Helen H. Moore's Blog, page 737
June 26, 2016
Claws for concern: Hillary Clinton is conveniently vague when it comes to animal rights
Democratic presidential candidate Hillary Clinton waits to speak at a get out the vote event at La Gala in Bowling Green, Ky., Monday, May 16, 2016. (AP Photo/Andrew Harnik) (Credit: AP/Andrew Harnik/photo_master2000 via Shutterstock/Photo montage by Salon)
Hillary Clinton’s campaign has wisely caught on to an evolving voter dynamic by crafting a position paper outlining her support for protecting animals. But is she for animal rights or for animal welfare?
In addition to being good policy, courting the animal protection vote is good politics. Americans’ concerns about humane treatment of animals is stronger than ever before.
If this trend continues – and there is no reason to expect that it will not – the issue will likely play an even larger role in future elections.
Evidence of society’s rapidly evolving focus on animal protection abounds. In March, SeaWorld announced that it will stop breeding orcas and will phase out its orca shows, which are its signature attraction. Last month Ringling Brothers put on what it called its last elephant show ever. Last year McDonald’s joined Burger King, General Mills, Sara Lee and several other corporations that have announced they will only use cage-free eggs in their food products. In 2014 South Dakota became the 50th state to upgrade animal cruelty to a potential felony. Only 20 years earlier, all but a few states had only misdemeanor penalties for animal cruelty.
A 2015 Gallup poll addressing animal rights may be even more compelling. According to the poll, almost one in three Americans – 32 percent – now believe that “animals deserve the exact same rights as humans to be free from harm and exploitation.” In an identical poll Gallup conducted in 2008 only 25 percent of respondents expressed this view.
Clinton’s position paper does not go this far. It provides a vaguely worded list of mainstream animal welfare concerns such as “strengthening regulation of ‘puppy mills’” and “encouraging farms to raise animals humanely.”
The most interesting aspect of Clinton’s position paper is its description of the candidate as having “a strong record of standing up for animal rights.” “Animal rights” is a loaded term, and even animal rights supporters cannot agree as to what it means. Some animal rights advocates interpret the term loosely, and view animals as already having some rights because laws exist to protect them.
But other animal rights supporters assert that animals presently do not have rights, because our legal system views animals as property and does not allow them to be represented in judicial proceedings. Highly publicized lawsuits are underway in New York seeking to change this for chimpanzees by demanding that they be considered “legal persons” for purposes of protecting their “bodily liberty” and their “bodily integrity.”
Advocates of animal protection who believe that granting animals legal rights would be treating them too much like humans, with potentially harmful societal implications, often describe themselves as “animal welfare” supporters. Perhaps Ms. Clinton decided to describe herself as an animal rights supporter rather than as an animal welfare supporter because most Americans have not thought much about what the concept of animal rights actually means, and because everyone likes rights.
As an “animal rights” supporter who has only articulated support for protections that fit within an animal welfare paradigm, maybe Clinton can have her cake and eat it too. To the majority of Americans who would probably not support granting legal personhood to animals, her animal rights language may be interpreted as simply caring for animals. But to the substantial and growing minority of Americans who express support for a more extreme interpretation of animal rights, Clinton’s use of the term may provide hope that she could be open to their views.
Another Gallup poll suggests that politicians can probably get away with vague platitudes about animal rights such as those provided by Ms. Clinton. In 2012 Gallup reported that only 5 percent of Americans identify themselves as vegetarians. Thus, approximately five out of six of the 32 percent of Americans who say they believe that animals should have “the exact same rights as humans to be free of harm and exploitation” eat those animals. Either these people believe that eating humans is also acceptable or they have some fuzzy thinking regarding what supporting animal rights equal to human rights means. I suspect it is the latter.
Donald Trump has not yet issued a position paper regarding animals. However, if he does not articulate a platform position on animals before the November election, he may make history as the last presidential candidate from a major political party not to do so. Four years from now the public’s concern for animal protection will be even more pronounced, although what animal rights means to politicians may not be any less opaque.
June 25, 2016
Invite my kid to your wedding: Trust me — you’ll regret it if you don’t
(Credit: Eugene Partyzan via Shutterstock)
Wedding season is upon us and, bless you, you’ve decided that—despite all evidence to the contrary—yours is the love that’s going to last. The date is picked, your universalist friend conscripted, the vast redistribution of wealth begun. But as the realities of cost-per-plate caterers make you reassess if you really need to invite your mom’s friend’s boyfriend, one piece of advice: do what you gotta do to invite anyone you actually care about’s kids.
I know, I know—you can’t invite everybody. Weddings are expensive! And, really: kids? Yuck! I get it, because kids are pain in the ass: they’re noisy, and needy, and yell at inopportune times, or worse, and are massive attention hogs on a day that, reasonably, you want the attention to be on you. Kids are, to be blunt, horrible.
But guess what? I love that horrible, whiny, stinky little bugger nearly more than I can say, and soon you’ll understand just how big a pain/expensive it is to leave him at home. And I’m telling you now, because I also love you: five years from now, when this union of yours has borne fruit, you’ll thank me. Here’s why:
First: If it’s true that “you can’t understand until you have one” the world is doomed—the future of humanity depends on people understanding what other people are feeling: it’s called empathy, and it’s what words are for. So: the love one has for their kid is like the love you have for yourself plus the love you have for your soon-to-be betrothed plus the love you have for this thing all added up and then times infinity; and if you despise yourself a little too, as I do myself, then it’s even more like that. Not inviting my kid is like not inviting my nose just because I have a nasty head cold and might sneeze right as you say “I do.”
Second: When the meltdown occurs—which it won’t! But it might. But it won’t!—when that meltdown, or mistimed exclamation, or loud question during a quiet moment occurs, guess what: everybody’s going to laugh. They’re going to chuckle lovingly, and those chuckles will be knowing, they will be “there but for the grace of” type-chuckles. They will not be annoyed, horrified, or shocked. The wedding will not be ruined. The only person who will mind is you—and me.
Third: And I will mind, but also I’m aware of what I’m asking you, and promise to remove said child at the first ill-timed peep. Also, let’s be honest: other guests are going to be way bigger gluten-free pains–in–the–ass.
Fourth, Fifth, Sixth: But are you aware of the benefits of having a bunch of kids at your wedding? They include, but are not limited to:
An immediately packed dance floor: my kid can, like, light it up. We’re talking total free abandon, and the infectious kind that’ll get the party started—they will literally pull people onto the floor with their hands. The kids at your wedding are going to give everyone else permission to have exactly the kind of good time you want them to have;
The best photos in your wedding album: you already kind of know this, but the wedding pictures with the kids in them, all dressed up in their adorable wedding clothes: they’ll be irresistible;
Drunk insurance: far worse than a toddler-meltdown is what happens to kid-free parents with access to an open bar. The mess you’ll have on your hands (and possibly dress) will include relationship fallout that will take years to repair.
Look, god knows I’m always searching for ways to escape my kid—but you’re not doing me a favor. Because regardless of the fact that my après-bébé tolerance for booze has gotten lower than a first year sorority pledge’s, 6:30am—baby wake-up time—is still going to happen no matter what, followed quickly by the 8 am parents-and-tots swim class that was, fml, the only one available and where I’m going to have to get in that icy pool with her. And it’s going to hurt. Whereas if she’s at the wedding I’m going to have to take her home sometime within a couple of hours of her bedtime, somewhat sober, and am going to feel 1000 times better in the morning, and will look back on your wedding with total non-post-vomit adoration.
Not to mention this “favor” is going to cost me $120 (plus tip!) the minute I leave the house—a.k.a. way more than you’re going to spend for her wee-meal. As you’ll soon discover, parents devote like the first ¼ of every hour of every workday earning the money to pay for someone to watch their kid so they can work the other ¾ hour to pay for that kid’s worthless college degree. I’m not saying I don’t love you enough to then pay again on Saturday to go to your wedding—if things are going well, I would love to, of course. But give me the option. Let me take a look at my bank account and decide.
(And just fyi: pretty sure one of Dante’s circles is reserved for people who demanded destination weddings sans kids. Asking me to travel without my kid is essentially inviting me just to be polite, because it’s almost impossible to actually make happen and will essentially ruin me, financially.)
I know this will cost you, and I’m sorry. I’m sorry that my child eats, but also: her meal is a drop in the bucket compared to what you’re spending on flowers that will be dead before you get to Puerto Vallarta. Invite all the kids and skip the chocolate fountain, or the omelet station, or the monogrammed bubbles. I assure you: not a soul is going to remember the burlap table runners, but the parents who can bring their kids will remember how important their family is to you, and they’ll feel so grateful and indebted they’ll probably double down on the his-and-hers croque pans on your registry (which you will also never use), and just thinking about it will make them choke up a little with love for you from here on out.
I, too, was once young and hopeful and in love—before the slow dawning realization that true love really just means picking sweetie’s socks off the floor ad infinitum. I got married, had a wedding, and only invited the kids I absolutely had to. And I just really regret being so self-centered and selfish and forcing my friends-with-kids to shell out the dough for a babysitter; or split up for that night so one could booze up with a handsome groomsman while the other stayed home and mainlined 30 for 30s and their precious baby slept in the other room; or contemplated the air-fare for family plus au pair to Calistoga and wept at the poor life choices that have led to such a pitiful discretionary income. I should have been more thoughtful, more caring, more giving. I wish, in short, I had been my future better self.
And five years from now you will understand this exactly. You will be in exactly this position, if your marriage is what you think it is, if you’re lucky, make the baby, do the work, keep it together. And you’ll regret then the decision to exclude the children of your loved ones, just as you will rue the fact that your own most-beloveds have been excluded from the weddings of your best friends. You’ll wonder why you didn’t get it—why you couldn’t have been more generous, more broad-minded, more…loving.
Or, you could be your future better self right now. You could invite my kid. And then—then!— then your wedding will be the best wedding ever: the most memorable, greatest, most fantastic. Because I will be there with you, we all will, just so full of gratitude for you and your inclusiveness, and because your generosity of spirit will be felt throughout the room, because your wedding will be the kindest, the loveliest, the most caring—in essence, your wedding will win the day by celebrating exactly those things weddings are supposed to be celebrating: community, family, friendships, love.
Adversity Builds Character: World-renowned Harlem-based artist shares insight
Franklin Gaskin, better known as “Franco the Great,” is internationally known for his paintings on storefront metal gates across 125th Street in Harlem, USA. The major thoroughfare is even unofficially titled “Franco’s Blvd.”
However, Franco comes from extremely humble beginnings with a troubling start. When Franco was very young he suffered a severe head injury that left him unable to articulate properly, and as a result, he was treated like an outcast by his family and peers. Franco found solace in art and through patience and dedication was able to find his voice. From painting in Panama for $1.50 a week to relocating to NYC in the 50’s to traveling all over the world, his art has opened up countless doors. “I always feel that the world owes me nothing but opportunity,” he said. “All I needed was the opportunity to show what I could do.”
Franco shares a snippet of his story with us along with some life advice.
The Democrats could learn from the NRA: A sit-in on the House floor is vain absent a passionate voter base
A photo tweeted from the House by Elizabeth Esty shows Democratic members staging a sit-in "to demand action on common sense gun legislation," June 22, 2016. (Credit: Twitter/Elizabeth Esty)
Your elected representatives have done their bit. Now it’s up to their constituents.
Ten days after the gun massacre that left 49 dead and scores more injured at an Orlando nightclub, House Democrats this week combined 1960s tactics with 21st-century technology to force gun control legislation to a vote.
Led by Rep. John Lewis, the 76-year-old Georgia Democrat who rose to national prominence in the civil-rights movement, lawmakers engaged in what might be called “parliamentary disobedience,” disrupting business as usual on the House floor. And when the C-SPAN cameras were turned off because the House officially had gone out of session, members took to Periscope and Facebook Live — video-streaming services — to let the public know what they were doing. To its everlasting credit, C-SPAN took the feed.
It was an extraordinary moment: Insiders became outsiders, declaring that the system they’re part of is broken. And they were visibly enjoying it. “Don’t you feel like a little kid?” one congressman asked his colleagues in about the sixth hour of the sit-in. It was the same kind of euphoria and solidarity that civil-rights marchers have described feeling.
Like those civil-rights demonstrators who deliberately broke Jim Crow laws, the Democrats are defying House rules in the service of what they consider true justice: Polls show that an overwhelming majority of Americans favor tighter restrictions on gun sales. Yet Republicans, who control both the House and Senate, have refused to allow the bills on the floor. Why? They don’t want to expose their members to a vote that might prove unpopular in November, and they don’t want to alienate the gun lobby, a source of considerable campaign funding.
As we reported earlier this week, the National Rifle Association already has ponied up more than $2 million to help maintain the Republican Senate majority. The NRA also has donated $30,000 to the National Republican Congressional Committee. And, as House Speaker Paul Ryan undoubtedly knows, there’s more where that came from: The NRA has reported having $14.7 million in cash on hand.
Money talks. But not necessarily as loudly as voters. As John Morse, the former president of the Colorado state Senate and a victim of the gun lobby, has told us, the power of the NRA is not just its money but its members’ “passion.” He described gun-rights activists surrounding his state capitol when gun legislation was on the floor, inundating lawmakers’ offices with calls and emails, and most importantly, showing up at the polls. In the recall election the gun lobby engineered after Morse shepherded gun-control laws into enactment three years ago, 80 percent of registered voters in the district did not show up. But gun owners did and Morse lost by 315 votes.
Like the civil-rights protesters of the 1960s, the advocates for gun control and an end to gun violence are hoping to ignite some passion in what has heretofore been a relatively silent majority of Americans who agree with them. Will it work? Members are headed back to their districts for a long July 4 recess. The ball is in the home court.
The stars aligned for Seth Meyers: “That was more dumb luck than anything else”
Seth Meyers (Credit: Reuters/Gus Ruelas)
When it started, “Late Night with Seth Meyers” had a bit of trouble standing out from the rest of the late-night pack. But Meyers, a mostly amiable host who became well-known doing Weekend Update for “Saturday Night Live,” has lately emerged one of the most important political voices on television. Recently he has drawn attention for tackling subjects like the disastrous Kansas tax cuts, the Orlando shooting, the lawsuits over Trump University, and the candidate’s revoking of the Washington Post’s press credentials. (Meyers banned Trump from the show.) He’s not, of course, the only person on TV talking about these issues, but he approaches them with the right balance – both forceful and bemused — that’s hard to attain.
With Jon Stewart gone from “The Daily Show,” the inconsistent political seriousness of his replacement Trevor Noah, and a presidential campaign becoming ever more unpredictable and troubling, Meyers has become gutsy and direct at just the right time.
We spoke to Meyers from New York City about the way he sees himself, his show, and his mission. The interview has been lightly edited for clarity.
You’ve been doing political humor all the way back to “SNL,” but it seems like recently these bits are getting more substantial, more pointed, and are being talked about more. I wonder if that’s just because the election is getting close, or if things are just so whacked out that the temperature is coming up everywhere?
I think everybody’s comedy compass sort of started pointing a little bit more towards this election as we realized what kind of election it was going to be, but it also kind of timed out with the evolution of our show. It wasn’t planned that way, but it was nice that as we were making the decision to go back to a format that was a little bit more reminiscent of Weekend Update it was also right around the same time that people were paying attention to the election. So that was more dumb luck than anything else on our part.
What about the weirdness of the election? We’ve lived through a bunch of elections, but this one seems to be stranger and wilder and more unhinged than usual. What does that do to the way a comedian responds to it?
Well, the only thing I’ll say is that 2008, working at “SNL,” that seemed to be weirder and more unhinged. Ross Perot certainly seemed weird and unhinged. So I do worry sometimes that we always think the present is as crazy as things can ever possibly get, and the reality is it’ll probably adjust to saner for years and then shoot back up to super-crazy eight years from now. With that said, sometimes we worry that we’re talking about the same things every day, but elections are important and this one certainly is providing a lot of things to talk about.
What has the departure of Jon Stewart done to the field? Does that change what somebody in your chair does?
I don’t think his departure changed anything we did. I think the fact that Jon did a show in the first place probably influenced a lot of what the shows are doing now, so I think it was more his presence that influenced us than his absence.
How did he change things? Did he make a certain kind of moral intensity or commitment possible?
I just think that when you look at where comedy was before Jon and before Stephen [Colbert], there was a lot less point of view. I think that makes it a really exciting time to do the kind of show that we’re doing, because there was an era not that long ago where I think people, to some degree, hid that and tried to keep the audience guessing. It’s a lot more fun to write and it’s a lot more fun to perform when your point of view is on display, so I think we sort of owe a debt to them because of that.
How high does the bar seem to be these days for political comedy in late night? How much do you pay attention to what the other hosts are doing?
I think we all have a high bar because we’re aware that we’re not the only people who are doing it any given night. With that said, I only kind of catch my colleagues in this field in snippets, and what I catch is always really impressive to me. It’s not like I go home and I’ve loaded up the DVR with everybody else’s shows, but the morning after you can always find people’s best work online, and everybody’s best work is pretty impressive these days.
Do you have a favorite of the other hosts? Or someone you consider a friendly rival of sorts?
The nice thing about this field is there aren’t that many of us that have these jobs, so it’s always nice to run into anyone. I know John Oliver fairly well, and every time he comes by the show it’s just fascinating to talk about the process and what it’s like to do these and how tired we are. Sam Bee came on right before her show started, but I’d be a lot more interested to talk to her now about how it’s all going, because I know that I did a lot of talking about my show before it started and I wonder if it turned out to be everything she thought it was gonna be, or what surprised her and whatnot. It is a friendly field right now, and I kind of am in awe of everything everybody else is doing.
Is there a trick to keeping political humor from being so serious that it’s not funny anymore? In a lot of cases you’re talking about dead-serious subjects: violence, handguns, wars. How do you keep the tone right when you do this stuff?
Well I think there are days where… After Orlando, we sort of made the decision, “Hey, let’s not worry about laughs per minute today.” With that said, that’s not the goal on most days. So there’s no real trick other than, “So we’re gonna explain this to people, and now if everybody could please pitch in for a joke that will finish the thought.” I feel like as long as you do that, you don’t drift into a place that I think none of us really want to be, which is too serious for comedy.
How much of the writing do you handle or oversee or change?
Certainly the main thing I realized [about] the difference of being on a writing staff like I was at “SNL” and having a writing staff like now, is you just get to choose the kind of writers that are going to be able to do things in a voice that you’re comfortable with. We have great writers who focus on things like “A Closer Look,” but those are always something where the morning of that show I’ll always go through those again and try to put it a little bit more in my voice and add jokes and whatnot.
But I think the most important thing you realize when you actually have to host these shows every day, and especially because we do them every day, there’s not a lot of time to sort of roll up your sleeves like there was at “SNL.” You could always pull an all-nighter or stay until it’s done, and here it’s a little bit more like a newspaper when you’re turning it out on a deadline. So I’m sort of learning to write faster, and even more importantly I’m learning to write when the sun’s out, because I didn’t used to do that that much.
We’ve seen Perot and various kinds of eccentricity in the past, but does Donald Trump seem to be the most despicable or the funniest candidate of your lifetime?
There was that Frank Rich piece in New York Magazine talking about how for a lot of people who are older than we are, Ronald Reagan was sort of this, you couldn’t believe it was happening. But I think for people our age, it’s so strange to have someone we were so familiar with for another thing become this thing that we thought what he had done up to this point would have disqualified himself. Again, I’m always a little wary to talk about Donald Trump in that I’ve been wrong about how this would go at every single turn. So I’m no expert and I don’t really know how it’s gonna end. I feel like he says so many things that it’s nice that you can make jokes about what he’s talking about, because what he’s talking about is actually very serious. I wouldn’t want to talk about him without being funny, but it’s nice that he provides that for us.
Is there anything troubling about him or does he seem mostly amusing?
Oh no, I think it’s very troubling. There are certain demographics in this country — their lives have been negatively affected by the kind of campaign he’s running, and that’s very serious and sadly will probably endure past whatever outcome this election has. So that part of his message is really troubling, and there’s a lot of things he’s talking about that I think are very real concerns for Americans, and I think he has every right to talk about them. I just think one of the great shames has been his decision to appeal to those outer fringes, because there are so many decent Republican voters who agree with sort of 80 percent of what he agrees with. Our job is to draw attention to that outer 20 percent. I don’t think he’s representative of what a lot of the people who are registered Republicans stand for.
This whole race has been fun and frightening, but it still has five months left. Do you look forward to having the damn thing over finally?
We have a couple weeks off coming up and I’m really looking forward to that. I don’t want it to be fully over yet, but I do kind of need a break. Sometimes we question, “Hey, are we piling on here?” But at the same time, it’s not like he’s taking a day off, so if he checked out… maybe when he goes to Scotland we’ll give him a break. [Laughs] So I’m actually happy to be in a place where I can read some beach fiction as opposed to hanging on his every word.
Muhammad Ali’s real legacy: From fanaticism to tolerance
Muhammad Ali (Credit: AP/Charles Harrity)
Last December, when Donald Trump proposed banning Muslims from entering the United States, he drew a verbal left hook from the greatest boxer of all time. “We as Muslims have to stand up to those who use Islam to advance their own personal agenda,” Muhammad Ali declared.
Ali didn’t name names, but everyone understood that he was talking about Trump. His remark was endlessly recycled after Ali died earlier this month, because it fit snugly into a good-versus-evil media narrative. In this corner, The Donald: crude, vindictive, and bigoted. In the other corner, The Greatest: kind, forgiving, and tolerant.
Ali’s statement also blasted the “ruthless violence” of “so-called Islamic jihadists,” which got trotted out again after the Orlando shootings. It reminded all of us that “true Muslims”–as Ali called them–abhor the kind of bigotry and fanaticism displayed by Omar Mateen, who murdered 49 people in a gay nightclub.
But that missed the most important story of Ali’s life, which was his own transformation into a man of peace. The youthful Ali was himself a chronic bigot and fanatic, rigidly attached to a corrupt religious leader. Ali moved beyond that, reminding us that human beings — of every faith and background–can redeem themselves from ignorance and prejudice.
If you think Ali wasn’t a bigot, Google his 1971 interview with British journalist Michael Parkinson. Ali railed against interracial marriage, which he likened to mating across species. “God made us different,” Ali insisted. “Listen, bluebirds fly with bluebirds.” Four years later, in an interview with Playboy, Ali suggested that interracial couples should be killed.
And if you think Ali wasn’t a fanatic, read the recent book about Malcolm X and Ali by Randy Roberts and Johnny Smith. Malcolm and Ali were fast friends, praying together in the dressing room before Ali defeated Sonny Liston to win his first heavyweight crown in 1964. When Malcolm broke with Nation of Islam founder Elijah Muhammad, however, Ali read Malcolm out of his life. “Muhammad taught Malcolm X everything he knows,” Ali told reporters. “So I couldn’t go with the child, I go with the daddy.”
That meant going with everything, which is precisely what a fanatic does. Turning a blind eye to Muhammad’s very un-Islamic adultery, including the fathering of children with several of his secretaries, Ali insisted that Elijah remained “The Messenger” of God. And Ali followed Muhammad’s orders to stay away from Malcolm, refusing to speak with him during their chance encounter in Ghana in May of 1964.
“Brother Muhammad! Brother Muhammad!” Malcolm called, as Ali walked away. Malcolm kept pursuing him until Ali finally stopped. “You left the Honorable Elijah Muhammad,” Ali said, glaring. “That was the wrong thing to do, Brother Malcolm.”
We still don’t know if Elijah Muhammad gave an explicit order to kill Malcolm X. But he certainly spread the word that Malcolm should die for his apostasy. And Muhammad Ali seemed to be fine with that, too. After Nation of Islam gunmen murdered Malcolm in 1965, Ali stood on a stage with minister Louis X—later known as Louis Farrakhan—and applauded, as Elijah Muhammad told a cheering audience that Malcolm was a “hypocrite” who got what he deserved.
To his credit, though, Ali changed. Like Malcolm X, he eventually renounced Elijah’s racial separatism and his crude idea that white people were, literally, devils. “The devil is in the mind and heart, not the skin,” Ali concluded. “We Muslims hate injustice and evil, but we don’t have time to hate people.”
Ali also came to regret how his mindless devotion to Elijah had poisoned his relationship with Malcolm. “I wish I’d been able to tell Malcolm I was sorry, that he was right about so many things,” Ali said. “If I could go back and do it over again, I would never have turned my back on him.”
So Ali’s story isn’t just one about the peaceful essence of Islam, which is mostly what we heard about after he died. It’s also a story of personal redemption from hateful versions of it. To be sure, Ali’s youthful bigotry didn’t carry the violent, apocalyptic edge of today’s Islamic jihadists.. But they clearly had elements in common: a rigid adherence to a charismatic leader, a deep intolerance of other peoples and faiths, and a fanatical certitude that God was always on their side.
“I am a Muslim, and there is nothing Islamic about killing innocent people in Paris, San Bernardino, or anywhere in the world,” Muhammad Ali declared, back in December. “These misguided murderers have perverted people’s views on what Islam really is.” Ali once subscribed to a perverted version of Islam, too, but he found the grace and the strength to overcome it. Our greatest challenge is to help today’s misguided Muslims do the same.
Litchfield’s devastating loss: Why this shocking “Orange Is the New Black” death was the right choice
"Orange Is the New Black" (Credit: Netflix/K C Bailey)
Warning: Spoilers ahead for a major plot point late in season 4 of “Orange Is the New Black.”
Coincidental prescience repeatedly occurs throughout television, particularly on series informed by current events. Sometimes these serendipitous bridges between art and life highlight a level of deep insight in a show’s writer’s room; sometimes, the fact that real-life events happen to play out in fictionalized form on TV simply speaks to the natural progression of our times.
In any event, it’s amazing to think that three days after the fourth season of “Orange Is the New Black” kicked off, the Supreme Court delivered its decision in Utah v. Strieff, making it legal to detain a person without cause and then, should that person have an outstanding warrant and be found with incriminating evidence, allowing the results of that search to be admissible in court.
Erosive to the Fourth Amendment, the ruling sets a worrisome precedent that impacts every free citizen and stands to disproportionately target minorities and the poor. Meanwhile on “Orange Is the New Black,” “stop and frisk” — the very practice at the center of Utah v. Strieff — plays a central role in the new order at Litchfield. At these allegedly random stops, the white girls can keep on walking, contraband and all, while the black and Hispanic inmates must line up and submit themselves to intrusive pawing by the guards, the newest of which are ex-military and view the women as adversaries.
Series creator Jenji Kohan and “Orange’s” writers conceptualized these plotlines months ago, and certainly couldn’t have known that using “stop and frisk” as a story device would fly in the face of what the majority opinion stated, that there’s no indication that the case examined in Utah v. Strieff was part of “any systemic or recurrent police misconduct.”
No aspect of life in Litchfield occurs in a vacuum, and this is doubly true in the current season. Written with the specific goal of exploring privilege and social justice movements such as Black Lives Matter, there’s no way “Orange” could believably do that without showing how law enforcement inordinately targets minorities.
But there’s prescience in TV writers’ rooms, and there’s just unfortunate timing. In the case of the fourth season’s big death, “Orange Is the New Black’s” creative staff obviously had no idea that in building toward that climactic horror, they were walking into another protest movement inspired by a terrible TV trope, Bury Your Gays, that reared its head too many times during the 2015-2016 season.
(In case you breezed by the spoiler warning at the top of this piece, the piece addresses a major one from this point on. If you’re still reading and haven’t finished the current season of “Orange Is the New Black,” stop now or forever hold your peace.)
In committing to bringing Black Lives Matter into our hands and homes, “Orange Is the New Black” was obligated to show us the reasons said movement exists. Given that the ignition of that movement were the deaths of African Americans at the hands of law enforcement, including Eric Garner, Sandra Bland and Michael Brown, that meant someone with whom fans had a deep emotional connection, had to die.
Turns out the bell tolled for Poussey (Samira Wiley), one of the show’s most lovable, life-affirming characters and a lesbian who was out and proud. Poussey joins the shockingly long list of gay females who died during this season of television. According to a widely circulated piece published on Vox.com, it is estimated that LGBTQ women account for some 10 percent of this season’s TV character deaths.
Autostraddle.com maintains a growing tally of lesbian and bisexual characters TV deaths, and also indicates how each character died. Poussey’s passing has already been logged, without explicitly naming her at press time.
Her death has inspired an outcry on Twitter and its own hashtag, #PousseyDeservedBetter, and though Wiley herself has addressed the character’s death and the reasons for it in several publications, (her girlfriend, Lauren Morelli, wrote the episode, which was directed by “Mad Men’s” Matthew Weiner) that’s still not enough to placate some viewers.
Poussey was not killed off by a stray bullet, didn’t die by suicide, or take a crossbow bolt through the eye. But the nature of her death, and the fact that she was the one who died, makes her exit from the show different from other deaths. In fact, unpopular though this idea may be, I’d even go so far as to call it as good a TV death as one could be.
By good, I don’t mean that what happened to Poussey is fair or that she deserved it. But if “Orange Is the New Black” had to give its movement a martyr, Poussey was the obvious choice. Not only was she a clear fan favorite, she also was some version of a so-called “model minority”; she defied uninformed assumptions about what type of women end up in prison.
Kohan reportedly chose Poussey not only because she was beloved but, according to Morelli, because her character had a shot at a good future on the outside of prison. This is one of the cardinal rules of writing tragedy: go for the pain, and make the audience feel it. Poussey was just a good girl who got lost, and died in the crush of injustice.
Poussey was highly educated and worldly, the child of an Army officer and a mother who held a master’s degree and who could barely stomach taking an aspirin. She was also around 90 pounds, and had been the victim of violence in a past season, when “Crazy Eyes” (Uzo Aduba) beat her up on orders from season two’s main antagonist, Vee (Lorraine Toussaint). In a show initially built around a character referred to as a Trojan Horse, Poussey was the real secret weapon.
All of which is to say, Poussey in no way posed a threat to anyone, least of all the guard who crushed the breath out of her, Baxter Bayley (Alan Aisenberg). The tragedy occurred when the new captain, Desi Piscatella (Brad William Henke) attempted to break up a peaceful protest, organized in the spur of the moment to demand his resignation. Piscatella responded by ordering his team to physically remove the inmates from the cafeteria, which sparked a panic attack in Crazy Eyes.
When a guard starts to manhandle her, Poussey steps in, trying to defuse the situation and calm her friend down, leading Bayley to toss Poussey to the ground and put his knee on her back to keep her down. In the ensuing frenzy, Crazy Eyes attacks Bayley, who is so focused on fending her off that he fails to notice Poussey is suffocating under his weight.
The pity of this situation is that both the perpetrator and the victim are among Litchfield’s most vulnerable. There are many cruel men among the prison’s guards. Bayley, a wide-eyed, easily manipulated youngster, was not one of them.
When the representatives of the prison’s new management, MCC, swoop in to do damage control, the first thing they do is attempt to vilify the victim. But nothing in Poussey’s file or public profile jibes with the story they want to tell, which would paint her as a violent aggressor. So they pivot to make Bayley into the scapegoat. The entire time that this was happening, Poussey’s body remained on the cafeteria floor, right where she fell, for hours – echoing what happened to Brown in Ferguson, MO.
Capping off that indignity, Caputo (Nick Sandow) makes an honest, heartfelt attempt to explain what happened in a media statement, without permanently staining Bayley’s reputation. But in doing so, he neglected to mention Poussey by name, angering her friends and setting off a prison riot.
Grief for the loss of a favorite TV character can feel especially bitter when said character’s death amounts to a cheap exit. But Poussey’s was no flimsy departure. In fact, it’s one the most powerfully depicted demises of recent TV seasons.
Following the cadence of true mourning, the fourth season finale gave us a glimpse of one the best nights of Poussey’s life in flashback — a transcendent New York City evening when she got separated from her friends. This time, when she got lost, she stumbled on a magical warehouse party filled with love, kisses, dancing and sharing, later hitching a ride with a friendly group of bicycling monks, who weren’t actually monks. In our final glimpse of her she smiles brightly, the city skyline sparkling at her back, a world of possibility reflected in her eyes.
Before the chaos that took Poussey’s life breaks out, Piscatella reminds an inmate that prison wasn’t built on humanity. But sometimes it takes the death of someone we love, in the service of a cause worth fighting for, to remind us of ours.
Lessons of Britquake 2016: A history-shaping crisis, and a moment of danger and opportunity
Nigel Farage, David Cameron (Credit: AP/Frank Augstein/Reuters/Gareth Fuller)
In the early hours of Friday morning, as we watched those images of ashen-faced young Londoners absorbing what had just happened to their country, one question leaped to mind: Was the (supposedly) shocking result of the Brexit referendum, in which the British public voted to withdraw from the European Union, a preview of things to come? Will people be standing around at election-night parties in Brooklyn and Austin and Minneapolis on a cool evening in November, wearing those same hollow-eyed, holy-crap expressions as President-elect Donald Trump celebrates victory and wondering whether the “Canada option” was more than just a gag?
I don’t know, and don’t claim to know. But conventional wisdom and complacency seem misplaced at this historical moment, don’t you think? Everything we think we know about political science and public opinion and Electoral College voodoo suggests that it will be almost impossible for Trump to win the 2016 election. But can we please take a moment to laugh about all the stuff we thought we knew? And can we underline that “almost” in Day-Glo orange, and print it across the landscape in huge letters of “Game of Thrones” dragon-fire?
What we are seeing right now across the Western world goes beyond political aberration, beyond WTF Brexit and WTF Trump. It cannot and must not be boiled down to analyses like “those people are stupid and racist.” I’ve heard way too much of that in the first 48 hours since the Brexit vote. It’s insulting and simplistic and just plain wrong. Some people are stupid and racist on both sides of the Atlantic, for sure. Anti-immigration sentiment and anxiety over Islam played a major role in the Brexit campaign, and form the centerpiece of Trump’s appeal. But if there is a moment for the educated trans-Atlantic elite to refrain from condescension and stereotyping, this would goddamn well be it.
British election returns suggest that numerous working-class regions of England dominated by the Labor Party, at least outside the major cities, voted to leave the E.U. by significant margins. I would guesstimate that 20 percent or more of the “Leave” vote came from the left, approximately speaking. Although both Labor and the governing Conservative Party officially supported the “Remain” cause, below the surface both parties were deeply split. That was more obvious on the Tory side, but Labor leader Jeremy Corbyn is a former Euroskeptic who was decidedly lukewarm on Brexit, and declined to campaign alongside Prime Minister David Cameron. (Given that the Brexit result has apparently forced Cameron out of office, that looks like a shrewd choice.)
To the extent that Donald Trump has an electoral strategy, it relies on carving up the electorate across ideological lines, Brexit-style. His only conceivable path to victory in November requires swaying large numbers of working-class or middle-class white Democrats and independents in purple states that Barack Obama carried, from Ohio and Wisconsin to Colorado and Nevada. It shouldn’t work and probably won’t, but Trump’s entire presidential campaign has been about surfing an unexpected wave of populist outcomes to improbable destinations.
To gain any perspective on what just happened in Britain and how it will affect America, we need to move beyond politics, and especially beyond the myopic politics of right now. Of course I don’t want to see Trump elected president, but in the very near future bigger questions will be at stake. Britquake 2016 offers further evidence that we are experiencing a widespread and unexpected cultural shift that transcends canned political analysis, and whose long-term ramifications are unknowable. We are witnessing the implosion of the postwar cultural and economic order that has dominated the Euro-American zone for more than six decades. Closing our eyes and hoping that it will go away is not likely to prove successful.
Elite arrogance and overconfidence may not lie at the root of this cultural shift, but they haven’t helped. Virtually everything that we expected to happen in 2016 — and by “we” I mean the supposedly educated and supposedly intelligent people like me, and quite likely like you, who pride ourselves on understanding the world — has gone crazy-town sideways. Virtually everything we said was impossible has, well, happened. It’s been fun, in a way, to watch the media caste donning sackcloth and ashes and recanting the dozens of articles we all wrote about how Trump could never possibly be the Republican nominee, let alone the president. Now the fun’s over and we’ve entered the anti-fun zone.
Hillary Clinton and her supporters can take absolutely nothing for granted. This election won’t be fun and won’t be easy. A historic tide of anti-elite, anti-Establishment rebellion is sweeping across the Western cultural and political sphere, and no one has any idea how high it will get. Clinton may well win this election, but the unavoidable fact that she stands on the wrong side of that cultural gulf nearly cost her the Democratic nomination (against a hilariously unlikely opponent) and is a major liability in the fall campaign as well. Next time you see Trump on TV and tell yourself, “Oh no, that couldn’t possibly happen,” remember that’s what the girl in the horror movie says right before the guy with a chainsaw appears over her left shoulder as the audience screams.
Furthermore, and more important, the politics of fear and negativity and retreat and compromise that has driven the Democratic Party for 30-odd years, and the Hillary Clinton campaign of 2016 in particular, has to stop. As in right now, if not yesterday. That approach is not merely whistling past the graveyard or inviting disaster. It’s more like strapping yourself into a suicide vest as you jump out the window. If Clinton cannot come up with a more inspiring campaign message than “You may not like me, but least I’m not that idiot!” she will conclude her political career by once again snatching defeat from the jaws of victory. That might be an unpalatable result in terms of life on Planet Earth, but it would possess a certain poetic justice.
There are a number of important lessons to be drawn from Britquake 2016, in my undoubtedly flawed overnight judgment. But that’s the first of them: Yesterday’s politics don’t work anymore. They didn’t work all that well yesterday, come to think of it. But it’s time to stop pretending. Since roughly the end of the Cold War, center-right and center-left elites on both sides of the Atlantic have insisted that economic stagnation, worsening inequality and political paralysis were a temporary management problem, which the next government, the next tech bubble or the next stock-market boom were sure to correct.
Such arguments came to sound increasingly hollow and cynical, especially in the poisonous political atmosphere of the Bush and Obama years. Large segments of the public, perhaps a majority, simply don’t buy them anymore. Hillary Clinton’s campaign is predicated on the idea that nothing’s wrong with American politics or the American economy that can’t be fixed with a steady hand on the tiller. Setting aside the partisan drama of the moment, do you actually think that’s true?
Another urgent Brexit lesson is that it’s a fatal error to build so-called progressive politics, or indeed any vision of the future, around a message of fear and negativity. That might sound like a strange thing to say in the year of Trump — but in fact his stump speeches are overwhelmingly sunny free-associated paeans to the greatness of America, larded with delicious nuggets of hate about the Wall and the Muslims. (In fact, Trump never brings that stuff up without explaining how much he is loved by Latinos or women or gays or blacks or whomever he happens to be bashing.) The Brexit “Leave” campaign was also largely positive in tone, fueled by a hazy nostalgia for the imaginary Britain of yesteryear, even if anti-immigrant sentiment and racism were not far below the surface.
Britain’s “Remain” campaign, on the other hand, was a hapless combination of talking-head doomcasting and celebrity hectoring, which seems to have backfired in spectacular fashion. Economists on TV with plummy accents promised a stock-market crash and an immediate economic downturn, which now seems to be well underway. J.K. Rowling and Eddie Izzard and Bob Geldof and other prominent leftish citizens deigned to instruct their fellow Britons that they were better off in Europe. But they couldn’t quite say why, largely because for most people the E.U. is identified less with its purported human-rights and social-justice priorities than with neoliberal economics, crippling austerity budgets and disastrous “free trade” deals.
Widespread elite arrogance has helped poison the E.U.’s reputation, and elite arrogance helped torpedo the Brexit “Remain” campaign as well. It’s understandable for American progressives and leftists to find the Brexit vote unfortunate. European unity, in the abstract, is a lovely idea. But as we have seen with the parallels and contrasts between the Trump and Bernie Sanders campaigns in America, not all resistance to elite establishment opinion is retrograde or reactionary. It’s deeply insulting to look at this complicated situation from across the pond and announce that the E.U. is an inclusive and progressive institution, and therefore everybody in Britain who wanted out must be a small-minded bigot. That’s almost as ignorant and blinkered as the worldview of the stereotypical Trump voter.
No doubt it’s true that Brexit was an assault on the cosmopolitan, borderless pan-European ideal represented by the E.U. It was also an assault on what has been called the “Washington consensus,” meaning the post-Cold War world order of economic globalization and “free trade” agreements, coupled with permanent undeclared war and worldwide intelligence-gathering on an unprecedented scale. That was never a genuine social consensus, but one imposed from above by governmental and corporate elites. It was justified to the public in various ways over the years (and usually piece by piece), but it was hardly ever debated and never subjected to real democratic oversight. That consensus has been badly undermined in recent years, and is now in imminent danger of collapse. Whether you think such a collapse would be good or bad depends, I suppose, on how much you stand to lose by it — and what you think is likely to replace it.
The possible or probable demise of the postwar world order marks the biggest global crisis since 9/11, and quite likely the biggest since the collapse of the Soviet Union. Comparisons with the political and cultural crisis that transformed Europe in the 1930s are not absurd, but that doesn’t mean the results have to be the same. This is a moment that offers unprecedented openings for the left and the right, a moment of immense danger and immense opportunity. It cannot be wished away, and those who retreat from it or pretend it’s not happening will be swept away by history.
A few months ago amid the proverbial snows of New Hampshire, I heard Jeb Bush tell a middle-school auditorium full of sympathetic mainstream Republicans that America had to get back to “regular-order democracy” or risk political chaos. Those middle-class, small-town, golf-playing conservatives, who still thought they were the heart of the GOP, ate it up. Hello, chaos. What Jeb and friends discovered shortly thereafter was that the barn door of democracy had been left open and the regular order was long gone. Britain’s political establishment just got the same telegram, and Cameron, a Bush-style aristocrat prepared for rulership from birth, finds himself politically beheaded barely a year after winning re-election.
Hillary Clinton now stands facing the incoming tide, like King Canute in a teal pantsuit, and it’s hard to avoid the conclusion that she’s a remarkably bad fit for this moment in history. I suppose she is likely to win (and I hope she’ll win, I suppose) but in dramatic and philosophical terms, she definitely deserves to lose. She came startlingly close to losing the Democratic nomination to a grouchy septuagenarian socialist who was not a Democrat. She is a creature of the Washington consensus and a warrior for regular-order democracy, who has spent her entire political career fighting the next election as if it were the last one. Does she have any idea what just happened, or what will happen next?
Lives are on the line: The smearing of LGBTs by the right is more than disturbing — it’s dangerous
(Credit: AP/Patrick Semansky)
How ironic. The architect of North Carolina’s anti-transgender “bathroom bill,” which took away the right of transgender people to use the restroom that matches their gender identity, compared LGBT rights activists with the Taliban. Just last week, the killer in the latest major attack on the LGBT community, which left 49 people dead in Orlando, Florida, may have proclaimed his allegiance to ISIS on calls with the police. Some have wondered if the killer used ISIS as a cover for a different motivation involving a possible struggle with his own sexual identity, but the massacre was terrorism against LGBT people, regardless of motive.
Emails obtained by the Charlotte Business Journal display the nasty views of North Carolina State Rep. Dan Bishop (R), the primary sponsor of the “bathroom bill.” In response to a constituent message telling him not to “cave in to the Politically Correct Taliban” and to coordinate “bathroom bills” with other states, Bishop replied, “I LOVE that idea. Taliban. Love that too. Not giving up. Ever.”
“As someone who grew up in Rep. Bishop’s district, it’s deeply disturbing to see such blatant animosity from someone who is supposed to represent all constituents in his district, including LGBTQ people,” said Matt Hirschy, Director of Advancement at Equality North Carolina, in a press release. “Based on these outrageous exchanges, it seems clear that pulling back the curtain on legislators’ true intent will reveal the despicable nature and motivation of this legislation.”
North Carolina’s House Bill 2 also banned any local discrimination protections for LGBT people and revoked the ability of anyone to sue under state employment non-discrimination laws. And, just for fun, the GOP threw in a provision that prevents municipalities from raising the minimum wage, perhaps intended to soften the blow that businesses operating the state are feeling because of a bigoted law that discriminates against employees and customers.
Hundreds of businesses have come out against the bill, although many that did have given large political donations to conservative groups that helped elect some of the bill’s sponsors, many more who voted for it and the desperate governor who signed it, hoping to score points with his Republican base in his tough reelection bid this year. PayPal canceled plans to bring 400 jobs to Charlotte because of the hateful law.
But the North Carolina GOP has dug its heels in. Just this week, the state party hired anti-LGBT religious fanatic Kami Mueller, who comes from the main group lobbying for HB2, as its spokeswoman.
Bishop’s comments are nothing new among the anti-LGBT community. Bryan Fischer of the American Family Association, an anti-LGBT hate group according to Southern Poverty Law Center, also compared gay people to the Taliban, equating gay sex with domestic terrorism. “If open homosexuals are allowed into the United States military, the Taliban won’t need to plant dirty needles to infect our soldiers with HIV,” he wrote. “Our own soldiers will take care of that for them.” Fischer, who was scheduled to join Ted Cruz at a Mississippi campaign rally until the Texas senator reportedly got sick and canceled the event, has also blamed gays for Adolf Hitler and the Holocaust.
Tony Perkins of the Family Research Council, which cheered the North Carolina law and is considered an anti-LGBT hate group by the Southern Poverty Law Center, has also compared LGBT right activists with terrorists. As support for the Defense of Marriage Act waned, Perkins said on his radio show that terrorism is “a strike against the general populace simply to spread fear and intimidation so that they can disrupt and destabilize the system of government. That’s what the homosexuals are doing here to the legal system.”
Outspoken conservative blogger and radio host Erick Erickson compared LGBT rights activists with the Charlie Hebdo killers. In a 2015 radio program, he said, “One group [LGBT rights activists] destroys the livelihoods of those who dare to mock or dissent and the other [actual terrorists] took their lives, but both are doing it to drive debate from the public square…”
Former U.S. Senator and presidential candidate and lifelong bigot Rick Santorum was angry when the Massachusetts Supreme Court legalized same-sex marriage in 2004. “This is an issue just like 9/11,” he stated. “We didn’t decide we wanted to fight the war on terrorism because we wanted to. It was brought to us.”
And we must not count out who funds the hate groups. For example, close Koch brothers ally and wealthy mega-donor Art Pope of North Carolina has backed LGBT hate groups including the Family Research Council and its North Carolina affiliate, the N.C. Family Policy Council, with almost $1.5 million since the late 1990s.
America may have finally enacted marriage equality, though it took far longer than it did many other comparable countries, but LGBT people are still under attack. Politicians, anti-LGBT activists and talking heads who continue spitting anti-LGBT bigotry have blood on their hands. They create a climate in which gay and trans people are constantly at risk. LGBT people are now the most likely to be subjected to hate crimes than those of any other group in America, with trans women of color in the most danger. Because of this same climate concocted by bigots, 41 percent of transgender and nonconforming people have attempted suicide.
The bigots are right: The world is full of terror. But LGBT people are its victims.
We need a true blueprint for gun control: Democrats must devise an in-depth strategy that’s massive in scope
A photo tweeted from the House by Gregory Meeks shows Democratic members staging a sit-in "to demand action on common sense gun legislation," June 22, 2016. (Credit: Twitter/Gregory Meeks)
As the unprecedented sit-in in the House of Representatives unfolded on Wednesday, there were tremors of a world about to shift, in ways that it was impossible to imagine. When Civil Rights legend John Lewis initiated the sit-in, he called attention not just to the horrific levels of American gun violence, but also to the dysfunction, intransigence and inaction which had become normalized. Law-making had become so broken, he essentially argued, that simply getting government to work again now required breaking the law. But if that were so, was there any guarantee of where it would lead, especially given such a cynical and skilled opposition in power? That is what worried me as I watched the drama unfold.
“Those who work on bipartisan solutions are pushed aside. Those who pursue commonsense improvement are beaten down. Reason is criticized. Obstruction is praised,” Lewis said. “We were elected to lead, Mr. Speaker. We must be headlights and not taillights. We cannot continue to stick our heads in the sand and ignore the reality of mass gun violence in our nation…. The time for silence and patience is long gone…. Give us a vote! Let us vote! We came here to do our job! We came here to work!”
All of that was an eminently reasonable, if impassioned indictment of the status quo, and a plea for restoring functional democratic government. Lewis then turned distinctively in the direction of his activist roots. “Sometimes you have to do something out of the ordinary. Sometimes you have to make a way out of no way,” he said. “We have been too quiet for too long. There comes a time when you have to say something, we have to make a little noise, when you have to move your feet. This is the time. Now is the time to get in the way.”
It was particularly inspiring for someone like me, who grew up with John Lewis as one of my teenage heroes. But I knew all too well how decades of work had prepared the ground before he emerged as a young leader of SNCC, creating the preconditions in which a spontaneous freedom struggle could flourish, and I knew that no such extensive preparation had been done in this case. And that was a cause for profound concern.
The next day, after the sit-in was over, Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi gave a hopeful gloss on what had happened. “When Republicans turned off the microphones, we raised our voices. They turned off the cameras, we turned to Periscope,” she said. “They tried to shut down the discussion, and what resulted was a discussion heard round the world,” and that sent a chill down my spine, reminding me powerfully of the Arab Spring. But then, I could not help but think of how all that hope had been crushed, even as Pelosi continued, “All this trouble just because Republicans refused to give us a vote on common sense gun violence legislation, overwhelmingly supported by the American people. In the case of one bill, 85%, the other 90% of the American people.”
The figures Pelosi cited were sound. The reality is blindingly clear: Republicans may control both houses of Congress, but they’re far out of touch with the majority of Americans—even with a majority of their own voters. Yet, there’s nothing new in this. What is new is the willingness to fight back.
Watching the sit-in unfold, I was both inspired and concerned about what the GOP might do in the future, taking this as precedent. Billmon—owner of the legendary Whiskey Bar blog—laid out an argument about the dangers involved on Twitter the morning after, questioning use of a high moral claim without thinking through where it might lead and how the logic might differ from that involved in 1960s sit-ins. Specifically, he pointed out, “Consciously imitating civil rights movement stakes an extremely high moral claim.” Their sit-ins violated local segregation and trespassing laws, based on high law—the 14th Amendment, Supreme Court rulings, even “natural law.” Activists willingly broke lower laws, and accepted the price for it, because a higher law, a compelling moral principle was at stake. But how does that measure up to this specific example?
Not well, Billmon thinks: “It attacks—directly—legislative principle that majority has right to rule,” by demanding “votes on background checks & misnamed ‘no fly no buy’” but, he asks, “What higher law justifies that action?” And he points out, “The Constitution (2nd Amendment this time, not 14th) & related SCOTUS rulings are not on protesters side this time,” nor are they “claiming any civil right that is denied to them or to the people they represent by color of law (no pun intended).” In fact, he points out, “if u take ‘no fly no buy’ at face value, they’re staking high moral claim for bill that denies a right based on government fiat.”
But none of this diminishes the underlying moral argument for a vote on doing something to protect people’s lives, I would claim. Rather, it underscores how ill-prepared the groundwork is for making that argument in a universally compelling manner, or for illuminating exactly what stands in the way—and why. The Constitution and Supreme Court rulings aren’t on the Democratic protesters’ side because conservatives/Republicans have spent the last half century prioritizing an increasingly coordinated political attack to take over the courts and rewrite the Constitution—a long-game strategy of constitutional hardball—while liberals and Democrats have usually only fought disjointed battles in response. The Second Amendment’s meaning has been completely reinvented as one small, but significant part of that attack.
This is almost exactly the opposite of what happened with American law in decades from the 1930s to the 1960s with respect to civil rights, though the precise mechanisms of how the changes took place were dissimilar. A small band of civil rights advocates—most notably Thurgood Marshall—built a solid, intellectually sound edifice of law to justify recovering the lost promise of the Civil War Amendments. In sharp contrast, conservatives have waged a sweeping war to take over the judiciary grounded on a variety of myths, key among them the notion that “judicial activism” is only practiced by liberals. Nothing could be further from the truth, as the wholesale reinvention of the Second Amendment so richly proves. The conservatives’ creation of an individual “right to bear arms” in the 2008 Heller decision, with no connection to a well-regulated militia, has no traditional legal foundation worth speaking of; it is the result of a sustained propaganda campaign by the NRA, as explained in a 2014 Politico article by Michael Waldman, author of The Second Amendment: A Biography. In 1990, conservative former Chief Justice Warren Burger described the notion of an individual right as “A fraud on the American public.” Waldman noted:
There is not a single word about an individual’s right to a gun for self-defense or recreation in Madison’s notes from the Constitutional Convention. Nor was it mentioned, with a few scattered exceptions, in the records of the ratification debates in the states. Nor did the U.S. House of Representatives discuss the topic as it marked up the Bill of Rights. In fact, the original version passed by the House included a conscientious objector provision….
Though state militias eventually dissolved, for two centuries we had guns (plenty!) and we had gun laws in towns and states, governing everything from where gunpowder could be stored to who could carry a weapon—and courts overwhelmingly upheld these restrictions. Gun rights and gun control were seen as going hand in hand. Four times between 1876 and 1939, the U.S. Supreme Court declined to rule that the Second Amendment protected individual gun ownership outside the context of a militia.
Furthermore, when Antonin Scalia co-wrote a book, Reading Law, trying to defend his judicial approach in Heller, another conservative legal giant, Appeals Court Judge Richard Posner, wrote a devastating attack, titled, tellingly, “The Incoherence of Antonin Scalia.” In it, he wrote:
[T]he book’s defense of the Heller decision fails to mention that most professional historians reject the historical analysis in Scalia’s opinion. Reading Law quotes approvingly Joseph Story’s analysis of preambles—“the preamble of a statute is a key to open the mind of the makers, as to the mischiefs, which are to be remedied, and the objects, which are to be accomplished by the provisions of the statute”—but fails to apply the analysis to the preamble of the Second Amendment.
The false arguments on which today’s “gun rights” depend are but one strand within the broader conservative assault on our judiciary—an assault that’s shifted the entire Supreme Court farther to the right than ever before. But the judiciary is just one branch of our government. Conservatives have spent decades waging a war to control all three, and the House sit-in is about all of them, in different ways.
In his initial tweets, Billmon brought up the “legislative principle that majority has right to rule.” He later pointed out that Democrats had run the House on similar assumptions. But there was a difference. And indeed, his own late 2012 analysis of how the House had come to the brink of collapse highlighted both continuities and differences between Democratic and Republican House governance over time. It drew, in part, from political scientist Barbara Sinclair’s 2006 book, Party Wars: Polarization and the Politics of National Policy Making. “Her book helped me understand that the breakdown of the House is as much an internal institutional failure as a product of external polarization – although obviously the two are related,” he wrote, going on to say:
The post-Watergate reforms greatly strengthened the partisan majority and diminished the minority….
But while the Democrats generally didn’t run their system along strict ideological lines (the party was too diverse at the time for that), the Republicans who overthrew them in 1994 intended to do exactly that.
Even more telling was the role of the Hastert Rule. In one section, “Lenin and the Hastert Rule,” Billmon explains how the Hastert Rule mirrors Lenin’s parliamentary doctrine, “a bit of Orwellian jargon called ‘democratic centralism,'” that was “extremely heavy on the centralism, but light on the democratic – 100% democracy free, as a matter of fact. It required Communist Party members to obey all party decisions once made, without question or dissent.” As Billmon explained, it allowed Lenin to leverage tight discipline over a minority faction into complete legislative control. And in the next section, he explained:
[L]ike the Lenin Rule, the Hastert Rule made it possible for a relatively small group of GOP loyalists to control a much larger legislative body. To wit: The GOP Steering Committee controlled a majority in the Republican Conference, which controlled the conference, which controlled the House.
The problem was, “Leninist party control requires Leninist party discipline,” which was always difficult to maintain under stress—Billmon cites the example of the Medicare Part D debate. After 2010, with an organized Tea Party faction refusing to be disciplined, it was now the intransigent extreme minority that was positioned to block the majority of the majority, and even, at times “muster their own majority of the majority — turning the Hastert Rule into a tool that can be used against the party leadership, not just by it.” Which explains the situation that eventually lead Speaker Boehner to resign.
Speaker Paul Ryan is now trying to pretend that he’s an old-fashioned speaker, the kind who can actually get things done. He needs this desperately, if he’s ever going to run for president, which is clearly what he has in mind. He needs this sit-in like he needs a hole in the head. But maybe if he can shut it down swiftly, totally, and absolutely, that can provide at least the appearance of being in control that he so desperately needs. This is Ryan’s hope, and much of the D.C. establishment and the national media shares it to some extent. After all, Ryan is the “sane,” “responsible” “adult” alternative to Donald Trump.
But actually, Ryan is trapped—and the sit-in showed it. Pelosi is right—the measures that Ryan is blocking votes on are overwhelmingly popular. The majority that Ryan pretends to represent is cobbled together—”rigged,” as Trump would call it. In 2012, Democrats won 1.4 million more House votes than Republicans, but ended up with 33 fewer seats, due to systemic gerrymandering, which I wrote about recently, but almost never draws more than fleeting attention. (Even when Republicans considered building on gerrymandered House seats to effectively steal a presidential election, it barely registered in the national media.) And that’s just one facet of how our democracy has been perverted.
The sit-in backers’ weakness is that they lack a well-developed, well-articulated explanation of how and why the whole system has been rigged—not just on behalf of the gun lobby. Indeed, some are tangled up in it themselves. If the House sit-in is to ultimately succeed, it must connect itself intimately with a sustained systemic critique that brings all the rigging of the system into focus, critiques it thoroughly, and subjects it to relentless attacks, until it eventually gives way. The Moral Mondays movement—which I also wrote about recently—provides an excellent model for this on the state-wide level. Before the House convenes again, let us hope the Lewis and his allies think long and hard, not just about the next steps they are about to take, but about how to start mapping out a much longer, years-long journey in the days ahead, and how to start raising signs to point the way.
