Fairness - The Commentary

With the 2012 popular vote supporting marriage equality regardless of gender winning in Maine, Maryland, Minnesota, and Washington, the struggle for marriage equality has turned a corner. It’s not  the  corner, but an important corner nevertheless. We can quibble all we want about whether human rights should ever be put up for a popular vote, but the fact that for the first time on a state-wide level activists have been able to beat back the huge funding mechanisms and built-in grassroots networks of right-wing churches and bigots is a symptom of an on-going cultural shift. And that’s worth celebrating. Along with the reelection of President Obama and other progressive wins, much of the regressive right-wing has acknowledged that they’re on the run. They’ve concluded that the Evangelical vote has lost the clout it held for the last decades. “I think this was an evangelical disaster,”  lamented Albert Mohler , president of Southern Baptist Theological Seminary in L...

That’s the gist of an all too common question. And when looking at the daily news, there’s clear reason for asking it. Recently we saw again what can happen when anti-Muslim Christians - this time using a film – chose to rile up anti-Christian Muslims. It’s as if both sides in such feuds thrive on the hatred of the other. And the psychological reality is, they do. Extreme right-wing religions play on the fears and insecurities of people growing up in a world that installs these in its children through what the late child psychologist Alice Miller calls “poisonous pedagogy.” In fact, their theologies enshrine and sanctify such childrearing practices. “There are countless theological explanations for the motives behind God’s inscrutable counsels,” Miller writes in  The Truth Will Set You Free  (2001), “but in all too many of them I see a terrorized child trying hard to interpret the mysterious actions of the [punishing] parent as good and loving, even though the chil...

The government of the United States has no right to tell two consenting adults whom they can and cannot love. That’s the essence of the argument for marriage equality. Religions can believe anything they want, but love is none of the government’s business. Let religions fight with each other over this, for there are religious people everywhere disagreeing over who people should or shouldn’t love. When a society is built on fear and hate, whether religiously or otherwise inspired, those who dare to love whom they want are seen as subversive. They’re the ones willing to fight society’s fear and hate so they can live as people who love another. Groups that want to limit the definition of love so it fits nicely within their stifling boundaries get scared by love that knows no bounds. They visit their fears of what it would mean if they themselves loved boldly on those who don’t fit what feels safe to them. It doesn’t matter that real loving never always feels “safe.” It feels vul...

It’s silly season. And it would be laughable if elections weren’t downright serious. We’re about to see the worst of politics. It’s been building all summer, but now the money really flows. So, here we go. “Awash in money” is an understatement as the 1% bids for owning the political winners. The system is drowning in corporate and billionaire’s contributions. As cowboy-comedian Will Rogers, Jr, put it generations ago: “We’ve got the best Congress money can buy.” Not telling the truth has always been a part of politics, but we can expect outright lies from the right-wing to increase to a level never seen before. And when someone points out the lie, we can expect them to continue and do it blatantly. There’s no penalty in the mainstream media. Even if it’s a known lie, when repeated long enough, it becomes just another opinion taken to be equal to fact-based claims. It’s unusual to find anyone in the mainstream media who is any help. If it weren’t for the evening lineup on ...

Who can’t understand why people are frustrated, skeptical, fed up? We have two political parties with a monopoly on politics that are dominated by corporate interests. We often find ourselves voting for the least awful alternative, not a candidate who courageously champions our interests. We hear the label “liberal” used of people who barely lean left and often tilt to the right, who readily seem to cave in to the right-wing in order to get re-elected. We desperately want to believe in someone. So we scrounge around like abused spouses clinging to anything that tells us they’re for us, that their critics don’t understand. We make excuses for their failures to stand boldly against the opposition. We tell ourselves to be realists because it’s really, really, really the best they can accomplish “given the state of politics.” Such feelings are widespread. In terms of the corporate world, for example,  a recently released Gallup poll  conducted in 2011 indicates that abou...

In response to the President publicly supporting marriage equality, it’s open season for right-wing pastors to publicly preach violence toward LGBT people. Brown University political scientist  Michael Tesler has previously shown , as in a recent issue of  The American Journal of Political Science ,  that President Obama has such an affect on race-conscious voters that they adjust their positions on health care reform, taxes, Supreme Court justices, and even  a president’s dog  because of him. Tesler’s recent analysis of surveys on marriage equality (“T he Spillover of Racialization into Marriage Equality ”) demonstrates that Obama’s support pulls blacks toward equality, but also pushes white “racial conservatives” away. The most rabid of them feel free to spout the same hatred toward LGBT people as they do toward the not-white president. On May 6 th  at Berean Baptist Church in Fayetteville, NC,  Pastor Sean Hayes’ sermon  recommended m...

In a Greenville NBC affiliate interview, North Carolina’s outgoing Democratic governor Beverly Perdue said: “People around the country are watching us, and they’re really confused. To have been such a progressive, forward-thinking, economically driven state that invested in education and that stood up for the civil rights of people, including the civil rights marches back in the ‘50s and ‘60s and ‘70s — folks are saying, ‘What in the world is going on in North Carolina?’ We look like Mississippi.” Perdue was reacting to North Carolina’s 62 to 38 percent approval of a constitutional amendment to ban non-heterosexual marriage. On May 8, it became the 29 th  state to do so and the last of the Southern states - including Mississippi. Fair criticism? I don’t know. After all, she didn’t say: “We look as  bad  as the Magnolia State.” I live in Missouri, a former slave state that passed such an amendment by an even greater margin. Here state legislators scramble to outd...

There’s another argument to be made when people fight state and federal marriage amendments like the one just passed in North Carolina. It has the potential to take back the debate because it’s about the Constitution and the First Amendment’s guarantee of religious freedom. There’s no doubt that the need for marriage equality is first and foremost about the civil and legal benefits that currently come with government recognition and approval of two people’s legal commitment to each other. It might be that the ultimate solution to the issue is to recognize marriage as only a civil issue with its legal benefits for everyone. Couples could then add the blessings to their union of a religious institution of their choice if they desired. Yet the history of marriage in US culture and consciousness is one enmeshed with religious images, sanctions, and overtones. That means that we must take those connections in American consciousness seriously. There is an established legal history ...

I lost what was left of my naiveté about the equal justice ideal of the Supreme Court with their decision in  Bush v. Gore  to select George W. Bush president by suspending Florida’s vote recount in 2000. That political overreach by the increasingly activist right-wing majority, interfering in a state’s right to count its own votes, was so radical that in the decision itself they forbid it to ever be cited in the future as a precedent. Harvard Law Professor, Alan Dershowitz concluded: “[T]he decision in the Florida election case may be ranked as the single most corrupt decision in Supreme Court history, because it is the only one that I know of where the majority justices decided as they did because of the personal identity and political affiliation of the litigants. This was cheating, and a violation of the judicial oath.” ( Supreme Injustice: How the High Court Hijacked Election 2000 ) I should have known. I’d read Howard Zinn’s  A People’s History of the United S...