A Liberal Argument FOR Drone Attacks

During the second presidential debate, the one focusing on foreign policy (remember that snoozer?), the big take-away was the fact that President Obama and perennial presidential hopeful Mitt Romney were in such lock-step on foreign policy that they hardly had anything to argue about. It seems the center-right and center-left essentially agree when it comes to how to prosecute the War on Terror, or at least they’ve both learned a lesson from one of Bush II’s mistakes; Don’t stand in front of a Mission Accomplished banner and pretend that an unconventional war will lead to a conventional parades-in-the-streets victory celebration. This one is going to be ugly, and it’s best if we have tamped-down, realistic expectations about that ugliness.

This has not stopped the far-right and far-left from criticizing the use of unmanned drones to prosecute this war. Some of these concerns are more legitimate than others. Among the least legitimate are concerns that unmanned drones are a step across some great divide toward artificially intelligent robots bringing war against humanity (sorry, but they are no more or less human than the cruise missiles we sent after Saddam Hussein back in Gulf War 1), that drones were fine when a real American was ordering their use but not when our current president is doing it (quit choking on your sour grapes, guys), or that drones are somehow undignified or cowardly (as though we are obligated to show up and slap people with white gloves when they would gladly blow up civilian targets with truck bombs). These arguments are patently ridiculous.

Unfortunately, most of the other arguments against the use of drones fall into a category in between the absurd and the worthy-of-debate. Some argue that the President does not have the right to use drones in countries where Congress has not made an official declaration of war.  They use this as an example of President Obama’s executive overreach. This is blatantly hypocritical coming from people who turned a blind eye to previous presidents who authorized military actions in countries where we were not officially at war. Here are some countries where we’ve had military actions without actual congressional declarations of war. In chronological order, we’ve had military incursions in the Dominican Republic, Cambodia, French Polynesia, the West Indies, Argentina, Peru, Indonesia, Fiji, Samoa, Mexico, China, The Ivory Coast, Turkey, Nicaragua, Japan, Uruguay, Panama, Angola, Colombia, Taiwan, Colombia, Egypt, Korea, Haiti, Samoa, Chile, Brazil, The Philippines, Honduras, Syria, Morocco, Cuba, Guatemala, Newfoundland, Bermuda, St. Lucia, the Bahamas, Jamaica, Antigua, Trinidad, British Guiana, Greenland, Iceland, Greece, Vietnam, Lebanon, Thailand, Laos, Congo (Zaire), Iran, El Salvador, Libya, Chad, Italy, Bolivia, Liberia, Sierra Leon, Iraq, Somalia, Bosnia, Macedonia, the Central African Republic, Albania, Gabon, Guinea-Bissau, Kenya, Tanzania, Afghanistan, Sudan, East Timor, Serbia, Nigeria, and Yemen. Oh, and there are some that don’t even exist anymore, like the Kingdom of Tripoli, Spanish Florida, French Louisiana, the Ottoman Empire, the Kingdom of Hawaii, the Soviet Union, and Dalmatia. These are all pre-9/11, by the way. So if the argument is that President Obama has overstretched executive authority by taking military action without the formal authorization of Congress, that doesn’t make him exceptionally tyrannical; it just makes him a normal president. 

Another argument is that these are targeted killings of accused criminals who deserve the right to a fair trial. This would be an entirely legitimate argument if it came from people who had consistently held that the declaration of war on Al Qaeda was illegitimate because the group isn’t a country, so all actions against Al Qaeda should have been undertaken by law enforcement. Conservatives who gave George W. Bush a blank check to fight Al Qaeda all over the world can make this argument, but first they have to admit they were wrong and slap “We Should Have elected John Kerry in ’04” stickers on their cars. Liberals who want to make this argument would have to own it completely, and would have to forgo the electoral benefits that came from the killing of Osama Bin Laden, meaning they very well might have to accept that this position is important enough for them that it would justify a Mitt Romney presidency. I don’t hear that from either camp. 

Slightly more legitimate is the concern that Americans have been targeted. I recoil at this because it smacks of a kind of American exceptionalism I find repugnant, the same kind that says foreigners can be imprisoned without trial but Americans cannot, but I admit that our laws do make different allowances for the treatment of American citizens than for the citizens of other countries. However, if the President has the authority to send troops to attack American nationals fighting against us in foreign lands, then that authority necessarily extends to all the means at the military’s disposal, and the military should be able to choose the means that is most effective, threatens the safety of the fewest civilians, and puts the fewest American soldiers at risk. Hence, drones.

Among the most legitimate concerns are those regarding the transparency of the means by which the targets are chosen. “[The] review process occurs entirely within the executive branch, violating the principle of the separation of powers. The executive is the judge, jury and executioner,” Juan Cole argues. “The drone program in the United States is hugely anti-democratic because the whole thing is classified. Therefore, it cannot be publicly discussed or debated with the officials behind it, who can neither confirm nor deny its very existence.” This concern is real, but the same could be said about any military planning. Decisions regarding household raids in Iraq and Afghanistan were made under the same conditions, with the targets receiving no trials unless they were captured. The drone strike program is striking because it is employed when the President invokes his right to kill or capture suspected Al Qaeda operatives, despite the fact that the drones have no means to capture anyone. That shocks the conscience, but only because we were willing to take it on faith that ground forces always make every effort to capture enemies. Not only is this assumption naïve, but it must be counterbalanced by the recognition that our forces put themselves in incredible danger when seeking to capture suspected terrorists. As much as it seems monstrous that President Obama personally authorizes the killing of suspected terrorists, we should remember that the alternative is to personally authorize missions to capture them and to take responsibility for the inevitable loss of American lives that would accompany those decisions. I completely understand that some are concerned that this President or the next might abuse his/her authority to send in the drones, but without some evidence that the 227 strikes he’s authorized as of January 23^rd of this year have been so capricious that the loss of American soldiers lives would be preferable because it would focus American attention on the abuse, this argument is simply premature.

There’s also the legitimate concern about civilian casualties. Any moral person should share this concern. Also, in a conflict with an asymmetrical group like Al Qaeda, where winning the hearts and minds of the locals is paramount to “victory” (whatever that means in this kind of war), we have to acknowledge that every civilian casualty is not only a moral tragedy but also a strategic failure. But in this context, criticizing drone strikes is also a philosophical failure. According to the Bureau of Investigative Journalism, there have been between 472 and 885 civilians killed in U.S. drone strikes as of October of 2012. That’s in 350 strikes going back as far as 2009. That’s certainly a lot of civilian deaths, but, for the sake of an honest comparison, consider five years of boots-on-the-ground combat in Iraq: According to our own government’s judgment (leaked through Wikileaks’ Iraq War Logs) 66,081 Iraqi civilians died in the period between January 2004 and December 2009. No one can make a claim that President Bush or President Obama lacked the legal authority to put our soldiers in harms’ way in Iraq during the period between 2004 and 2009. But putting soldiers on the ground produced 140 times as many civilian casualties as drone strikes in a similar amount of time. So if civilian casualties are the concern, criticizing drone strikes simply doesn’t cut the mustard.

Ultimately, the most philosophically consistent criticism of our drone strike policy comes from complete pacifists; if you don’t like that people are killed in wars, drone strikes are certainly a part of that equation. Wars between nations do not produce winners; they produce countries that lose more and countries that lose less. Even in a post 9/11 world, we should acknowledge that the people who actually attacked us are all dead, and that we exchanged the threat of potentially devastating future attacks for the very real and quantifiable loses we’ve suffered as a consequence of our reaction to the attacks on 9/11. The War on Terror may have prevented X, but X is unknowable, and the more than 4,000 U.S. military deaths in Iraq, the more than 3,000 U.S. military deaths in Afghanistan, the more than 3,000 U.S. contractor deaths in both, the $4 trillion dollars worth of projected costs (about $13,000 per American), and the estimated tens of thousands of Afghanistani civilian deaths and the estimated 120 thousand Iraqi civilian deaths are knowable, and should weigh heavily against any abstract threat. I used to be an absolute pacifist on religious grounds, and though I’ve always thought of the men and women who commit themselves to our Armed Forces as exemplars of duty and self-sacrifice, I’m still highly skeptical of the efficacy of any war to produce anything but human misery and opportunities for profiteering for corporations. With that being said, I would encourage my fellow liberals to lay off the drone strike arguments. Questioning the need for war of any kind should be a part of our political debate, but holding hands with hawks to criticize drone strikes threatens to sound like an argument that we should exchange the lives of more soldiers and more civilians because we’re uncomfortable with a new technology or with opaque military strategizing that isn’t actually new at all.

Righties, you hate Obama. You can’t articulate a good reason why you hate him so much (despite my requests, hell, my begging for a good explanation), so you’re grasping at straws.

My fellow Lefties, you don’t like war. Good. Stick with that. Unlike the Righties, you have literally trillions of good reasons.

But both sides, lay off the drones.

Stupid, Faulty Reasoning on Gun Registration Infects my Facebook Page

I'm back, your friendly neighborhood liberal gun owner.

Over the last few days, my Facebook page has been overrun by comments and memes devoted to protecting my second amendment rights. As a gun owner and someone who's generally a fan of rights, that's fine, but I'm really struggling not to post rude comments on the pages of my friends. Note: My friends are not stupid people. In general, they post silly, light-hearted pictures or clever memes that make me laugh. But in the last few days I've seen multiple variations on this theme:

"Criminals don't register their guns." Ergo, we should not strengthen our registration system.

In some versions of this, President Obama is pictured and called various names. In one he is writing the phrase on a chalkboard while wearing a dunce cap.

My friends, before you put the dunce cap on someone else's head, please pull the pointy end out of your own eye. Because this is simply the dumbest argument I can think of against any kind of regulation. You are hurting your own cause. Check yourself before you wreck yourself. Please.

Murderers do not obey the laws that criminalize killing people. Should we, therefore, make murder legal? Rapist do not follow the law. Should we take that crime off the books? Most people (myself included) drive over the speed limit from time to time. Do you think we should take down all the speed limit signs and let people zip through school zones at a hundred miles per hour?

Laws do not prevent all crime. Laws reduce crime and allow the justice system to punish violators of those laws. Reducing gun crimes and punishing people who use guns in crimes should both be positions responsible gun owners should support, both as a matter of morality and as good strategy to maintain their own right to bear arms. 

Look, there are legitimate arguments that could be made regarding registration schemes. You could argue that regulations are only as strong as their enforcement, and you don't think they'll be enforced. You could argue that registration won't completely end gun crime (except that no reasonable person is claiming that it will).  You could argue that the right to bear arms is so universal and unassailable that it should not be limited even if a prospective owner is a felon or has been diagnosed as dangerously, violently mentally ill. That's a loser of an argument, I think, but at least it's philosophically defensible. You could even argue that you're afraid of a giant conspiracy to confiscate all guns which hasn't materialized or even been proposed, but which makes you reluctant to give an inch. I understand that's where some gun owners are coming from, though it does beg the question: Why are the most heavily armed people the most frightened? Whatever your argument, and no matter how loosely it connects to reality, it should at least follow logically from your premises. So don't argue that we shouldn't have rules because some people will break them. That's... well, not to be indelicate, but that's just dumb.

Guess what, fellow gun owners and second amendment supporters? We can't afford to be dumb. Maybe the NRA can afford it. Sure, there are lots of true believers in the NRA, but the decisions of the NRA leadership lately show that the organization is more concerned about selling memberships, getting press, and frothing up their base than they are in protecting gun rights in the long term. The NRA could have been reaching out to urban, liberal America, trying to show that they are reasonable. They were wise to push back by pointing to mental health rather than letting the debate be about types of guns, but between their vitriol about the U.N. Small Arms Ban, their commercial calling the President names and bring up his kids, and their absolutist position against expanded registration, it seems like they are making the same mistake the Republican Party has been making over the last few decades; they're doubling down on the far-right wing, rural, white men. This is about as smart a strategy as trying to conquer Russia in the winter or marching your empire's army in Afghanistan. If gun rights groups can only hold on to conservative, rural whites, they will simply be outvoted. Responsible gun owners who want to stay responsible gun owners need to go out of their way to show urban-dwelling liberals that they are, in fact, responsible. People who live in cities think of guns predominantly as the weapons of criminals and not the tools of hunters or people who want to defend themselves because they live more than five minutes from a police station. I know this from personal experience. When I lived in San Diego, my only experience related to guns was seeing a body surrounded by police tape in front of my junior high. Is it any wonder I grew up thinking guns were evil? It wasn't until I moved to a small town and got to know a lot of responsible gun owners that my feelings about guns changed.

Now, gun rights advocates will say I am advocating caving in to the anti-gun folks. Yep. Pick your battles, guys. Second amendment absolutism isn't even supported by the second amendment itself. We've had decades of fights about whether the amendment extended to individuals, we finally get a president who is a democrat and says he believes it does extend to individuals, and instead of calling that a victory, some people want to paint him as the Confiscator-in-Chief. You got a win, but even if Obama is willing to be generous (liberal, some might say) with his interpretation of some confusing language in a way that we gun owners appreciate, we can't deny the fact that the amendment explicitly says "well regulated." You can't expect him (or any sensible person) to interpret "well regulated" to mean "completely unregulated." (And I know about the argument that the militia is supposed to be well regulated but the individual right that's never mentioned is somehow exempt. That's a bridge too far, guys.) Look, if you're worried Obama might sign an assault weapons ban (you know, the kind Mitt Romney signed when he was the governor of Massachusetts), then make that your fight, but when the majority of NRA members agree that the gun show and private party sales loophole should be closed, take advantage of that and show people who are leery about guns that gun owners are reasonable. Fight to make it possible and even easy to transfer the ownership of a gun to someone else who can pass a background check. Fight to make sure guns don't have to be turned over to the government when the original owner dies, but can be willed to the next of kin who can pass the background check. Fight to make sure the definition of mental illness isn't so broad that people with no propensity for violence or self-harm are prevented from getting guns. But don't fight to put guns in the hands of criminals or the violent mentally ill based on obviously, painfully inept lack of reasoning. You will just push the growing urban, liberal majority to think you're dangerous kooks until they have the numbers to repeal the second amendment.

And you know whose fault that will be, responsible gun owners? Ours. If our arguments are dumb.

Noah and Ben sing "Man or Muppet"

Noah and I sang a song tonight at the community talent show. He was great. The sound quality of the video, however, is pretty terrible. Still, Noah won 1st place in the Youth category with his performance and made his daddy very proud.

Return of the Liberal Gun Owner

In a previous post (“A Liberal’s Defense of Gun Ownership”), I tried to explain why an avowed lefty would own a gun (or a bunch of them). That was prompted by a direct challenge from my mother in the wake of the Aurora theater shooting. After the shooting in Newtown, I have been hesitant to weigh in, not because I don’t have strong feelings about the political issues that have arisen as a consequence, and not because it’s somehow impolite to talk about an incredibly important news story while it’s still news, but because I needed to spend some time reading the responses to this tragedy in order to formulate my thoughts. As a liberal, I am on a bunch of e-mail lists wherein pundits and politicians keep me up-to-date on the mainstream liberal party line and the radical left-wing version. Because I’m a gun owner and read up on gun-related subjects, I’ve also found my way onto the e-mail lists of the NRA and their ilk. As a public school teacher, I have been reading about how schools are supposed to respond. I’ve also been talking with real teachers who know a lot more about real schools than so-called “school reformers,” and I have a pretty good idea about the broad spectrum of responses teachers are voicing. Oh, and I’m also a human being, so thinking about those children and parents in Newtown is still emotionally overwhelming. I don’t have any insight into that grief, but I hope the confluence of a liberal, gun-owning, public school teacher might offer something useful to others.

First off, to my liberal sistren and brethren, please, please stop using the phrase “assault weapons.” I understand that you are referring to the Public Safety and Recreational Firearms Use Protection Act of 1994, and I know that is commonly referred to as the “Assault Weapons Ban,” but you must understand that this doesn’t just close the ears of responsible gun owners because they have some knee-jerk antipathy towards a specific piece of legislation. It closes their ears because you sound ignorant. There is no such thing as an “assault weapon.” Don’t believe me? Go into your local gun store (I recommend that you don’t wear your Obama T-shirt for this outing) and see if they have a section marked “assault weapons.” Ask to see if there are any boxes for any guns marked “assault weapon.” When you find that there aren’t, ask the proprietor which of the guns in the store are, technically speaking, “assault weapons.” She may laugh at you. She may calmly explain that the term has no specific meaning. Either way, the answer will teach you a lot. You will come to understand why the 1994 “Assault Weapons Ban” was such a loophole riddled piece of legislation that it only successfully banned some dozen individual models of guns. You will also quickly deduce why gun owners are so resistant to talk of limited gun bans from people who clearly know so little about guns. After all, for all the talk about protecting the rights of hunters and other responsible gun owners, if the anti-gun advocates know so little about guns, isn’t it entirely plausible that any legislation they propose might be another toothless collection of loopholes? And isn’t it equally possible that legislation written by people who believe in mythical “assault weapons” might ban far more than they intended? As I tell my students, if you want to be taken seriously, you have to do your homework first.

For the sake of being “Fair and Balanced,” to my fellow citizens who find themselves on the other side of the political aisle, especially those who allow themselves to be swayed by the Fox News talking points, please, please try and be a tiny bit realistic when you blame violent movies and video games. First of all, this line of reasoning inevitably makes you sound a good forty years older than your real age. What’s next? Criticisms of the length of boys’ hair? The volume of rock and roll music? Pass me that crystal dish with the hard candy please, grandpa. Much like the mythical “assault weapons,” your definition of violent video games is so amorphous that even us casual gamers worry you’ll be banning just about everything. You do understand that Pac Man was about a yellow blob who was running for his life because he was being chased by murderous ghosts, only when he would devour a magical pill he gained the ability to incapacitate those ghosts temporarily by consuming them whole? Super Mario Brothers starred some plumbers who jumped on their enemies’ heads, stomping them to death, in an effort to rescue a kidnapping victim. The aforementioned Mario also starred in the game Donkey Kong, where he charged directly at an oversized primate who was trying to kill him by throwing barrels at him. What games would be left if violent video games were removed? Tetris and Pong would still be fine. And sports games like Madden Football… oh, wait.

And what about these violent movies that are corrupting our youth? The Godfather is probably the greatest movie ever made. In it, about twenty people are killed, more than half with guns, some with semi-automatic pistols, others with machine guns (those are assault rifles, which are real things, and not “assault weapons,” which don’t exist). Oh, and a really violent thing happens to a horse. Should we prevent people from seeing The Godfather because it is violent? What about Saving Private Ryan? Or Schindler’s List? Ah, you say, but those have historical, artistic, and socially redeeming value. Agreed. But did Steven Spielberg’s first short film, the one that led to Saving Private Ryan and Schindler’s List, have that same value? I don’t know, because I haven’t seen it. You probably haven’t either. But if we banned violent movies, I’m guessing it wouldn’t have seen the light of day based on nothing more than the fact that it was a Western titled The Last Gun. I’ll bet there’s some gun violence in it.

And if we’re going to even consider banning the viewing of violence because it could lead to real world violence, we should certainly start with 24 hours news networks that make their money by keeping their viewers continually angry and afraid.  Pundits spewing toxic amounts of vitriol and doom are far more dangerous than episodes of Tom and Jerry.

Now, to my teacher friends, here in Oregon, we have our resident rhetorical-bomb-throwing-boob in our state legislature who has suggested that teachers should arm themselves. I’m sure there are some teachers who would feel more comfortable if they were armed, but I have two reasons why I, as a responsible gun owner, would not. First, a big part of my job is making students feel comfortable in my classroom. Contrary to those who look back fondly on nuns hitting kids on the knuckles with rulers, I firmly believe that children learn better when they are not scared. People should have a healthy fear of guns. So when kids have that fear, and some have it exaggerated by the fact that they are kids, and other have it exaggerated by the fact that their home lives have given them even more reason to fear guns than should be warranted, their ability to learn will be diminished if they know I’m packing heat in class. Second, I would be afraid some kid would grab my gun and use it. Kids are impulsive, some dangerously so. The proximity of other teenagers makes kids more likely to do stupid things. I wouldn’t want one of those stupid things ending with some kid pulling my gun out of my holster while I’m trying to help another student correctly place a comma in a sentence.  So if Newtown inclines any teacher to consider carrying a gun into a classroom, especially one of my son’s classrooms, I hope that teacher will also remember Columbine or Kip Kinkle here in Oregon and imagine his or her own gun falling into the hands of someone like that.

As to the NRA’s idea of a police officer in every school, I think it’s a great idea, but not for the same reasons the NRA likes it. They like it because it gets the conversation away from gun bans. I like it because it’s government stimulus spending on unionized workers in every community in the country. I know that it might not prevent something like what happened in Newtown. As many critics have pointed out, Columbine had an armed guard. But as long as it means more cops in more schools showing kids that police officers are not scary, distant enemies but friendly, relatable public servants who keep them safe, that’s all to the good. My only caveats would be that the officers’ salaries and all their expenses must be fully funded by the feds so the money doesn’t come out of the local or state education budgets, the legislation has to be written so the police will be there for the long haul and not just until the next round of budget cuts, and the police officers must live in the communities where the school is located. If the deficit hawks in Congress will go for that, Obama should sign it immediately. Take the money out of the Homeland Security budget and call it an anti-terrorism measure. Because what we saw in Newtown is indisputably domestic terrorism.

Police in schools cannot be the end of the discussion, though (sorry, NRA). We need to massively beef up our mental health services in this country. My wife is a mental health counselor who works at a live-in facility for severely mentally ill children. The stuff she sees would break most people’s hearts. But you know what breaks hers? You know what broke the camel’s back the one and only time I saw her job bring her to tears? It was when a kid who needed care had to be sent away because his parents private insurance wouldn’t cover his care any longer. Yes, high quality mental healthcare is expensive. The facility where my wife works has a two-kids-to-one-adult ratio, and that’s spendy. But parents, good parents who love their children and are trying to do what is best for them, should not have to give up custody of their children and turn them over to the state just so the kids will qualify for state-sponsored insurance. These parents shouldn’t have to quit their good paying jobs where they contribute to their communities and pay the taxes that fund those services just so they can move to other states with better care and go on the public dole in order to get their kids the care they need. That’s stupid. That’s backwards. And that’s the system we have. Ramping up our mental healthcare infrastructure isn’t sexy and it won’t show an instant payoff in lowering mass shootings because the future killer you’re treating is still a little kid getting the help he needs today to avoid that fate years down the road. But when it comes to preventing mass shootings, even with its high price tag, robust mental health infrastructure is still going to be the biggest payoff. We just need politicians willing to do things that won’t show results until after their term has ended, and we need a public willing to admit that taxes are investments in our society’s future.

While we’re being realistic, we can do some serious things about guns without making up fictional categories of firearms. There is no good reason that the same background check that I have to go through when I buy a gun at a store shouldn’t be mandatory when I buy one from a friend or from a “friend” who sits behind a card table at a gun show. I understand that the most extreme conspiracists worry that a more robust national background check system is just a means for the evil government to find out where to come take guns from. Furthermore, they worry that limiting the ability of the mentally ill to acquire guns would be a means for a nefarious government to keep guns out of the hands of law abiding citizens. To both critiques, I say, cut your losses, guys. Just as teachers’ unions need to do a better job of making it clear that we don’t protect bad teachers (We don’t. It’s a lie that’s been repeated so much people think it’s true. We protect the contract and the process to keep it fair, but bad teachers CAN be fired if administrators do their jobs.), gun owners need to make it clear that they do not support putting guns in the hands of those who would hurt others or themselves. As we beef up mental health services, counselors should have to report those who are potentially dangerous or suicidal, and those people should not be able to buy guns. From anybody (see the gun show/ private party loophole above). People who sell guns to criminals or the mentally ill should be criminally liable as accomplices if those people commit gun crimes or shoot themselves. Keeping guns out of the hands of dangerous people will do more to protect innocent people than trying to ban this gun or that gun.

To my fellow liberals and conservatives who’ve found common cause (or at least a common talking point) in protecting the rights of hunters and sportsmen, you are missing the purpose of the Second Amendment, and I think you’re doing so willfully. The Second Amendment is not about hunting. It’s about protecting yourself, your loved ones, and your property from your own government. Liberals don’t tend to like this amendment, but I think they should reconsider. I’ve made my share of jokes about the practicality of standing up to the U.S. military, with its complete arsenal of nuclear weapons, using common, handheld firearms (“assault weapons” or otherwise), but there’s something very real going on there. I’m not a hunter yet. The only thing I’ve ever killed with a gun was the gopher in my mother-in-law’s garden that she’d winged but was unwilling to shoot point-blank with a .22 to put it out of its misery. I plan on learning to hunt goose and duck during this next year, though. But even as I’m serving some succulent duck to my family (let’s be honest: I’ll probably overcook it the first few times, so I’ll be serving dry duck to my family), I’ll be fully aware that the founding fathers did not write the Second Amendment to make sure my family had duck to eat. They wrote it because governments can do horrible things to their own citizens. Just ask Japanese-Americans. And who, in our modern America, is most likely to be labeled as a potential traitor who should be rounded up and shipped off to a camp? Though I’m proud and grateful that I’ve never been involved with any group that has even hinted at armed insurrection (peaceful protest is not only more moral, but more effective), those of us who have marched in pro-union rallies and Occupy protests shouldn’t be too quick to believe we wouldn’t be on the short list if a very small, tyrannical minority ever managed to take power. As I’ve said many times, I hope to live my whole life without ever pointing a gun at another human being, but if that 1% of tyrants had a hard time rounding up jack-booted thugs to drag Americans out of their beds because they had very complete data telling them that a lot of those Americans were armed, if that knowledge made them think twice about kicking down the doors of “traitors” and “subversives” and liberal public school teachers, then the Second Amendment is doing its job, and in that unlikely (but not impossible or even historically unprecedented) dystopia, we’ll be glad it was there in the Bill of Rights. 

Lastly, let’s acknowledge that we could do everything in our power, beef up mental health care, close every gun purchasing loophole, ban this gun and that gun, hell, ban the sale of every gun and start kicking down doors to get the old ones melted down, and we still might not be able to prevent the next Newtown. We also wouldn’t be any closer to understanding this terrible, tragic, and ultimately incomprehensible act. If the shooting at Sandy Hook Elementary School has compelled us to reevaluate some public policies, let’s harness that energy to make good ones, but let’s acknowledge that we will be more successful at preventing some of the thousands of other deaths in this country than at preventing the kinds of mass killings we simply cannot comprehend. If we maintain a focus on doing what we can do, and on doing it well, we might manage wrest a little bit of something meaningful from this mindless horror. I worry that, if we only focus on this one tragedy and the specific models of guns chosen by a madman, we’ll fall back into pointless bickering, do nothing, and insult the memories of those we’ve lost.

 

"Jesus is here." Best email exchange ever?

Today I was forwarded an email exchange that passed between a couple colleagues of mine at school. The high school where I work has a high enough Latino population that this didn't initially raise any eyebrows. Trust me, this was completely un-ironic. I'll let it speak for itself.

To: J-
From: N-
Subject: Jesus is here
Would you like me to send him to you or would you like to come over?
Thanks,
N-


To: N-
From: J-

Subject: Re: Jesus is here 
N-

Thank you for your help with Jesus.

Jesus was suspended today for extreme attendance issues. I have a meeting set up with him and his guardian tomorrow morning to discuss what he/we can do to help.

Thank you,

J- 

Poem: The Kind of Teacher

I was inspired to write a little poem during school today. I'm sure it would have been much better if I hadn't been forced to wait until my prep period to write it down. This certainly is not about any great lesson I taught today, but I wish it were.

The Kind of Teacher

When class begins

I can see the skepticism

The loll of tired heads

Eyes rolling

Maybe a sneer.

At my best,

I can earn a nod

Acknowledgement of time well spent.

Maybe a thoughtful “Huh.”

Occasionally a “Whoa.”

Of course the class ends with

My obligatory thanks for their attention

Wishes for a good day

Reminders about pending assignments

See-you-tomorrows.

But if I were the kind of teacher I want to be

All the classes would crescendo

With that moment of realization

Where a teenage skepticism is breached

Punctured by some uncool grownup insight.

And I would look them in the eyes

Unrolling eyes

Attentive, expectant eyes

And shout,

“So There!”

Okay, so I know it's not the greatest poem in the world. But then, the greatest song in the world isn't the greatest, either (see below). I guess this poem is a tribute to the poem about teaching I wanted to write. I think teachers will get it, though.

A Debate About the Hatred, Intolerance, and Misogyny in the Religious Right

My friend Scott, commenting on my dissemination of an article critical of the role the Religious Right is playing in our country's politics, challenged the assertion that the Religious Right is hateful or intolerant. He acknowledged the zealotry of fringe elements, but challenged the notion that the mainstream of the Religious Right is hateful or intolerant. This is an excellent illustration of a kind of inside-the-bubble thinking that is causing the conservative movement to lose touch with the American mainstream.

I do not believe that right-wing evangelicals, conservative Catholics, conservative Mormons, or conservative Jews hate gay people. I don't think they hate African Americans or Hispanics. I don't think they hate women. But if they can't see that their marriage to the Republican Party and its platform will cause them to be associated with policies that are hurtful to those groups, they will not be able to build a winning coalition on a national level.

Back in the days of slavery, masters did not necessarily hate their slaves. Even in the days of Jim Crow and anti-miscegenation laws, conservatives who wanted to "preserve traditional marriage" did not necessarily hate black people. Now, I know these examples will immediately infuriate conservatives who don't want to be compared to slaveholders or racists. I'm certainly not saying that opposing gay marriage or immigration reform are one-to-one equivalents to slavery. But the comparison is fair in the sense that modern conservatives look back at that kind of racism and see it as hateful and intolerant, but cannot see their own policies in the way they will be perceived by the effected parties now, or by the way they will be viewed by our grandchildren in generations to come.

To the gay couple who wants to be married, the personal feelings of a right-wing Christian are irrelevant. The policies advocated by the Religious Right are themselves hurtful. Furthermore, because they are based on a view that an important part of a gay person's self-identity is immoral, the policy is hateful.

To the Mexican-American (or any other Latino mistaken for a Mexican American), policies of self-deportation that cause them to be harassed, that cause employers to hesitate when considering them for employment, that cause them to worry that their government is going to be rounding up millions of people who look and speak like them and send them over the border... These concerns are far more relevant than the personal feelings of the religious conservative. The objective fact that vitriol towards Mexican immigrants has led to a dramatic increase in the number of hate crimes directed at Mexican Americans, regardless of their documentation, is far more real and immediate than some distant pastor's hedging from the pulpit about how we should love our brothers and sisters while trying to round some of them up in cattle cars and send them over the border.

To a woman who is told that, if she is raped and decides not to keep that child, God wanted that to happen (or at least allowed it, though it's an unfortunate tragedy), that good can come from that pregnancy, that because someone else believes this she has no choice in the matter, and that her rape probably wasn't really rape since she allowed herself to get pregnant, that right-wing evangelical's love for her is less than meaningful. More insidiously, when she’s told she doesn’t need any legislation like the Lilly Ledbetter Fair Pay Act to assure her a chance to get into the courthouse if she’s discriminated against because she can depend on the goodwill of CEOs, she knows she’s being dismissed. And when she’s told that her desire for birth control makes her a slut, and her desire to have a health clinic nearby which offers affordable medical services is unacceptable if that facility also offers abortions, she knows her concerns are not valued. Finally, when she’s told that the religious affiliation of her employer trumps her own judgment about what healthcare she needs, she knows the party defending some religious board members does not care about her. That’s hurtful. And the notion that she can’t evaluate these things properly because she’s a woman, and a man or a group of men should get to decide is a textbook example of misogyny. (Oh, and then there's this.)

As for intolerance, not only is the religious right intolerant, but it should be. Intolerance is not always wrong, and tolerance is not always a virtue. Religions get to be intolerant. Furthermore, they get to be intolerant regardless of popular opinion. If a religion dictates that abortion in a sin, it should refuse to tolerate it within its own membership. While American Christianity is busy pulling that mote out of its own eye (because there are a lot of Christians who have had abortions) it might also want to take a hard look at Jesus’ teachings about wealth. He wasn’t a big fan. I would be very interested to see how the Religious Right would implement a systematic intolerance of the service of Mammon within its own ranks.

The problem with the Religious Right's intolerance isn’t that it’s drawing lines in the sand and deciding to take a stand based on its particular interpretation of scripture. That’s the prerogative, if not the responsibility, of religions. The problem is where they’ve drawn those lines. Nations states also have a responsibility to be intolerant to some degree, but they must look to a different authority than a religion. While people of faith can look to a text or a religious leader to tell them what or who to tolerate and what or who not to tolerate, democratic governments must look to their voters. In this country, that means the government will be responsive to Christianity in proportion to the voting habits of Christians and non-Christians. But the Religious Right has so wedded itself to the Republican Party that it dictates the party’s platform. Even that is fine. If a large enough constituency of any party draws its lines based on a shared religion or principles which join the members of its party, that party’s platform should reflect those principles. The problem pointed out by the article is that the Religious Right’s principles are out of step with Biblical Christianity and the American electorate.

Now, since I’m no longer a Christian, I can’t really weigh in on the debate about the principles of the Republican Party and their relationship to Biblical Christianity. When I was a Christian, they didn’t seem to fit the Bible I was reading. I’d hear the claims made by religious figures speaking in the name of the religion I claimed, and, no matter what translation they cited, I felt like they were reading a completely different book. I kept on trying to redefine Christianity, pushing back against the right-wing version I couldn’t square with the version of Jesus I found in the Gospels. More and more, I felt like I was saying, “I claim the label X, but I redefine it as Y. X means something completely different for me, but I hold on to it and believe all those who don’t accept Y are wrong.” People who do this are either dynamic leaders who move organizations to their positions, or they are crazy people. I felt overwhelmed, and it pushed me out of a feeling of brotherhood with the larger Church, or at least the American variety. I stuck around because I attended a wonderful church (shout out to the greatest congregation and greatest pastoral staff in the world at Newberg Friends). Eventually I abandoned the claim to the label for theological reasons. (To be more precise, it was for epistemological reasons.) The loss of a firm belief in an all-mighty deity and in an afterlife, and my reluctant embrace of agnosticism, was quite a blow. The loss of my congregation still hurts. But losing the broader American church? No skin off my nose. They kicked me out. Or maybe I pulled away. Ultimately, that’s six of one or a half a dozen of the other. If the church would recognize the kind of loving, tolerant Christianity described by Frank Schaeffer in the article in question, I think that would be great for our country. That’s why I posted a link to the piece in the first place. Whether it would be good for Christianity is now a debate from which I have recused myself.

But Schaeffer’s second point, that the Religious Right’s positions are out of touch with the American mainstream, is clearly true. When polled, Americans do favor comprehensive immigration reform over policies of forced or self-deportation. We have come around when it comes to gay marriage. And we want to leave reproductive choices up to individual women, especially in cases of incest and rape, which means the Republican Party’s stated platform (not just some fringe kooks’ poorly worded statements in debates) is out of touch. And while the conservatives convince themselves that they are not in the thrall of the Religious Right because they nominated a (conservative) Mormon, their willful ignorance of the way their policies will be received by the American mainstream aren’t just a lesson for religious leaders who want to be politically relevant, but for the whole conservative movement. Conservatism, according to William F. Buckley, is the political philosophy that “stands athwart history, yelling Stop[.]” Unfortunately, in marrying itself to right wing Christianity, it’s held hands with people who demanded that it stop in a place where the majority of the country does not want to be. It can stand there and reject the idea that it’s hateful and intolerant all it wants, but if the majority of the country says that’s a hateful and intolerant stand to take, the conservative movement will soon find itself standing on the fringe, trying to redefine the term “American” as the vast majority of Americans wander off toward progress, shaking their heads and shrugging about the crazy guys they are leaving behind. Trust me. I know how that feels.

William F. Buckley also warned that, “Conservatives pride themselves on resisting change, which is as it should be. But intelligent deference to tradition and stability can evolve into intellectual sloth and moral fanaticism, as when conservatives simply decline to look up from dogma because the effort to raise their heads and reconsider is too great.” As a progressive liberal who wants a great deal of change, I firmly believe in the value of conservatives. We need the intellectual counterweight to make us stop and consider and we push toward progress, even if it means we push more slowly. But, as they protect the status quo, if the conservative movement can’t recognize that its intransigence will open itself up to charges of hatefulness, intolerance, and misogyny until the day when we achieve a society devoid of systematic injustice, that’s a kind of intellectual sloth that will prevent them from doing the job this country needs them to do. The degree to which those charges of hatefulness, intolerance, and misogyny stick relates to the movement’s willingness to shift its priorities and focus, but ultimately it’s just not up to them. When America wants to move, it will move.

Please Abandon the Myth of the Center-Right Nation

Over the next few days, if you pay attention to the election post-game show, you will inevitably hear them use the phrase “Center-Right Nation.” They will use it to explain why Obama won. They will use it to explain why Romney lost. They will use it to explain that Obama won in spite of this fact. They will use it to explain that Romney lost in spite of this fact.

But it’s not a fact. It’s not even a lie, per se. It’s just label devoid of context. It’s only a myth in the sense that some Greek deity is a myth, a character who doesn’t really exist interacting within a pantheon that doesn’t really exist. Except that’s being too generous, because there might be a Zeus or an Athena, and they might live on a Mount Olympus somewhere. “Center-Right,” without some context, doesn’t mean anything, anywhere.

So, every time you hear a pundit use the phrase, shout at your television. Scream, “BS!” or “Bollocks!” or “Cockamamie malarkey!” (if you’re Joe Biden).  Flip your TV the bird. Take off a shoe and throw it at the set. Tweet #CallinBullshit and tell people what network is still floating this garbage. But whatever you do, don’t let this slide.

Here’s how you know it’s a lie: Imagine someone was trying to give you driving directions. They told you to go down three blocks, turn left on Monroe St., and find the third house on your left, the one with the red door and the white fence, with the number 7597 on the mailbox. You could get there, right? Now imagine they told you to drive three blocks down to the ocean, then make a right heading south down the coast, and look for a houseboat that isn’t tied to the docks. The boat is adrift in a moving sea, it changes its distance from the shore based on the tide, and it’s generally headed north. It was last seen in your town about five presidencies ago. Do you honestly expect to find it there now, just because they waved vaguely in the direction of the ocean and told you to go to the “Center-Right”? No. Freakin’. Way.

My analogy is actually an oversimplification. If the houseboat is America and it is drifting slowly to the north on a changing political sea, the analogy implies that at least the land is fixed and you have control over your own position on that fixed ground. In fact, there’s an active earthquake fault line in that area and you have a sever inner ear condition. We can only know the position of the boat relative to where the land used to be, and we can only interpret that in relation to which way our ear is causing us to lean that day. Now, can you honestly say the boat will consistently be found in the “Center-Right” of this universe?

I’ve tried to give these pundits the benefit of the doubt. (My wife says that’s a bad habit of mine.) If the statement is meaningful, maybe they are referring to some kind of global political spectrum in which the U.S. is near the middle, but slightly to the right, of the other countries in the world. This just doesn’t add up, though. We’re to the right of many countries, but their politics are in flux. For example, countries in Europe have institutions like national health services which imply they are more left-wing than we are. However, these same countries, when faced with almost identical economic pressures during our most recent housing collapse and the ensuing recession, chose austerity programs that were far more right-wing than anything our citizens would have tolerated. While they slashed government spending, we developed a Tea Party that quickly grew to focus on social issues and which succeeded only in knocking moderate Republicans out of their primaries, thus ensuring the passage of Obamacare and a Democratic majority in the Senate that could make sure it wouldn’t go away even if Mitt Romney won the presidential election. In short, our response has been more left wing, and not because of our President, but because our right-wingers couldn’t capture a majority in a time when a left-wing program was being enacted.  In relation to Europe, America had a left-wing response.

For that matter, why do we measure our political spectrum on a continuum that stretches from the Netherlands on the left to Saudi Arabia on the right? I was under the impression that comparing ourselves to the modern countries of the “Old World,” or to any foreign country, was somehow un-American. 

Still trying to give these pundits the benefit of the doubt, I imagined they were putting modern America in a historical context, somewhere between Mussolini’s Italy on the right and Mao’s People’s Republic on the left. But this historical model doesn’t work, either. Most positions held by modern Americans related to the enfranchisement of voters, the role of government in public life, and the relationship between the state and religion, for example, would all have been considered wildly left-wing at some point in history. Women and minorities voting? Crazy liberal idea. Religious pluralism and tolerance? Nutso liberal. Public libraries and schools? Left-wing extremism. But America didn’t normalize these ideas through a left-wing revolution (well, maybe we normalized the liberal idea of voting rather than obeying a king through a left-wing revolution, and maybe we ended slavery through an incredibly bloody civil war, but most of the mainstreaming of these liberal ideas happened more peacefully and more slowly). Now these ideas aren’t liberal. They are the norm. Not only did the country drift on a slow tide toward a more inclusive, tolerant, and activist political structure, but the culture shifted around these ideas. Furthermore, we are products of that culture, so we moved around in that cultural milieu, such that a woman could run as a vice-presidential candidate and not think of her candidacy as the product of a million liberal victories. From where she was standing, she felt like a conservative (and looked like it to the rest of us). 

American can’t be “Center-Right,” because wherever America is, that’s its center currently. A few years ago, the political center was firmly opposed to gay marriage. Karl Rove was able to use it as a wedge issue to get his base to the polls and put George W. Bush into the White House. But that wasn’t a center-right position. That won. It was the center. As of last night, gay marriage is winning. It is becoming the center. Does that mean we’re a “Center-Left” nation? No. In thirty or forty years, our children will be standing on different ground, looking out at a different sea, leaning whichever way their inner-ear conditions cause them to lean, but I would bet good money that if they are told where the houseboat of America sailed back in 2012, they’d say it was a far-right position wherein only a few states allowed gay marriage, something that will be so normal they won’t even consider it up for public debate. 

In one last, desperate attempt to believe the TV blowhards were using a term that meant something, I considered the possibility that they were speaking about the rate of change Americans generally find tolerable. Maybe they mean we keep moving that center to the left, but we do so slowly because we’ve got some kind of right-wing ideology written into our genetic code. Our history doesn’t bare that idea out, either. Sometimes the boat moves quickly, as it has with gay marriage. Sometimes the boat moves very slowly. Slavery lasted for hundreds of years in North America, and it was followed by Jim Crow. Even with a second term African-American President, we still carry the vestiges of deep seeded racism within our culture. It’s not the law anymore. It’s not a basis for public policy. It’s not even socially acceptable for the majority of Americans. But it’s not gone. On that front, we’ve moved very slowly to the left. Our national xenophobia has refocused on people from different countries of origin as every passing generation tried to burn the bridges behind them by calling the next wave of immigrants an unfair burden on the system. In that way, the ocean stays in place and the land moves. We go back and forth from isolationism to the flexing of military muscle like we’re riding the tides. Religious minorities go from cults to the mainstream in waves. But at every point, whether we’re isolationists who are concerned about Catholic Irish Immigrants or hawks slamming the doors on Mexicans and looking down our noses at Scientologists, that’s not left or right. It’s just the center. 

As of yesterday, America picked a guy who some portion of the population consider a socialist. Does that make us a “Center-Left” nation? Oh, and as of last night, he was still African American.  Does electing a black guy still qualify as a left-wing idea? We didn’t elect the Mormon guy. Does that make us right-wing evangelicals?  And we’re still about as polarized as we were going into the Civil War. Does that mean the Union and the Confederacy met in the middle and were all centrists? 

Labeling our whole country as “Center-Right,” is meaningless, and worse, it’s creates a false picture that whatever is right-wing today hold some kind of sway over the national psyche. If anything, our country is Progressive, but it’s making progress in fits and starts toward some far off goal that we haven’t defined and which won’t fall neatly into our current definitions of right and left. 

Elections tell us where we are. Pundits who try to tell us that we are, at our core, somewhere to the right or left of that position are invariably wrong. You aren’t to the left or right of where you sit reading this right now. America isn’t to the left or right of itself, either.

Bobby's 5 Point Plan

Yesterday, shortly after the debate, I received this wonderful bit of satire from the mother of one of my students. With her permission (and a name change), I want to share it. Just try to convince me this isn't a spot-on description of Romney's campaign promises:

"Mr. Gorman,
"After watching the 3 debates, Bobby has developed his own 5 point plan for your writing class.  He feels he doesn't need to know what the points are, just that he has one.  He also thinks you should accept that his paper is done without seeing it.  He says it will be posted on his website.  Bobby wants to tell you that all the scores were passing scores, so don't worry if the math doesn't add up.  Finally, Mr. Gorman, Bobby wants me to use the Romney philosophy of parenting which is to trust that he has a plan but doesn't need to share it." 

Why Does the Right Hate Obama So Much?: Part 3

I'm still waiting for someone to give a satisfactory explanation for why the Right seems to hate Obama so much. So far, the answers seem to be: A) He's black or in some other way different and that's scary, B) He's not an ultra-nationalist who preaches that America is and has always been perfect, or C) He's a harbinger of a demographic shift that will leave the Republican Party in permanent minority status, and they are pooping their pants with fear and obstructing everything he tries to do in order to stave off the inevitable. Without anyone making a particularly persuasive argument for any of these, I tend to think it's C. Mostly, this is because I'm a sucker and I like to think the best of people. C allows me to think that Republicans are not racists, nor are they so blinded by ideology that they are willfully ignorant of our country's history. Instead, they are smart people who can accurately read the political tea leaves. Maybe I'm wrong to give them the benefit of the doubt in this way.  But seriously, you should read the explanations some people have tried to give me (here and here). One would think, in almost four years in office, Obama would have done some far more substantive things to pick on, but the arguments are just pathetic.

Here's a great example I came across today. I'm a liberal and an Obama supporter, and I'm also a gun owner (as I've explained here). Even though I'm not a member of the NRA, nor do I support half of what they do, I somehow got on their email list. The NRA has been going all-out against Obama. The level of vitriol is nuts. But, just as I've requested it here, I've been examining their posts to try to figure out why they hate him so much. They seem to have three big pieces of evidence against him. One is an offhand comment he made during the his election campaign about clinging to God and guns. It was a stupid way of putting it, but it's actually not an anti-gun or anti-God comment. He was talking about people who vote against their economic self interest, trying to explain why they would do that, and said that they have lost hope of any true political change and thus hold on to what is important to them. Saying that guns are important to people shouldn't be interpreted as anti-gun rights, but that's how it was spun and that's what the NRA heard.

Second, they're freaked out about the U.N. International Small Arms Treaty. I don't buy this critique, either. Is it a bureaucratic boondoggle? Probably. Will it be as toothless as most international agreements? Probably. Will it effectively keep guns out of the hands of warlords? Probably not. But is it part of some global plot to limit the rights of American gun owners, some nefarious first step in a worldwide gun registration and confiscation scheme? Absolutely not. At its best it will keep a few guns out of the hands of warlords who kill children and terrorists who shoot at our soldiers, but it probably won't do anything at all. If this is the case against Obama, it says more about NRA paranoia than it does about him.

Then there's the third piece of evidence, the mess that was Operation Fast and Furious. And guess who just reported to all its members that the blame for the mess lies with some ATF agents and the Pheonix District Attorney's Office? The NRA! Check it out if you don't believe me: "Draft Report Blames Many for Fast and Furious" Guess who the draft report does NOT blame: President Obama. Now, someone who really wants to believe that Obama is responsible could say this is part of a massive conspiracy to cover up his close, personal involvement with a local ATF operation, but I am not willing to live in that ideologically-driven fantasy land. To me, the NRA has just made a persuasive argument that one reason they hate Obama has no merit.


Here's Obama's track record on guns (well summarized by Steve Chapman for reason.com):

"[H]e has proposed nothing in the way of new federal restrictions on firearms. Even the "assault weapons" ban signed by President Clinton—and allowed to expire in 2004—has no visible place on his agenda.

"Not only that, he's approved changes that should gladden the hearts of gun-rights supporters, a group that includes me. He signed a law permitting guns to be taken into national parks. He signed another allowing guns as checked baggage on Amtrak. He acted to preserve an existing law limiting the use of government information on firearms it has traced."

As Chapman also points out, the Brady Center to Prevent Gun Violence flunked President Obama on all seven of the items on its priority list.

Oh yeah, and Obama made his position on gun rights crystal clear. He said, "I believe in the Second Amendment. I believe in people's lawful right to bear arms. I will not take your shotgun away. I will not take your rifle away. I won't take your handgun away. … There are some common-sense gun safety laws that I believe in. But I am not going to take your guns away."

I think the NRA's antipathy towards the President is symbolic of the Right's feelings as well. They hate Obama. They can even give you reasons why they hate him. They just can't come up with any good ones. That leaves everyone else in America wondering where that deep well of hatred comes from, and it opens the Right up to some pretty damning speculation.