti-Semitism, the Brat victory represented a victory for evangelicalism and Christian politics and therefore a long-term threat to Jews and all non-Christian minorities. Vigilance about church-state separation is always appropriate, of course, but it is hard to see the threat here. Brat is often described as aligned with the Tea Party, which is a motley collection of organizations and activists; it has ill-defined religious positions not at all identical with those of evangelical groups, which are diverse themselves. Most important, there is much evidence that Americans are becoming less religious and not more so, and, as the gay marriage issue demonstrates, more tolerant in their religious outlooks.
Mr. Brat, of course, likes to talk publicly of his belief in God, and that is distressing to some people, both Jews and Christians. But God talk is acceptable in America, and people with liberal religious outlooks, President Obama included, also make reference to their religious beliefs from time to time. The key for politicians is to be sure that they ground their statements in a language of morality that is accessible to everyone; Americans need a common political discourse not dominated by exclusivist theology. As long as Brat—and others—stay on the right side of that political line, there is no reason to see this election as a religious watershed for Jews or anyone else, or a victory for religious coercion.
A third claim is that the Cantor defeat represents a disastrous decline of Jewish political fortunes. In this view, Cantor’s defeat is seen as part of a broader pattern: There are 33 Jews in the current Congress, both the House and the Senate, as compared with 39 in the previous one. But here again, this seems like an altogether arbitrary and unfounded assumption. Jews are well represented in all areas of America’s educational, business, and political life, and that is not changed in any way by the defeat of a Jewish Majority Leader in the House of Representatives.
Eric Cantor’s fall from political power is interesting and in some ways important. For decades to come, politicians and professors will study it as an example of what happens when a serious but self-referential politician loses touch with the things that ordinary Americans care about and gets caught up in the big-dollar culture of Washington. But they will say very little about the Jewish dimension of this affair—and that is for the simple reason that it doesn’t exist.
By: Rabbi Eric H. Yoffie, a Writer and Lecturer, was President of the Union for Reform Judaism from 1996 to 2012; Time, June 16, 2014
“The Big Tent Just Got Smaller”: Congressional Republicans, Nobody Here But Us Christians
Among the many shocking things about Eric Cantor’s defeat yesterday, the one that shocked me most is the realization that he is currently the only publicly-identified non-Christian Republican in Congress. Not just the highest-ranking Jewish Republican, or the highest-ranking non-Christian Republican, but the only non-Christian Republican in either chamber, at least according to a Pew analysis of the religious affiliations of Members of Congress conducted after the 2012 elections. It’s always possible, I suppose, that a non-Christian GOPer can be nominated later this year and elected in November, but for now, the estimated 27% of Americans who don’t identify themselves with some form of the Christian faith will likely have no representation among Republicans House and Senate members come next year.
Even if you only look at the disappearance of Republican Jews in Congress, that’s pretty amazing to those of us old enough to remember Jacob Javits and Rudy Boschwitz and Arlen Specter and Warren Rudman and Chic Hecht, all members of the Senate. Lord knows there’s been a significant Jewish presence among right-bent intellectuals over the years, from Milton Freidman to Frank Meyer to Ayn Rand and her “collective” (which included, of course, Alan Greenspan). That’s not to mention Jewish Republican journalists and flacks from the Kristol clan to William Safire and David Brooks and Jonah Goldberg and Jennifer Rubin, or major donors like Sheldon Adelson. And these are just the names that come to mind instantly.
Cantor, of course, was on track to become the first Jewish Speaker of the House, and played a central role in validating conservative criticisms of Democrats as unfriendly to Israel. I can recall a long moment in the rehearsal room for the 2008 Democratic Convention when a congressman scheduled to defend Barack Obama’s record on Middle East issues lobbied convention managers for additional time on grounds that “Eric Cantor will be given all the time he wants at the Republican convention to attack Obama as an enemy of Israel.” Now, presumably, Christian Right GOPers will fully assume control of this line of attack on Democrats in Congress.
But the bigger picture here is that at a time when Republicans are huffing and puffing to depict themselves as a Big Tent Party bound together by ideology rather than race or ethnicity or religion, they likely won’t be able to point to a single Member who isn’t at least formally a Christian. And yes, that’s shocking.
By: Ed Kilgore, Contributing Writer, Washington Monthly Political Animal, June 11, 2014
“Neutral, Generic Blessings?”: Get Prayer Out Of The Churches And Back In The Public Square Where It Belongs!
Maybe it’s something I retained from my early training as a Southern Baptist, way back when members of that denomination, believe it or not, hewed closely to Roger Williams’ doctrine of strict separation of church and state. But every time increasingly conservative courts make fresh accommodations for state-sanctioned religious expressions, as SCOTUS did yesterday in Town of Greece v. Galloway, I have an adverse reaction from a religious point of view.
As Dahlia Lithwick points out at Slate, the majority opinion in the 5-4 decision goes well out of its way to emphasize the banality of prayers at town meetings and other public events:
There will be a good deal of bitterness in the coming days among members of religious minorities and majorities who believe that the Town of Greece decision is just or unjust depending largely on how they feel about sectarian Christian prayers. But stepping back from the specific arguments of the plurality and dissent, it’s fascinating to see how Kennedy and Justice Samuel Alito relentlessly characterize religion as an essentially peaceful, civilizing, lofty influence that seems to have more to do with social politeness than religious zeal. Kennedy’s majority opinion contains the complete text of four prayers, presumably to calm and unify his stressed-out reader, and he writes lovingly of prayer that is “solemn and respectful in tone, that invites lawmakers to reflect upon shared ideals and common ends before they embark on the fractious business of governing.” He seems unaware that for every solemn and respectful prayer, America offers up dozens of fiery, judgmental, even violent ones.
And yes, Americans also offer up soul-wrenching, spiritually deep, and challenging prayers, too. Cheapening prayer into a “neutral,” generic blessing of secular proceedings offends me as much as sanctioning sectarian expressions because most people in a given community more or less belong to a particular faith, which appears to have been the case in Greece, New York.
Had I been on the Court, I would have probably filed a dissenting opinion urging the reversal of Marsh v. Chambers, the 1983 precedent which basically authorized generic public prayers to a generic God, instead of expanding Marsh to include “non-coercive” sectarian prayers, as the majority did, or drawing the line at prayers so empty as to be deemed non-sectarian, as the dissenters did.
Corporate prayer is meaningless if it does not invoke the beliefs of the community for which it is offered. That is why it belongs in gatherings of believers (and those who for whatever reason–say attendance at a wedding or funeral–are voluntarily participating in a religious event). Yes, throughout the centuries there have been many religious believers who reject the very idea of a “secular” realm, but that is unmistakably alien to American traditions, much as latter-day “constitutional conservatives” try to demonstrate otherwise in their audacious efforts to turn Jefferson into a theocrat.
So let’s don’t assume the only Americans who object to the kind of public prayers sanctioned by Town of Greece–or for that matter, Marsh–are members of religious minorities or unbelievers, justified as they are in the exclusion they feel in public events blessed according to rites they do not accept. Some wag years ago mock-thundered that it was “time to get prayer out of the churches and back in the schools where they belong.” That’s exactly how I react to the the whole “religious expression in the public square” movement. It’s offensive to those who pray as much as to those who don’t.
By: Ed Kilgore, Contributing Writer, Washington Monthly Political Animal, May 6, 2014
“Forgetting What Religion Is About”: When Did ‘Dependence’ Become A Dirty Word?
Too many Americans—including Christians—are afraid that helping the poor will create ‘dependency.’ They’re forgetting that’s what religion is all about.
Not long ago, I preached a Lenten sermon in which I made a lone reference to food stamps as being one of the ways we “love our neighbors as ourselves.” Judging from the reactions of a few congregants, you might have thought it was all I preached about. They went out of their way to tell me how such programs “breed” complacency, laziness, and—wait for it—dependency.
It reminded me of Rep. Paul Ryan, who’s always carrying on about America’s “culture of dependency,” and just realized a major budget proposal that would slash food stamps and other government measures that relieve the misery of the poorest Americans.
When did “dependence” become such a dirty word? We list our children on our income tax forms as “dependents” without stigmatizing them by such a designation. So why does “dependent” become an accusation when applied to other people’s children when they are in need of food stamp (SNAP) assistance, a free-school-lunch program, or housing assistance to rescue them from being homeless? Why is it wrong for someone blind, disabled, or elderly and frail to be “dependent” upon the society in which he or she lives for the basic necessities, when it is impossible for that person to provide for themselves?
And besides, it’s far from clear that a “culture of dependency” is what America has—in fact, we have something like the opposite. Independence may well be the modern day Golden Calf to which far too many of us bow down and worship. Independence is bound up in our national identity, both personal and corporate. After all, next to our Constitution, it is the Declaration of Independence to which we most often appeal. The rugged individualism which in many ways helped make our nation what it is may also be what is causing us to lose our sense of the common good.
The establishment of a social safety net is the most profoundly religious action a government can take. An underlying principle of the Judeo-Christian faith—indeed of most faith communities—is that God will judge humankind by the way we care for the most vulnerable in our midst. Think of all the people in the world we generally revere: Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., Gandhi, Clara Barton, Nelson Mandela, Dorothy Day, Albert Schweitzer, Dag Hammarskjold, Mother Teresa. All of them, in one way or another, reached out to the poor, the disenfranchised, and the marginalized, seeking to ease their pain and help bear their burdens.
When a government sets out to seek the common good, it realizes that there will be some among us who are less able to meet all their needs, chief among them housing, food and safety. And it’s not just a few of us who find ourselves in need at some point: as Mark Rank wrote on the New York Times’ Opinionator, “nearly 40 percent of Americans between the ages of 25 and 60 will experience at least one year below the official poverty line during that period ($23,492 for a family of four), and 54 percent will spend a year in poverty or near poverty (below 150 percent of the poverty line).”
Are there undeserving, even fraudulent people receiving welfare/food/housing assistance? Undoubtedly. But as a citizen of this great nation, I am willing to fund the undeserving few who slip by unnoticed and game the system, in order to provide for the many who are truly in need. Many of our national and state legislators seem to want to use the excuse of the undeserving few to gut the social safety net altogether, and by so doing, punish the many who are in real need.
In fact, most of the people who avail themselves of the government’s (in other words, our) social safety net are indeed dependent. Some of them will remain so: children (45 percent), the disabled, and the elderly (20 percent). Many more will remain so until we get serious about offering them the kind of assistance which might lift them out of poverty, like raising the minimum wage.
In 2012, 47 percent of people who received food stamp assistance were in families where at least one person was working. These so-called “working poor” are not lying around in Paul Ryan’s imagined hammock of ease, living off others’ hard work and generally having a grand time of it. They are working one or more jobs, and because of part-time work or low wages and extreme needs, are still not able to provide adequate food and shelter for themselves and their families. Politicians who claim to be “helping” poor people by depriving them of aid are either ignorant or cruel.
For Christians are called to care for our neighbors. Telling the Good Samaritan story, Jesus teaches that all people are our neighbors. And as for a few “getting away with murder,” Jesus reminds his followers that it rains on the just and the unjust alike, and that God will sort it all out in the end. Jews, Muslims, Christians, and followers of nearly every religion believe in helping those in need. So do most humanists and atheists. We are called to respect the dignity of every human being. And yet, we witness professed Christians like Paul Ryan putting forward budgets that would eviscerate our common safety net.
It’s time religious people stood up and laid claim to their desire and responsibility to care for the poor. It’s time to withdraw the stigma and condemnation from those who by necessity must be “dependent” on the rest of us. It should be our joy to serve them.
By: V. Gene Robinson, Senior Fellow at the Center for American Progress, Washington, DC, and the Retired IX Episcopal Bishop of New Hampshire; Published in The Daily Beast, April 4, 2014
“The Wasted Life Of Fred Phelps”: It’s Hard To Mourn A Monster
And what shall we say now that the monster has died?
His estranged sons Mark and Nate told the world just a few days ago that their 84-year-old father, Fred Phelps, was in the care of a hospice and “on the edge of death.” Thursday morning, he went over the edge.
The senior Phelps, of course, was the founder of Westboro Baptist “Church” in Topeka, KS. He was the “God hates” guy. As in “God Hates China” (its divorce rates are too high), “God Hates Islam” (for being a false religion), “God Hates Qatar” (for being rich) “God Hates The Media” (for saying mean things about Westboro), “God Hates Tuvalu” (for having too many holidays), “God Hates America” (for tolerating homosexuality) and, of course, most notoriously, “God Hates Fags” — Phelps’ odious word for gay men and lesbians.
He was also the man who applauded the deaths of American soldiers and picketed their funerals, under the dubious formulation that their dying represented God’s judgment upon this country.
Westboro is a tiny “church” — hate group, actually — said to draw its membership almost exclusively from Phelps’ extended family. His sons say Phelps was excommunicated from it last year for some reason, which the “church” refused to confirm or deny, saying its “membership issues are private.” For what it’s worth, last week Phelps was conspicuous by his near absence from Westboro’s website, which once displayed his words and image prominently.
Now the monster is gone. What shall we say?
The people hurt and maligned by Phelps didn’t wait for his actual expiration to begin answering that question. They started days ago when his sons announced that his end was near. One woman tweeted about Death needing rubber gloves to touch the body. Another woman set up a “Fred Phelps Death Watch” on Facebook, the tone of which can be inferred from one posting depicting feces in a toilet as a photo of Phelps in hospice care.
After his death, one person tweeted the hope that “his final hours were filled with immense physical pain and horrifying hallucinations.”
You can hardly blame people for not being prostrate with grief. This man cheered the lynching of a young gay man in Wyoming. He turned the funerals of American military personnel into circuses. It is hard to imagine anyone more loathsome, despicable and justifiably reviled than he.
And yet it is also hard not to feel saddened by this reaction, diminished by it.
If one is a Christian as Phelps claimed to be, one may hear the voice of Jesus arising from conscience: “A new command I give you: Love one another.” And you may demand an exemption from that command, because being asked to love the spectacularly unlovable Phelps is just too much. But, if you love only the lovable, what’s the point? What does that say or prove? Indeed, loving the unlovable pretty much constitutes God’s job description.
Even beyond the obligations imposed by faith, though, there is something troubling in the idea that some of us willingly become what we profess to abhor, adopt extremist hatred in protest of extremist hatred. As Martin Luther King famously put it, “Darkness cannot drive out darkness; only light can do that. Hate cannot drive out hate; only love can do that.”
It is hard to imagine that anyone beyond, perhaps, his immediate family, is sorry Fred Phelps is dead. And that is probably the truest barometer of his life and its value. But as most of us are not sorry, some of us are not glad, either. What we feel is probably best described as a certain dull pity.
Phelps was given the gift, the incandescent miracle, of being alive in this world for over 80 years — and he wasted it, utterly.
If God hates anything, surely God hates that.
By: Leonard Pitts, Jr., Opinion Writer, Miami Herald; Published in The National Memo, March 24, 2014
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