Tag Archives: presidential election

Benefit of clergy

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Whether or not the recent unanimous decision of the Supreme Court in Hosanna-Tabor Evangelical Lutheran Church and School v. Equal Employment Opportunity Commission was just (I do not think it was), it’s clear that Cheryl Perich was not fired for religious reasons or indeed for any secularly legitimate reason.1 Her firing would have been illegal had it been carried out by a secular organization. Shortly after the verdict was announced, The New York Times spoke out against it in a fairly sharp editorial. After reviewing the facts of the case and the court’s reasoning, the Times argued as follows:

The court’s conception of the ministerial role is more encompassing than it has been defined by state and federal appellate courts. Its sweeping deference to churches does not serve them or society wisely.

Recent legal decisions have so enlarged the scope of clerical benefit where it can be argued to pertain to religious establishjments and not to individuals as to constitute an establishment of religion (or so it seems to me) in clear violation of both the spirit and the letter of the first amendment. We’re now seeing this establishment flex its new muscles in ongoing disputes regarding the availability of health insurance coverage for contraception and abortion under the new federal health care law, in which Catholics and Evangelicals seem to be forming a political alliance that is going so far as to claim that its opposition to contraceptive coverage is based upon respect for the individual conscience and to demand a broad conscientious exemption that would include “employers with religious people running them or other people of conviction who are running them.”

If we follow the reasoning of the Supreme Court and the allied Bishops and Evangelicals we are not permitted to judge the morality of their position on the basis of it’s social consequences or it’s consequences to individuals who will be denied access to legal redress and necessary health protective services. This is a position that I believe can only be maintained by trivialization of the persons affected and the importance of the health care issues involved, more or less on the order of Foster Friess’s comments about birth control this past week; or as Melissa Moschella writes in the National Review Online:

Forcing employers or insurers to fund an activity that they believe to be gravely wrong is a denial of individual conscience rights. Is free access to contraceptives an equally fundamental moral right to be protected even at the cost of others’ conscience rights? Is it a prerequisite for a free and ordered society? Anyone inclined to say yes should consider the following question: Would it be worth risking one’s life or livelihood, emigrating to an unknown land, or fighting a revolution to secure all-expenses-paid access to contraceptive services? Only for those who have made sexual expression their religion.

It is in the nature of the sort of casuistry being used by the “religious” with respect to this issue to set up and attack straw persons and to pretend that wolves are sheep. The Catholic bishops’ design to impose Catholic teaching upon Catholics and non-Catholics alike is patently obvious.2 It is laughable for Timothy Dolan to present himself and his fellow princes of the church as victims of presidential overreach. Indeed, according to a recent article in the National Catholic Reporter,

Perhaps Obama saw, as many of us do, the bishops’ actions as an attempt to legislate beliefs that they cannot get their own people to obey. . . . The sad truth is, if the numbers of Catholics leaving the church are any indication, most Catholics in the United States probably see the hierarchy more as victimizers than victimized.

Here’s some more casuistry. I’ve just received an email from Senator Roy Blunt in answer to a call I made last week to Senator McCaskill’s office urging her to oppose Blunt’s amendment to a transportation bill that would have attempted to repeal the contraception mandate. It reads in part:

In August 2011, the Administration announced its decision to mandate that all insurance companies and employers cover contraception and sterilizations with no copay. This unprecedented decision is an affront to the deeply held convictions of millions of Americans, which is why I introduced legislation to repeal the mandate. . . . The government should not force doctors to perform procedures or employers to provide coverage for services they view as immoral any more than the government should force treatments on Americans. The federal government has no business in a doctor’s examining room and the Administration’s actions have put our nation’s deep commitment to religious freedom in jeopardy.

But the controversy isn’t about anybody’s conscience.3 It’s about power, or more precisely it’s about the ability of the Catholic hierarchy and allied Evangelical groups to to command the power of the state to manage the lives and welfare of those millions of Americans Mr. Blunt pretends to represent. And of course Mr. Blunt and the Republicans don’t want to keep the government out of doctors’ examing rooms in states requiring that women seeking abortions undergo ultrasound examination. In Texas and Oklahoma the government requires doctors to force women to view the procedure, and in some other states the government forces doctors to perform invasive vaginal ultrasound examinations when that is required in order to perform the procedure during the first trimester of pregnancy.

Catholic and other religious organizations receive huge infusions of public monies from federal, state, and local sources, and for these purposes claim to be secular institutions, as I have pointed out in a previous post. One would think that such institutions would not then be able to claim (or be so mendacious as to claim) benefit of clergy. But consistency and common sense don’t matter in contests like this one. And now the legislature of my enlightened state is taking up the issue. As Planned Parenthood reports today:

SB749 sponsored by Senator John Lamping of St. Louis and HCR 41 from Representative Paul Curtman of Pacific seek to undo the new federal rule and allow any employer to deny birth control coverage to their employees simply because they have a “moral” objection to birth control.

Of course, using public money to fund access to contraception has been part of federal law since 1970, when the idea was introduced by a Representative from Texas, George Herbert Walker Bush.4 The enabling legislation passed the house by a majority of 298 to 32 and passed the Senate unanimously. It was signed into law by Richard Nixon. But the religious right aren’t going after Nixon or Bush the first. Their target is the current president.

More later—

Notes

1Reviews of the case may be found here and here.
2As is the fact that Catholic teaching forbids most forms of contraception. In a related matter, Reed Abelson reports in today’s New York Times that Catholic hospitals are expanding by buying other hospitals and changing their character. See “Catholic Hospitals Expand, Religious Strings Attached.” In both cases the church’s practice is not persuasive but coercive.
3Ellis West, a constitutional scholar, has reviewed the issue of conscientious objection in the Richmond Times-Dispatch. Among many enlightened things he writes is this: “At the time of the ratification of the Constitution, both its proponents and opponents agreed that the national government should have no jurisdiction over religion, i.e., should pass no laws dealing primarily or directly with religious beliefs and practices, and the religion clauses were added to the Constitution to make that clear. No one suggested then that they were also intended to prevent laws that the government could pass from being applied to persons or groups who did not want to obey them for reasons of conscience.” See “Catholic claims stretch the first amendment.”
4See Ann Gerhart’s piece in yesterday’s Washington Post, “Birth control as election issue? Why?“

Metaphysical politics

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The Podium, The Pulpit, and the Republicans:
How Presidential Candidates Use Religious Language in American Political Debate

by Frederick R. Stecker

229 pp., Praeger, $44.99

An old friend has written an astute book about political language. He is Frederick R. Stecker, an Episcopal Priest, retired from the parish ministry and now an adjunct professor at Colby Sawyer College in New London, New Hampshire. Fr. Stecker also holds a doctorate from the Institute for the Study of Violence of the Boston Graduate School of Psychoanalysis. For his dissertation, as he explains in his introduction, he “studied the heavily rehearsed language of the presidential debates of 2000 and 2004,” from a perspective informed by George Lakoff’s work on political language in Moral Politics (1996) and by other work in the literature relating to ways we humans process fear and rage, form world views, develop identity and group identification, etc.1 The present book appears to have expanded and enlarged the work of the dissertation to include, among other things, an analysis of the language of the 2008 presidential campaign.

Fr. Stecker’s book is both incisive and informed. It avoids the clichés of contemporary media discourse while speaking directly to the categories that enframe those clichés. Here’s an example from chapter five:

[George W.] Bush first rocked the political world when he was asked in a debate, prior to the 1999 Iowa caucus, about his favorite philosopher. Bush responded, “Jesus, because he changed my heart.” The Des Moines Register reported that Governor Bush had misunderstood the question to be “Who’s had the most influence on your life?” However it was heard, Governor Bush changed the direction of the political discourse from that moment on. Orrin Hatch, who followed Bush, noted Abraham Lincoln as his favorite philosopher, but then added, “I bear witness to Christ, too.” Then Gary Bauer chimed in and echoed Bush’s testimony. John McCain was the only one of the six candidates who did not reference God that night; there were, in all, 20 such references by the other five. What started out as a misunderstood question resonated with the citizens of Iowa that polled 40 percent of caucus participants to be evangelical or “born again.” It set the tone for all that followed.

Particularly cogent in displaying how certain religious tropes resonate with various groups of voters, Fr. Stecker’s documentation is impressive, presented informally in the text. Like Lakoff, Fr. Stecker could be charged with speaking as a liberal, but that doesn’t trouble me; and I think the quantitative evidence in this qualitative study is forceful.

That’s not what I want to talk about, however. Fr. Stecker traces the rise of the religious right in post-1960s American politics in his second and third chapters and links that history both with the economic interests it serves and with its growth as a counter-culture. Central to his primary argument in the chapters that follow is an analysis of how George W. Bush and Richard Cheney (perhaps under the tutelage of Karl Rove) combined use of religious language identifying themselves with the supposed certainties of “faith” and skillful manipulation of the fear of terrorism to foster and maintain a siege mentality in the public mind during the years following 9/11 until support for the Iraq war began to erode.

A chief finding of Fr. Stecker’s research is that these rhetorical gestures and the gestures they provoked from Democratic candidates were successful for Republicans in 2000 and 2004 and validate Lakoff’s “nation as family” metaphors; but a further finding is that Barack Obama was able to turn the Republicans’ rhetoric against them and reclaim both the language of faith and the language of patriotism for his own campaign and best “the Republicans at their own game” in 2008. It is this latter finding for which I am particularly grateful.

Back in 2008 my beloved and I met a young couple from Oklahoma and their small children as we were all standing in line at the Edward Jones Dome to be admitted to an Obama rally. Even on a cold winter evening the crowd was huge, but we gained admission easily and had a pleasant time talking as we waited. I wrote about that conversation here. As the years have gone by and I have watched the Obama presidency develop, It has come more and more to seem to me that the president should be judged not on foreign policy, though I have much to say about that, and not on his performance with respect to the economic meltdown he inherited, but rather in relation to the hopes and dreams of young people like the couple we met at that long ago rally. They had driven all the way from southwestern Oklahoma to hear candidate Obama speak. They are part of that generation of Americans who do not expect the social safety net to be there for them but who remain hopeful that their children will inherit the American dream.

I have been severely critical of President Obama. I have been and am still a conscientious objector to his apparent willingness to keep the prison at Guantanamo Bay open, to his apparent willingness to sanction suspension of the right of habeas corpus, and to his apparent validation of Bush era policies that subjected enemy combatants (so called) to torture in spite of his claims to the contrary. But I have also been distressed that President Obama has apparently been unable, or unwilling, until very recently to pursue economic policies that fostered the hopes of Americans like me who believe that government policy has for thirty years favored the interests of a wealthy minority to the detriment of the great majority of Americans. My distress reached its apogee (or nadir) last summer with the President’s capitulation to a vicious Republican minority in the matter of the debt ceiling.

We live in a time of political ambiguity brought about by decades of irreconcilable disputes, as Fr. Stecker notes. Republicans have successfully demanded attention to these disputes as the price of attention to all other matters. In addition, Republicans have preempted the public sphere with absolutist religious and moral claims. The idea that morality is dependent upon religion is an absurdity. Even more absurd is the spectacle of political alliances between religious groups who do not expect to meet one another in heaven. Still, there’s a hard truth in all of this. These groups share a commitment to what Isaiah Berlin termed metaphysical politics.

Berlin begins his famous 1958 essay on two kinds of liberty with the observation that “Where ends are agreed, the only questions left are those of means, and these are not political but technical, that is to say, capable of being settled by experts or machines, like arguments between engineers or doctors.” Berlin characterizes this outlook as Utopian, but it might just as readily be called ideological.2 Berlin’s ideas were formed in the shadow of the Nazi terror that he and his family had escaped. It seemed self-evident that “fanatically held social and political doctrines” were as dangerous as the technologies of death they engendered in Germany and Eastern Europe during much of the twentieth century.

But what Berlin calls the metaphysical view of politics seems protean in human affairs. It has renewed itself in American politics since 1980 and seems to be renewing itself in European politics as well.3 Indeed, future historians may characterize our time as a time of resurgent fundamentalism worldwide—though we need a better term; contemporary French sumptuary laws forbidding the wearing of the veil by Islamic women, for instance, reflect a reified secularism that is metaphysical in Berlin’s sense but not precisely fundamentalist even in the broad sense in which we presently use the term.

I was a strong supporter of President Obama in 2008. I did not think him a superhero, but I saw his candidacy and election to office as ratification of the pluralist society we have built in this country since the time of my childhood. Like Berlin I believe “that human goals are many, not all of them commensurable, and in perpetual rivalry with one another.” I believe that we humans “choose between ultimate values; . . . because [our] life and thought are determined by fundamental moral categories and concepts that are . . . over large stretches of time and space, and whatever their ultimate origins, a part of [our] being and thought and sense of [our] own identity; part of what makes [us] human.” I believe that pluralism in politics and the willingness to proceed ad hoc are positive goods because over time these values seem to generate more liberty for more of us humans than does devotion to some dream of future perfection or past excellence or adherence to some system of practice believed to be rooted in the natural order or authorized by divine command.

I don’t mean to imply that I think Fr. Stecker shares these views. His purpose in writing seems to have been modest. At the outset of his last chapter, he makes this claim:

Since 9/11, it has become imperative to monitor our own responses to political pronouncements. We must be able to pause and reflect on our reactions as well as to examine the information we’ve been given. I use the pew to sort out issues. It provides a transitional space for me to help grasp what’s important-authority, not power.

Then after a recapitulation of his book’s major themes he says further:

As I write this, America now focuses on vitriol in politics. The attempt to assassinate Representative Gabrielle Giffords (D-AZ) brings the focus on linguistics to new heights; it is time that we stop finding unity solely in sorrow. By mid-2011, we will begin to see candidates testing the waters (and our credibility) once more. Keep an ear to the use of religious language and to the nuanced use of fear. I’ll be willing to bet that both will continue to resurface; it is a lightning rod that touches our emotions; it works every time, unless we become aware.

After some reflection I remain at least provisionally convinced that President Obama’s tenure in office affirms the ideals of human flourishing4 that I believe represent my country at its best. But that best is always open to critique, subject to correction, contingent, and historical. I am being persuaded by writers like Andrew Sullivan, James Falows, and now Frederick Stecker, that I should reevaluate my reaction to the president’s first term. I’m grateful to these persuasive writers; and though I agree with Fallows that the president will likely be regarded a failure if he does not win reelection, I begin to be hopeful about that eventuality. Frederick Stecker’s book lends credence to the view, more and more expressed these days, that President Obama is capable of deflecting the rhetorical weapons that will be used against him and turning them to his advantage as a candidate, that he takes a long view of the times and the tasks he has set for himself as president, and that he has always intended to serve two full terms.

Notes

1Fr. Stecker’s book is cross-disciplinary, citing work in psychology, pychiatry, history, rhetorical criticism, and other disciplines.
2I am thinking of Mannheim here, especially.
3See Tony Judt, Ill Fares the Land (2010) and here.
4I have the term from Martha Nussbaum.

Changing course (but not the horse)

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I’ve been away from these pages for a good while. Part of my reason for starting this blog was a desire to write about politics, but it’s been hard for me in recent months to overcome a combination of chagrin and despondency over my guy’s performance in office. He’s still my guy, but I have to change course. I think maybe I’ve understood a way to do so.

From now on and for the foreseeable future I’m clicking the unsubscribe link on the fundraising emails I receive from the Democrats. I’ve made a couple of modest contributions since the President’s jobs speech to the Congress on September 8, and I’m done. The President and the Democrats aren’t doing their job. I’ve watched this president ratify and extend the Bush police state, abandon the real economic interest of middle-class folk like me, and advance the process by which we Americans are destroying our common life, our institutions, our schools and colleges, our urban infrastructures, in the name of economics; and I’m done. The President and the Democrats have my vote only because the alternative is unthinkable.

As the late Tony Judt wrote shortly before his death, “We no longer ask of a judicial ruling or a legislative act: is it good? Is it fair? Is it just? Is it right? Will it help bring about a better world? Those used to be the political questions, even if they invited no easy answers.”1 To be sure the President paid lip service to the social and the ethical in the jobs speech; but I very much fear it was lip service only. Moreover, he will not easily undo his capitulation last August to Republican blackmail; the activities of the congressional Supercommittee will soon dominate cable news, and its deliberations (as well as its deliberate leaks) can only further the evisceration of our public life.

Make no mistake, Republicans, and that includes the Tea Party, don’t really want limited government. And in spite of the retrograde fulminations of Republican pundits like George Will (who, in a recent Washington Post piece, accused Elizabeth Warren of dealing in straw men and then went on to create a straw man of his own), economic individualism is the only sort of individualism Republicans like, and they don’t like even that more than they like what one might term “corporate individualism,” which the Supreme Court has now ratified.

What the modern Republican ideology represents, and what it has always represented, is an attempt to use the coercive power of the state to protect, enhance, and enlarge huge concentrations of wealth in the hands of multinational corporations and a few private individuals; and to ensure that these same persons and entities are never held accountable foir their sins. The idea that Republicans, as Will and others have claimed, believe in individual autonomy and self-government for the generality of humans is simply laughable.

If I were younger and had fewer hostages to fortune I’d join the crowds protesting Wall Street in New York’s Zuccotti Park (and now at Washington Square, as well). The New York Times and other mainstream media, including PBS and NPR, have finally begun to cover the protest. It seems to be gathering force—labor unions have joined in it—but it is still a young grassroots enterprise seeking a program and a vision. Most of the coverage has been light hearted after the fashion of Gail Collins’ column in today’s New York Times. But Paul Krugman takes it seriously, and so do I.

As I write, the Obama administration’s own entanglements in crony capitalism are being underscored by the Solyndra and Keystone XL Pipeline scandals and the President’s own party’s (my party’s) willingness to serve the very monied interests the President is presently attacking Republicans for supporting. Indeed, President Obama may already have given an answer to a challenge Shelby Steele delivered at the end of a little book written in anticipation of the 2008 presidential election: that then candidate Obama needed to let Americans know what things “he would risk his life for.”2

If I were the President, I think I’d find some new economic advisers at the very least. I don’t think Timothy Geithner can be fired in today’s political situation; the Republicans would only vote to confirm somebody worse. But it would be a good idea for the President to listen to somebody with a fresh approach—maybe somebody other than Gene Sperling

—and if I were Barack Obama, the candidate, I think I’d head for Zucotti Park.

Notes
1See Ill Fares the Land, Penguin (New York, 2010), 1.
2See A Bound Man, Free Press (New York, 2008), 134.

gumbobama – oui on peut!

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I looked for a new, small Bush countdown widget this morning and was amazed at the number I turned up in a Google search. They come in all sizes for all operating systems. Here’s one from Credo Action. I wonder if it will self destruct on January 20.

And somehow I missed this video during the presidential campaign. Thanks to Liberal Revolt for the reference. It’s a good reminder that my guy is trying to become the president of all of us, not just nerds like me.