“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
“Mike Pence Still Isn’t Telling The Truth”: Pence’s RFRA Is Not Clinton’s RFRA
Why Indiana?
With the backlash in full effect—with cancellations of gamer conventions, Wilco concerts, office expansions—even Indiana Governor Mike Pence backtracked today, saying that he will accept the kind of legislative “fix” that Republicans had earlier rejected, as Jackie Kucinich reports.
To hear Gov. Pence tell it, his state is being unfairly singled out. In fact, he protested today, his Religious Freedom Restoration Act (RFRA) is no different from the ones President Clinton and then-State-Senator Obama supported in the past. He reiterated that today in his press conference, saying it was no different than the federal bill the ACLU applauded “when President Clinton signed it in 1993.”
That is incorrect—and Gov. Pence knows it. Pence either doesn’t know the law—which is unlikely—or he is purposefully not telling the truth about it. And he kept up that lie today.
In fact, Indiana is different, for four specific reasons: Hobby Lobby, the interests supporting this bill, the bill’s focus on antidiscrimination, and the role of business.
1. Hobby Lobby
First and most importantly, Gov. Pence is being knowingly disingenuous when he compares Indiana’s RFRA to others. When Bill Clinton signed the federal RFRA in 1993, it passed Congress nearly unanimously. That’s because it was meant as a shield protecting minority religions from government interference. The typical cases were Native Americans using peyote, or churches seeking zoning variances—religious acts that didn’t really affect anyone else.
Hobby Lobby changed that. Last year, for the first time, the Supreme Court said RFRA was a sword, as well as a shield, enabling a corporation to deny insurance coverage to its employees. Social conservatives cheered.
Since Hobby Lobby, the only states that have passed RFRAs are Mississippi—not exactly a bastion of tolerance, commerce, and industry—and Indiana. Gov. Jan Brewer of Arizona, you may recall, vetoed her state’s RFRA after the NFL, among others, rebelled. Georgia and Oklahoma have shelved theirs, and Texas is likely to follow.
Pence’s RFRA is not Clinton’s RFRA. Hobby Lobby changed the game.
Now, does Gov. Pence know this? Of course he does. The law’s own supporters have used the same examples for years: the baker who shouldn’t have to bake a cake for a gay wedding, the photographer, the florist. To most of us, that looks like discrimination—putting a “No Gays Allowed” sign up on your storefront window.
And those are the best cases. RFRAs allow hospitals not to honor same-sex visitation rights, and doctors not to treat the children of lesbians. These are actual cases.
Is Pence just lying, then? Well, not quite, because of ….
2. The Right-Wing Echo Chamber
No matter how many times Gov. Pence says this isn’t about gays and isn’t about discrimination, the people standing behind him when he signed it are a who’s-who of anti-gay social conservatives. (This meme makes it pretty clear.)
Within that far-right echo chamber, RFRA really is about religious freedom. When I started working on this issue two years ago, I thought the “religious freedom” line was just rhetoric to disguise the culture war.
Since then, though, I’ve met and debated these people, and I’ve watched their propaganda. They appear to sincerely believe that Christians are being persecuted, and that LGBT people owe them an “olive branch” in the form of religious exemptions.
That echo chamber has been so well-funded, and is so insular, that it’s lost sight of the American mainstream, which sees discrimination as discrimination, even if there’s a religious reason for it. That’s left Republicans across the country exposed. Their base is telling them RFRAs are about religious freedom, and then they’re shocked when the mainstream sees it differently. Several have privately expressed a sense of betrayal.
The fact is, the echo chamber is far from the mainstream. And when RFRAs are out in the open, they’re failing. And the reason for that is—
3. Antidiscrimination
State RFRAs are a backlash to same-sex marriage—but, legally speaking, they’re not about marriage, but discrimination law. Should businesses—florists, pharmacies, hospitals, bakeries—be able to say “No Gays Allowed”? This is the question Gov. Pence refused to answer five times on Sunday morning.
And unlike marriage, it is not a close one, in terms of public opinion. Yes, public approval of same-sex marriage has risen sharply, to around 55% today. But public approval of anti-discrimination laws is much higher, around 75 percent.
This is why the focus on marriage (as in this thoughtful blog post at the Washington Post) is actually somewhat misleading. If this were really about marriage, it would be closer.
Now, will Gov. Pence’s “fix” be the one-sentence amendment that would bar its application in anti-discrimination contexts? The sentence is simple: “This chapter does not establish or eliminate a defense to a claim under any federal, state or local law protecting civil rights or preventing discrimination.” But we’ll see if it actually makes it into law.
If it doesn’t, RFRA will remain a loser in the court of public opinion. And also in the world of—
4. Business
As we also saw in Arizona, the corporate world has almost completely shifted on this issue. RFRAs are bad for business: they make states seem unwelcoming, turn away potential customers, risk costly boycotts, and make it harder to recruit the best employees. These aren’t ideological positions; they’re economic ones, supported by reams of data.
That’s why the Indiana, Texas, and Georgia Chambers of Commerce – dominated by pro-business Republicans have all opposed RFRAs. So have business-oriented Republicans in each of those states—including the mayor of Indianapolis. (Interestingly, Coca Cola, which has long touted itself as pro-LGBT, has remained conspicuously silent in Georgia.)
That realignment is a game changer. RFRAs aren’t being debated between Democrats and Republicans. They’re being debated between pro-business Republicans and social conservative Republicans.
Incidentally, because of GOP primary politics, that latter camp includes all of the party’s likely presidential candidates. We’ll see if the rightward pandering hurts them in the general election.
Indiana isn’t being singled out because of coincidence, or media spin, or just bad timing. Rather it’s because of a very mainstream, apple-pie value: because discrimination is not the American way.
By: Jay Michaelson, The Daily Beast, March 31, 2015
“Alabama’s Dangerous Defiance”: A Disturbing Line Of Thinking In The History Of American Federalism
On Tuesday the Supreme Court of Alabama prohibited the state’s probate judges from issuing marriage licenses to same-sex couples. This decision effectively throws down the gauntlet, challenging the federal courts to make earlier federal rulings stick — including last month’s refusal by the United States Supreme Court to stay a federal judge’s decision requiring the state to recognize same-sex marriages. It draws on a disturbing line of thinking in the history of American federalism, one that, were it to gain currency as a model, could compromise our entire system of law.
The court’s position is that under the Constitution, it does not have to follow the rulings of lower federal courts; in its ruling, it promises to “defer only to the holdings of the United States Supreme Court.” (That said, Chief Justice Roy Moore’s public statements have been more equivocal; he told a radio host in Birmingham, Ala., “It would be a very hard decision, because I know there’s nothing in the U.S. Constitution that authorizes the Supreme Court of the United States or any federal court anywhere to misinterpret the word marriage.”)
Such extreme states’ rights positions first appeared during an epic battle between the great chief justice John Marshall and Spencer Roane, a member of the Virginia Court of Appeals. The two were bitter political and ideological enemies in the early years of the republic, and Roane had long railed against the authority of the federal Supreme Court over state courts. He repeatedly declined to implement federal decisions with which he disagreed, and refused to recognize the authority of federal courts to review state court rulings. In the end, however, Marshall prevailed.
And yet extreme states’ rights have been asserted more often in political rhetoric than in judicial proceedings. Even in the period of Southern “massive resistance” to Brown v. Board of Education, the Supreme Court’s 1954 desegregation decision, state supreme courts did not try to interpose their own interpretations of the Equal Protection Clause or issue conflicting injunctions against state officials to block desegregation orders by lower federal courts (though some state legislatures did attempt to block Brown’s implementation).
Since the United States Supreme Court will rule on gay marriage in June, it’s easy to dismiss the Alabama court’s ruling as quixotic. But it raises a real issue: not what state courts can do, but rather what they should do. Because state and federal courts operate on entirely separate tracks, the state court’s position that it need not follow lower federal court rulings is technically correct. Yet if our judicial system is to function smoothly, both court systems must, from time to time, refrain from exercising their legal discretion to ignore the other’s handiwork.
The gay-marriage rulings bring this aspect of the state-federal relationship, called comity, into close focus. Alabama’s probate judges are subject to the jurisdiction of both state and federal courts. If both judicial systems exercise their authority concurrently and independently, issuing conflicting constitutional rulings, the probate judges are caught in a Catch-22. Respecting one court’s order necessarily will involve a failure to respect the other’s.
This isn’t just about state courts bowing to federal authority; federal courts have a number of “abstention” doctrines designed to respect the autonomy of state courts. The most famous, called Younger abstention, provides that federal courts should not intervene in pending state court criminal proceedings — even if a credible allegation of a federal constitutional violation exists.
In turn, state courts will often extend comity to the decisions of the local federal courts. Although state courts are not bound by lower federal court decisions, state officials are required to follow federal court orders (this distinction probably explains, at least in part, the willingness of state courts to voluntarily follow lower federal court precedents).
Gay marriage is exactly the sort of issue on which state courts should — and do — defer to lower federal courts. Five federal appellate courts have recently decided whether the Constitution requires a state government to recognize same-sex marriage: Four said yes; only the Sixth Circuit has held that they need not do so. The state courts and governments within these circuits have all acquiesced (Alabama is in the 11th Circuit, which has not ruled on the issue). In fact, Alabama’s State Supreme Court is the only one in the country to go to war with the local federal courts on the issue.
If State Supreme Courts followed the Alabama Supreme Court’s lead, a system of dual courts simply would not work. The United States Supreme Court, which hears only 80 to 90 cases per year, would not be able to disentangle the legal morass that would result if state courts routinely thumbed their noses at the decisions of their local lower federal courts.
Chief Justice Marshall observed, “If the legislatures of the several states may at will annul the judgments of the courts of the United States, and destroy the rights acquired under those judgments, the Constitution itself becomes a solemn mockery.” This holds just as true if state courts exercise an identical nullification power over federal court orders.
The Alabama Supreme Court’s action represents an unfortunate departure from the cooperative norm that must prevail between these independent judicial systems. Other state judiciaries would do well not to follow its example.
By: Ronald J. Krotoszynski, Jr, Law Professor at the University of Alabama; Op-Ed Contributor, The New York Times, March 6, 2015
“Showdown Between God And Government”: Roy Moore And The Divine Right Of Nullifiers
With Roy Moore in the national headlines again–this time for defying and urging state courts in Alabama to defy a federal court order–reinforced by the U.S. Supreme Court–to begin licensing same-sex marriages–it’s a good time to consult Sarah Posner, who has an important remembrance of a speech by the Ten Commandments Judge a few years ago. She helps explain why and how a lot of “constitutionalists” and “states rights advocates” like Moore have theocratic grounds for their supposedly law-based views.
That Friday night [in June 2011] in Severn [Maryland], Moore was speaking to a gathering of the Institute on the Constitution, a fringe educational group run by Maryland lawyer, former Constitution Party presidential candidate, and current member of the Anne Arundel County Council, Michael Peroutka. Back in 2010 and 2011, I made an irregular habit of attending the IOTC’s First Friday gatherings, at which there was typically an out-of-town celebrity speaker (Moore’s was particularly well-attended, with a few hundred people in the audience), covering topics near and dear to the IOTC’s unorthodox view of the Constitution. The Constitution, they claim, is a divine document designed only to protect the rights conferred by God, not to create “new” rights by way of jurisprudence. For all you law school graduates shaking your head as you read this, Peroutka, Moore, and their followers claim that the law schools are teaching it all wrong—that’s why they’ve created their own law schools….
In presenting Moore with a “Spirit of Daniel” award for courage, Peroutka gleefully noted that he was doing so on Jefferson Davis’s birthday. (The award was given because Moore “resisted a government that thought it was God.”)
That showdown between God and government is at the heart of Moore’s claims that he is on the side of righteousness and the federal courts on the side of an anti-God, unconstitutional “tyranny.” Moore believes there is a separation of church and state—but he believes it’s one that distinguishes America from royal monarchies. In other words, the government is separated from the church in that the government is barred from running the church, and it can’t tell the church what to do. Public schools, in his view, are “controlled by government,” and impose secularism; he favors tax credits for homeschooling because that’s “the right of the parent….”
Moore, who graduated from West Point and served in Vietnam, is fond of reiterating that he has sworn to uphold Constitution against enemies, both foreign and domestic. He readily agreed that America has been overtaken by enemies within. “Our government is infiltrated with communists, we’ve got Muslims coming in and taking over where we should be having the say about our principles.” And more: “I’m not so sure some in government don’t want to destroy our country.”
Sarah has more, but you get the drift. The scary thing is that Moore is not some isolated radio crank or even a state legislator, but the elected chief judicial officer of an entire state. He’s a useful study because he’s a little less crafty than most “constitutional conservatives” in speaking in code when he talks about the connection between religion and the law. For him, the divine law fundamentalists derive from the Hebrew scriptures was incorporated into the U.S. Constitution by the Founders and by definition cannot be legitimately modified by human hands, regardless of the instruments for doing just that made available in the Constitution itself. And so the presumed right of state nullfication of federal laws and court decisions is rooted not just in a pre-Civil War idea of federalism, but in an aggressively reactionary notion of religion and its implications for secular law.
While Moore’s bizarre and dangerous world view is plain for all who go to the trouble of looking for it to see, it has some pretty respectable fellow travelers. The Paul family’s close connection with the Constitution Party is a good example; indeed, in 2008, that party’s affiliate in Montana placed Ron Paul at the top of its ticket with Michael Peroutka as his running-mate (Paul protested this action, but apparently only to protect the status of national Constitution Party presidential candidate Chuck Baldwin, whom he ultimately endorsed over Republican John McCain and Libertarian Bob Barr).
So Roy Moore may be as crazy as he sounds, but he’s not as exotic a bird as you might think.
By: Ed Kilgore, Contributing Writer, Political Animal,The Washington Monthly, February 11, 2015
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