Archive for July 10, 2008

Rove Defies a Subpoena, and More Liberals on Obama’s Right Turn

I have a special place in my heart for Dana Hunter at “En Tequila Es Verdad,” and she quite routinely proves why she deserves that spot.  At least I know I’m not the only liberal who thinks the dangers of Obama’s moderate turn are overstated.  Check her post on the subject for that, and a little bit of snark on Rove, too.

Speaking of friends on the series of tubes, thanks to Progressive Conservative for this tribute. I won’t disappoint, and I’ll count on you and others to keep me in line if I start to stray from logic.

Disillusioned Democrats: Pick a Side, We’re at War

Barack Obama is a once in a lifetime candidate.  After eight years of divisiveness, we have a candidate who – quite apart from favoring serious, progressive policies to put America back on track – actually wants to work across the aisle and rebuild a collegial, functioning government.  We’ll have a true President of the United States, rather than a President of the Bible Belt.  There’s truth to Obama’s (considerable) hype – we have a lot to be excited about.

But.  Even for the best of candidates, there are compromises to be made, for the sake of fairness, and for the sake of expedience.  Coalitions and presidencies are never built on unswerving pursuit of an ideological party line, and even when they are, the country’s worse off for it (look where we are now).  When Democrats, like Kos, expect Obama to never deviate from Kos-style liberalism, they expect him to change the way politics works, and not for the better.  Liberalism imports subordination of passion to reason; we ought to bend when we have to, for the larger good.  Politics in a democracy, especially a democracy still suspicious of the word “Liberal,” means that Obama cannot be a model Daily-Kos-style Democrat.  Deal with it.  Certainly there’s an element of betrayal here – Kos democrats made Obama.  But candidate and (soon-) President Obama belongs to the American people, not to the narrow interests that got him to where he is.  Isn’t that independence, after all, what we admired about Obama in the first place?

More importantly – and more cynically – we can’t expect that, because we have an honest candidate, politics will all of a sudden be 100% honest, transparent, and above-the-table.  Politics is not sunshine and blossoms. Sometimes we as Democrats have to read the signals, guess what’s going on, intercept the code, and learn to listen for the spin.

Example: Obama on gay rights.  Yes, thank you, “Confluence,” for pointing out that Obama says he isn’t a fan of gay rights.  But that’s cheap talk.  Obama can oppose gay rights all he wants, but it’s not something he will have control over as president.  His Supreme Court picks, who will be equal-protection-clause-expansion liberals like you and me, will make the call on gay rights issues.  Obama wants his Supreme Court to protect “people who may be vulnerable in the political process.” What do you think that means?  It’s barely-concealed code for “gay rights.”  Do you want to make him say it clearer, and blow the whole game?

I realize it may hurt a few feelings for Obama to stand against a group that’s already been beaten up enough – talk about picking on the Bush administration’s scapegoat! – but his anti-gay rights stance is “full of sound and fury, signifying nothing.”  He has to say things like this to get elected.  No political campaign is conducted 100% above the table.  Watch the signs; watch the hands.

So, Democrats, I realize some of you may feel neglected, or “thrown under the bus.”  But realize that compromises have to be made, and learn to separate talk from spin, and read the signs correctly.  And then, fall the hell into line.  Even if you don’t think Obama needs your help, he does.  To turn Ben Franklin’s quote around, if we don’t hang together on this one, we won’t be hanging alone come November: under four more years of Republican rule, America will be hanging with us.  Join together.  Save the state.  Fall into line.

Ceremonial Religion & the First Amendment: When an Altar is Just an Altar

What exactly is it that liberals like myself object to, when we object to the mixing of church and state, or the state appropriation of religion to its own ends? I’ve argued before that the two biggest (but perhaps not only) problems with blurring the line between church and state occur when (1) a pluralist society freezes out a minority, by sending an exclusionary message through religious acts or symbology, sometimes with disastrous results, or when (2) the state’s decisionmaking process is tainted by subjective religious beliefs. Unsurprisingly, the problem with the latter type of church-state blending is ably presented by sitting president George W. Bush, who in 2003 refused to give condoms to Africa as part of an AIDS-prevention package, because his religious views mandated abstinence-only education. Obviously, reality refused to bend to Bush’s religion, and AIDS in Africa has continued to rise apace, all because Bush couldn’t remove his biblical blinders. Note also that “maverick” John McCain has a similar failing.

But the law is powerless to stop politicians from making religiously-motivated errors of policy: we as citizens have that job. And, on the first point, it’s tough to tell when a state use of religious symbolism crosses the line from expressive to impermissibly exclusionary (“get out, non-Christians!”). Where exactly is that line?

Law student that I am, to sketch the boundaries, I propose two hypothetical situations. In the first, the mayor of a Southern city, seeking to reaffirm his city’s progressive bona fides, wants to host a ceremony honoring fallen Union soldiers who died in the Civil War, fighting to free the slaves of his state. He wants to play the Union’s marching song – the “Battle Hymn of the Republic” – at the ceremony. The Hymn, of course, is a ringing evocation of what it means to be an American: “…let us die to make men free.” But it’s also blatantly Christian: “as He [Jesus] died to make men holy…” Is this state sponsored religious symbolism constitutional?

In the second case, we’re in Ancient Rome, which has, oddly enough, adopted the American Constitution, and secularized itself. The problem is, the Old Religion lingers. A number of Senators object to a monument in the Senate House, the Altar of Victory, which since time immemorial has been thought to guard the health of the Roman state. They say it’s a state endorsement of religion, and excludes secular senators and Christians. Other Senators – both adherents to the old faith and historical preservationists – object, saying the religious monument is a token of the past, historical, and with muted religious significance. Who wins?

Perhaps surprisingly, I would uphold both ceremonial uses of religious imagery, on the grounds that the threat of sending an exclusionary message is minimal when the dominant theme of a religious icon or expression is historical or cultural rather than evangelical. In these hypotheticals, both the Battle Hymn and the Altar of Victory have unique places in the consciousness of their respective populations owing to their antiquity, not their religiosity. While this position places me at odds with many of my liberal compatriots, I’m in good company. In 2005, Justice Breyer cast the tie-breaking vote in two “Ten Commandments on the courthouse steps” cases, distinguishing a monument with great antiquity (therefore valid – see Van Orden) from a monument placed seemingly only to inflame religious tensions and “make a point” (therefore invalid – see McCreary).

Being in a pluralist society not only requires us to avoid using the state to place one religion over the other; it also requires us to tolerate cultural expressions that might carry with them a twinge of religiosity. We cannot expunge religion wholesale from the public sphere, without depriving ourselves of valuable reminders of our heritage.

On the church vs. state front of the Culture Wars, I don’t think I’m conceding that much. We must still be extra wary of egregious and dangerous attempts to blend church and state. On a common theme, for example, teaching creationism in public schools would be by my rubric the worst of the worst, since it sends an exclusionary message to a particularly susceptible set of the population (children), and muddles the objectivity that democracy demands of both science and government. As liberals, the defenders of the church/state line, we ought to pick our battles, and conserve resources for the major clashes.