“The Devil Came Down To Georgia And Paid Off Judas”: Republicans Want Their Own Tidy Little Jim Crow Zone Of Discrimination
In some startling, if preliminary, good news from Georgia, members of a state House committee, including three Republicans, “gutted” a religious liberty bill by adding language foreswearing any preemption of anti-discrimination laws. Proponents of the bill quickly moved to table it for the session, according to the Atlanta Journal-Constitution‘s Aaron Gould Sheinin:
The stunning move to table Senate Bill 129 came after Rep. Mike Jacobs, R-Brookhaven, succeeded in amending it to make clear that the bill would protect against “discrimination on any ground prohibited by federal, state or local law.”
“I take at face value the statements of proponents that they do not intend discrimination with this bill,” Jacobs said. “I also believe that if this is the case, we as the General Assembly should state that expressly in the bill itself.”
Ha ha! Good one!
But “religious liberty” fans are not amused by having their own words quoted back to them. Erick Erickson, who often treats Georgia politics like his own personal dominion, pitched a hissy fit that’s extreme even by his porous standards, focusing on two Republicans who appeared to switch sides by voting with Jacobs, and a third who didn’t vote on the amendment.
Yesterday, I encouraged everyone to call Beth Beskin, Jay Powell, and Wendell Willard to tell them thank you. They had stood with Chick-Fil-A, Hobby Lobby, and people of faith. They fought off attempts to gut the religious liberty legislation in Georgia.
After you had taken the time to call them, Beth Beskin, Jay Powell, and Wendell Willard stabbed you in the back.
A week before we remember the anniversary of Judas selling out our Lord for 30 pieces of silver, Beth Beskin, Jay Powell, and Wendell Willard have sold out people of faith.
The very amendments they stopped that would have gutted the religious liberty bill, they put back in yesterday. They saved RFRA in a subcommittee only to kill it in full committee. And they did it after you had thanked them for sparing the legislation.
This is a serious betrayal. They stabbed you in the back as you were thanking them for defending your faith.
Whoa, Erick, remember you’re supposed to be the fearful, persecuted victim here, not a raging vengeful homophobe. Start tossing around references to Judas and you might find yourself tempted to lead one of those medieval-style Good Friday pogroms if you are not careful (as the AJC pointed out this morning, the prime mover in “gutting” the bill, Mark Jacobs, is Jewish).
What the incident makes clear, of course, is that the whole point of “religious liberty” legislation is to sanction discrimination. These people fully intend to discriminate, and demand the right to do so, because they’ve convinced themselves (by conflating traditional secular culture with Christianity, and then finding a few lifted-out-of-context references in Scripture that seem to back it up) that God wants them to discriminate against gay people as unclean. They want their own tidy little Jim Crow zone of discrimination where they benefit from the laws and policies they approve of but are allowed to disregard the others.
But as Erickson demonstrates, the really hard thing for them is to reconcile the appropriate appearance of Christ-like suffering at their terrible victimization with the fury they clearly feel at losing control of the political and legal system, if only for a moment.
One other reason the Freedom to Discriminate coalition is angry is that it is being “betrayed” not just by RINO legislators, but by the business community, which in Georgia and elsewhere, doesn’t want to sacrifice convention business in order to let people defy anti-discrimination laws.
These in Erick’s analogy are the equivalents to the Jewish priests who paid off Judas to turn over Christ to Roman soldiers in the Garden of Gethsemane. But the conspiracy apparently is even wider: Erickson points to Gov. Nathan Deal–a hard-core Christian Right pol–for allegedly being on the brink of appointing the chief betrayer of the faithful, Mark Jacobs, to a judgeship.
Having repeatedly appropriated to himself the right to determine who is and is not a “Christian,” ol’ Erick clearly needs to do some more purging of the Republican ranks to make the GOP safe for people who want to appropriate the right to determine which laws to obey.
By: Ed Kilgore, Contributing Writer, Political Animal Blog, The Washington Monthly, March 27, 2015
“Scott Walker; W. Without The Compassion”: With Walker, Conservative Evangelicals Don’t Much Feel The Need For Compassion
While it’s becoming common to hear Scott Walker dismissed as a flash-in-the-pan or Flavor of the Month or Not-Ready-For-Prime-Time gaffmeister sure to be pushed aside to make way for Jeb’s Brinks truck of cash or Rubio’s glamor, there are less-apparent aspects of his appeal worth noting. That intrepid translator of the Christian Right’s codes, Sarah Posner, has a fascinating take at Religion Dispatches about Walker perfectly matching a growing mood among politically active conservative evangelicals who want a less showy but more reliable champion:
Should he run for president, Walker may very well turn out to be the 2016 cycle’s evangelical favorite—not because he ticks off a laundry list of culture war talking points, pledges fealty to a “Christian nation,” or because he’s made a show of praying publicly to curry political favor. Although by no means universal, some conservative evangelicals—those who eschew the fever swamps of talk radio, yet share the same political stances of the religious right—are weary of the old style of campaigning. They’re turned off by the culture war red meat, the dutiful but insincere orations of piety….
In an op-ed in the Wall Street Journal last month, Russell Moore, president of the Southern Baptist Convention’s Ethics and Religious Liberty Commission, wrote that in 2016 evangelicals won’t be looking to candidates to “know the words to hymns,” “repeat cliches about appointing Supreme Court justices who will ‘interpret the law, not make the law,’” or to use “‘God and country’ talk borrowed from a 1980s-era television evangelist.”
Moore “has a good feel of the pulse of evangelicals” and “represents a wide segment” of them, said Tobin Grant, a political scientist at Southern Illinois University and blogger on religion and politics for Religion News Service. Unlike his predecessor, Richard Land, known for inflaming the culture wars, Moore’s “focus is more on religious and social concerns than directly political ones” and has “less interest in changing DC and more interest in keeping DC out of the way of the church,” Grant said.
These evangelicals are listening for a candidate who can signal he is “one of us” without pandering. Both evangelical and Catholic candidates who have earned the culture warrior label for their strident pronouncements—Ted Cruz, Rick Santorum, or Mike Huckabee—are seen as embarrassing embodiments of stereotypes these conservative Christians would like to shed….
Walker hits the right evangelical notes without overplaying his hand—and that’s exactly the way they want him to keep it. John Mark Reynolds, professor of philosophy and provost at Houston Baptist University, said that Walker “would do well to do nothing to appeal to us. We get it. He’s one of us. He sounds like one of us. He leans forward like one of us. He answers questions like one of us.”
Now this isn’t to say the new strain among conservative Christians involves any changes in their positions on culture-war issues, or a tolerance for different opinions: it’s a matter of tone and emphasis–and of trust.
You may recall how effective George W. Bush was in dropping little indicators of his evangelical piety (even though, technically, he attended a mainline Protestant church), like a secret handshake, when he showed up on the campaign trail in the 2000 cycle: Bible quotes, allusions to hymns, and evangelical catch-phrases were modestly arrayed in his rhetoric–not abrasively, but just enough that believers saw it, and as with Walker, knew he was “one of us.” Bush, of course, also grounded much of his “compassionate conservative” agenda in church work and religious sentiment. It seems that with Walker conservative evangelicals don’t much feel the need for compassion, which is a good thing, since it’s not one of his more obvious traits. No, they want something else:
Instead of talking about opposition to marriage equality, evangelical activists say, religious freedom has become the new defining mantra. Unlike marriage equality, on which white evangelicals, particularly Millennials, are divided, religious freedom unifies them like no other issue but abortion.
“What will matter to evangelicals,” Moore wrote in his Wall Street Journal op-ed, “is how the candidate, if elected president, will articulate and defend religious-liberty rights.”
The religious liberty issue is, for evangelicals, a “four-alarm fire,” said Denny Burk, Professor of Biblical Studies at Boyce College, part of the Southern Baptist Theological Seminary in Louisville, Kentucky. He said evangelicals expect the candidates “to have the courage of their convictions to persuade people about what’s going on.”
From the Hobby Lobby litigation to cases involving florists, bakers, and photographers refusing to provide services for same-sex ceremonies, the issue has been percolating in the evangelical community for years. In recent weeks, conservative Christians have talked and written prolifically about Barronelle Stutzman, a Washington state florist found liable under the state’s anti-discrimination laws for refusing to provide flowers for a long-time gay customer’s wedding, and Kelvin Cochran, the Atlanta fire chief fired after revelations about anti-gay comments he wrote in a book.
It requires a great deal of paranoia and passive-aggressive claims of “persecution,” of course, to take isolated collisions between anti-discrimination laws and religious principles into a major threat to the immensely privileged position of Christians in the United States. But it seems Christian Right leaders are up to the task, and here, too, Walker, with his quiet but insistent talk about death threats from the enemies he’s made in Wisconsin, fills the bill.
Speaking in 2012 to a teleconference with activists from Ralph Reed’s Faith and Freedom Coalition, Walker said his faith has enabled him to rise above the “vitriol, and the constant, ongoing hatred” during the recall election he faced in the wake of his anti-union legislation, which has crippled the state’s once-iconic labor movement. Along with the unmistakable contrast of his church-going family with the profane and progressive activists, Walker cited two Bible verses. He didn’t recite them, but for anyone who knows their Bible—as Walker, the son of a Baptist pastor, does—the meaning was clear. The verses that helped him withstand the hatred were Romans 16:20 (“The God of peace will soon crush Satan under your feet. The grace of our Lord Jesus be with you”) and Isaiah 54:17 (“no weapon forged against you will prevail, and you will refute every tongue that accuses you.”)
Don’t know about you, but I’d interpret those two verses as consolatory promises of Christian vengeance, not turn-the-other-cheeck pacifism. And so it may be Walker is giving exactly the right impression of representing stolid but not showy vindicator who’s in for a long fight with secular socialists and their union allies.
By: Ed Kilgore, Contributing Writer, Political Animal Blog, The Washington Monthly, March 13, 2015
“The Real Mainstay Of The Future Roberts Court”: Samuel Alito, More Than Just A Face In The Conservative Crowd
In an important piece today that’s worth reading and remembering, the New York Times‘ Linda Greenhouse profiles Samuel Alito–beginning his tenth year on the Supreme Court–as the true conservative titan of the U.S. Supreme Court, more so than the unreliable Roberts and Kennedy, the erratic Scalia or the eccentric Thomas.
[T]o the political right, and to a degree that has escaped general attention, Sam Alito is much more than just a face in the conservative crowd. He’s something special. He is a rock star — and not only for his headline appearances at gatherings of the conservative Federalist Society. He is the redemption of the promise that failed a quarter-century ago, when John H. Sununu, chief of staff to President George H.W. Bush, assured worried conservatives that the president had selected a hole-in-one Supreme Court nominee: David H. Souter.
Greenhouse does well to remind us of the Souter nomination, a grievous “stab in the back” to conservatives for which the Bush family has been doing penance ever since.
In the November issue of the religious journal First Things, Prof. Michael Stokes Paulsen, describing Justice Alito as the “man of the hour,” accurately labeled him “the most consistent, solid, successful conservative on the court,” adding: “There are louder talkers, flashier stylists, wittier wits, more-poisonous pens, but no one with a more level and solid swing than Justice Samuel Alito….”
He delivers: not only in the big cases, like Hobby Lobby last June, in which he wrote the majority opinion upholding the right of a corporation’s religious owners to an exemption from the federal mandate to include contraception coverage in their employee health plan, but also in less visible moves that don’t get much public attention but that speak powerfully to the base.
It sounds discordant to suggest that a Supreme Court justice has a base, but Sam Alito has one. One of several recent hagiographic articles in the right-wing press was one in the American Spectator back in May, describing Samuel Alito as “one of the noblest men in American public life today.”
Greenhouse goes on at some length to document Alito’s ideological consistency, and also his strategic savvy, particularly in signaling which kind of cases might offer the conservative bloc on the Court to undo some key progressive precedents. Indeed, the more you read about Alito, the more you can see him becoming the fulcrum of a future Roberts Court that’s been supplemented by another conservative appointment or two from a Republican president. He’s only 64, a relative youngster in the SCOTUS context. So he’s biding his time until the Court has been turned crucially in his direction. It’s all a bit chilling.
By: Ed Kilgore, Contributing Writer, Political Animal Blog, The Washington Monthly, January 9, 2015
“Magically Becoming Irish”: If Corporations Are People, Shouldn’t They Have To Expatriate Like People?
It’s a common complaint among American expatriates: no matter how far away you go, you can’t escape Uncle Sam’s taxes.
But that’s not the case with American corporations that move their putative “headquarters” overseas, as President Obama noted the other day:
In his toughest comments yet on the subject, he accused big US corporations of trying to play “the system” by “magically becoming Irish” through so-called tax inversion deals.
“I don’t care if it’s legal, it’s wrong,” Mr Obama said. “It sticks you for the tab to make up for what they’re stashing offshore.”
There has been a raft of such deals in recent months which have seen big American companies become “Irish” for tax purposes through buying smaller firms registered here. The same trend is happening in the UK and Switzerland. Fears America is losing out on taxes have made the deals controversial.
It’s understandable if businesses have a different tax code that subjects them to different rules to a certain extent, though shady tax dodging is still an enormous moral and financial problem.
But the issue starts to become even more open and shut once we start claiming that corporations are people. If a corporation has “free speech rights” to buy elections, then it should be subject to American taxes even if it “moves” overseas just like actual American people are. If a corporation like Hobby Lobby has personal “religious rights” not to cover its employees’ contraception, then it’s enough of a person to pay expatriate taxes if it decides to move to Ireland.
It has to be one or the other. You can’t become a person when it’s convenient to your bottom line, but not when it isn’t.
By: David Atkins, Washington Monthly Political Animals, July 26, 2014
“A Revolutionary Committee”: Time For Some Candor From The Supreme Court
In most of the cases it decides, the Supreme Court is what it presents itself as: a court of law. The justices apply preexisting rules and standards set forth, for example, in the Constitution and statutes passed by Congress, to a dizzying array of human and institutional behaviors.
But in many highly contested cases, especially those involving the definition of broad-based rights, the Supreme Court is only slightly more a court of law than the House of Representatives or the Senate. Here the justices are often covertly and ashamedly quasi-legislative, actually deciding what sort of a society they wish to call into being, designating winners and losers on the basis what they want or hope will be best.
A powerful mythology keeps the Supreme Court and its constituencies from acknowledging this. Sore losers often claim they have been cheated by life-tenured federal judges, but such complaints are promptly forgotten because today’s angry critic is tomorrow’s triumphant victor, suddenly extolling the fairness of the justices.
Judges, lawyers and the interested public usually end up colluding in promoting the idea that when the Supreme Court decides that corporations have the same speech rights as natural persons, or that there need not be a recount in a contested presidential election, or that sodomy cannot be a crime, or that racial segregation in education is not only abhorrent but a violation of the Constitution, the rule of law, not the rule of men, is in operation.
The core notion we cling to is basic civics. Though chosen democratically, the justices are not elected. The information they receive and their legitimacy are rightly circumscribed, the former by laws that surround the way decisions are reached, and the latter by their unaccountability. It is feared that if the Supreme Court talked about what serious observers concede, that many major rulings are a result of value choices made in a legal context rather than on strict application of a legal rule or precedent, the ensuing contradictions would undermine the public’s acceptance of its decisions.
Justice Sonia Sotomayer came as close as justices of the Supreme Court ever do to crossing this line when she pointed out the glaring inconsistency between the court’s assurances in the Hobby Lobby contraception case and a decision granting Wheaton College an injunction four days later. Despite becoming instantly famous, her blunt language — “Those who are bound by our decisions usually believe they can take us at our word. Not so today.” — stops far short of what an elected politician might say in a similar situation.
Deeply embedded in the discourse that follows decisions in epochal cases is talk about the way the Supreme Court’s reasoning connects to its conclusions and the practical consequences of the ruling. All can condemn or praise the work of the Supreme Court, but only entrenched partisans are likely to claim that the decision is purely political.
What Supreme Court majorities never admit is that the past is so contingent, and the choices made by other governmental actors so unclear, that nothing is left for the Supreme Court to do but what it thinks best under the circumstances. The thought is that it would be institutionally damaging to admit that the justices just choose the reasonable and wise course, in effect conceding that they truly act as a “revolutionary committee,” as A.A. Berle once memorably put it. Given such an admission, would the next voice say, “Why not leave these choices to the elected?”
But maintaining the myth is costly. Because both unhappy losers and Supreme Court analysts know that all too often the threads of the law said to dispose of a case really stand only as a thin cover of justification (rather as an honest search for solution), the result is large-scale cynicism. Law students learn early in their first year the difference between the language of opinions and what really cuts the mustard. Practicing lawyers know well the difference between rhetoric and reality.
This gap between actual and masked reasons for a decision muddies the waters and inhibits healthy debate. And it is unnecessary. Perhaps there was a time when, in order to respect the law, the public had to believe that it was found somewhere outside our judges, a “brooding omnipresence,” as it was called, but no longer. Given the massive exposure in the media to what passes for law making, people today are not quite so naïve.
More importantly, we need the justices to do more of what they do well. A deliberative process responsive to objective evidence and narrowed to real controversies is a paramount governmental function. There is probably no better way to meet the need to manage the existential controversies of a complex society than a judicial process that presents the true bases of decisions. What is no longer sustainable is the illusion that in these major cases the justices are merely the mouthpiece for decisions made by Congress or settled long ago by James Madison and his colleagues.
By: Michael Meltsner, Matthews Distinguished Professor of Law at Northeastern University School of Law; The Hoffington Post Blog, July 25, 2014
Share This Blog
Unknown Feed- An error has occurred; the feed is probably down. Try again later.
mykeystrokes.com 