Freedom of Religion and Freedom from Religion
23 Feb 2012 5 Comments
in 2012 Election, Civil Liberties, Culture, Politics Tags: 2012 Election, David Corn, Kathleen Parker, Maureen Dowd, Michael Steele, Religion, Republicans, Rick Santorum
The first Amendment to the Constitution reads, “Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion….” I don’t think that Rick Santorum has read the Constitution recently if ever. Last night on Hardball Chris Matthews tried to referee a shouting match between Michael Steele, the former chair of the Republican Party who tried to defend Santorum’s introduction of his religious beliefs into governing policy and David Corn who tried without success to explain why the introduction of religion was wrong. All three of them missed the point. The point is that we can have no established religion in this country and while those who govern as President can have personal religious beliefs, they cannot impose them on the country.
Kathleen Parker ended her recent column titled “The Trials of Saint Santorum” this way
Everything stems from his allegiance to the Catholic Church’s teachings that every human life has equal value and dignity. The church’s objection to birth control is based on concerns that sex without consequences would lead to men reducing women “to being a mere instrument for the satisfaction of (their) own desires,” as well as abuse of power by public authorities and a false sense of autonomy.
Within that framework, everything Santorum says and does makes sense, even if one doesn’t agree. When he says that he doesn’t think the government should fund prenatal testing because it leads to abortion, this is emotional Santorum, father of a disabled child and another who died hours after a premature birth. In both instances, many doctors would have recommended abortion, but Santorum believes that those lives, no matter how challenging, have intrinsic value.
Though Santorum’s views are certainly controversial, his biggest problem isn’t that he is out of step with mainstream America. His biggest problem is that he lacks prudence in picking his battles and his words. The American people are loath to elect a preacher or a prophet to lead them out of the desert of unemployment. And they are justified in worrying how such imprudence might translate in areas of far graver concern than whether Santorum doesn’t personally practice birth control.
Parker’s statement that “the American people are loath to elect a preacher of a prophet” is exactly right. And he is definitely out of step with mainstream America. Maureen Dowd was even blunter opening her column with
Rick Santorum has been called a latter-day Savonarola.
That’s far too grand. He’s more like a small-town mullah.
…
Santorum is not merely engaged in a culture war, but “a spiritual war,” as he called it four years ago. “The Father of Lies has his sights on what you would think the Father of Lies would have his sights on: a good, decent, powerful, influential country — the United States of America,” he told students at Ave Maria University in Florida. He added that mainline Protestantism in this country “is in shambles. It is gone from the world of Christianity as I see it.”
Satan strikes, a Catholic exorcist told me, when there are “soul wounds.” Santorum, who is considered “too Catholic” even by my über-Catholic brothers, clearly believes that America’s soul wounds include men and women having sex for reasons other than procreation, people involved in same-sex relationships, women using contraception or having prenatal testing, environmentalists who elevate “the Earth above man,” women working outside the home, “anachronistic” public schools, Mormonism (which he said is considered “a dangerous cult” by some Christians), and President Obama (whom he obliquely and oddly compared to Hitler and accused of having “some phony theology”).
Rick Santorum wants us to be a Christian country and beyond that a fundamentalist Catholic one. How different this is from President John F. Kennedy declaring that the Pope would not run the government. Mullah Rick needs to read the Constitution.
It is too easy to make fun of him. This is a dangerous man. We need to take him seriously.
Obama’s Holiday Scorecard
06 Jan 2012 Leave a Comment
in 2012 Election, Afghanistan/Pakistan, Civil Liberties, Iraq War, Obama Administration, Politics Tags: 2012 Election, alexander cockburn, Consumer Finance Protection Bureau, George W. Bush, National Defense Authorization Act, President Obama, recess appointments
I may be stretching the “holiday” a bit, but since Congress is still on vacation, I will use the term to talk about my tally of his most recent almost 10 days.
First, the pluses. The recess appointments, the cuts to the defense budget and his continuing feisty attitude. The negative is the signing of the National Defense Authorization Act.
The negative first. Alexander Cockburn’s analysis in the Nation is the best I’ve seen. He explains
The change came with the whisper of Barack Obama’s pen, as he signed into law the National Defense Authorization Act (NDAA), the annual ratification of military Keynesianism—$662 billion this time—which has been our national policy since World War II bailed out the New Deal.
Sacrificial offerings to the Pentagon aren’t news. But this time, snugly ensconced in the NDAA came ratification by legal statute of the exposure of US citizens to arbitrary arrest without subsequent benefit of counsel, and to possible torture and imprisonment sine die. Goodbye, habeas corpus.
We’re talking here about citizens within the borders of the United States, not sitting in a hotel or out driving in some foreign land. In the latter case, as the late Anwar al-Awlaki’s incineration in Yemen bore witness a few months ago, the well-being or summary demise of a US citizen is contingent upon a secret determination of the president as to whether the aforementioned citizen is waging a war of terror on the United States. If the answer is in the affirmative, the citizen can be killed on the president’s say-so without further ado.
This is the latest disappointment on civil liberties. I had such high hopes for a reversal of the Bush II trend after we elected a Constitutional expert. In the sum, Obama has been almost worse. ratifying decisions made by W and going further.
The President at Shaker Height HS
On the positive side, the New York Times says
On Wednesday, after waiting until the dust in Iowa had settled, clearing out space in newspapers and on television, Mr. Obama delivered another jab, announcing four recess appointments, including that of Richard Cordray as head of a new consumer protection agency, despite Republican opposition. On Thursday, the president went to the Pentagon and outlined a new military strategy that embraces hundreds of billions of dollars in cuts to what is a Republican sacred cow, and made it clear that American ground forces would no longer be large enough to conduct prolonged, large-scale counterinsurgency campaigns like those in Iraq and Afghanistan.
The cuts in the defense budget are a welcome change. I have thought since the days when I demonstrated at the Pentagon against the War in Vietnam. Let’s face it, the last 3 groundwars we have engaged in have been disasters. Maybe the Bush I war to repel Iraq from the invasion os Kuwait can be counted as a success. But Bush 1 knew when to stop.
In an unusual appearance at the Pentagon briefing room on Thursday, Mr. Obama outlined a new national defense strategy driven by three realities: the winding down of a decade of war in Iraq and Afghanistan, a fiscal crisis demanding hundreds of billions of dollars in Pentagon budget cuts and a rising threat from China and Iran.
A fourth reality, not mentioned in the briefing room, was Mr. Obama’s re-election campaign and the chorus of Republican presidential candidates who have sought to portray him as decimating the Pentagon budget and being weak in his response to Iran.
Mr. Obama, who spoke surrounded by a tableau of the Joint Chiefs of Staff in dress uniforms and with chests full of medals, underscored the national security successes of his administration — the ending of the Iraq war, the killing of Osama bin Laden and the ouster of Col. Muammar el-Qaddafi of Libya — before declaring that the United States would downsize to a smaller ground force, get rid of “outdated cold war-era systems” and step up investments in intelligence-gathering and cyberwarfare.
…
The new strategy document finally defines away the Defense Department’s historic requirement to have the ability to fight and win two wars at once — a measure that one official said “has been on life-support for years.”
The strategy released under Mr. Obama in 2010 said the military was responsible for “maintaining the ability to prevail against two capable nation-state aggressors.”
In contrast, the strategy released Thursday said the military must be able to fight one war, but is responsible only for “denying the objectives of — or imposing unacceptable costs on — an opportunistic aggressor in a second region.”
Senior Pentagon officials said that viewing military requirements through something as static as the two-war model had become outdated, and that the true measurement was whether the Pentagon could field a force capable of carrying out a wide range of military actions to protect the nation’s interests.
Pentagon officials made it clear that the department’s priorities in coming years would be financing for defense and offense in cyberspace, for Special Operations forces and for the broad area of intelligence, surveillance and reconnaissance.
I have never agreed with 100% of what any politician does, but this scorecard isn’t bad. It will be interesting to see what the impact of all this is on the President’s re-election.
Dave Barry and the TSA
15 Nov 2010 Leave a Comment
in Civil Liberties, Culture Tags: AirportSecurity, Dave Barry, Nate Silver
OK. I know lots of people will probably post this link, but I couldn’t resist. I had just come home from work and was in the bedroom getting changed. I habitually turn on one of the local NPR stations and listen for a few moments. Tonight, I couldn’t believe what I was hearing. Dave Barry didn’t pass his x-ray screening (blurry groin) and had to get a pat down. If you haven’t heard him tell the tale, you are missing funny story.
But the sad thing is that as funny as he makes his experience sound, I think we have gone overboard screening airline passengers. Yes, I know I wouldn’t say that if I ever found myself on a plane with a person with a bomb, but is all the radiation and the groping worth it? Are we willing to risk future cancers (especially the airline personnel) and/or humiliation to be safe. There has to be a better way.
Even Nate Silver is looking at the issue.
My first experience with the full-body scanners, on a flight back to Kennedy Airport from San Diego last month, was also a negative one. I had assumed that, whatever their other faults, the full-body scanners would at least speed up the process of going through the security line; I supposed I imagined something like this scene from the movie Total Recall, in which passengers literally don’t even have to pause to go through security as their bodies are scanned while they walk toward the departure gate.
Instead, the lines were quite slow — possibly because the machines were coming up with a lot of false positives, myself included. As is my usual practice when passing through airport security, I emptied my pants pockets completely — there wasn’t so much as a stick of gum, a penny, or a taxi receipt in there. But the machine nevertheless insisted that that there was something in the back right-hand pocket of my jeans. When the official from the Transportation Security Administration asked me what I had in my pocket, and I told him that there was absolutely nothing, he then performed a pat-down. I was in a chipper enough mood that I wasn’t inclined to make a scene, but I did ask the T.S.A. official whether it was routine for the machines to see things that weren’t there, to which he declined to respond.
Still, it shifted my overall opinion of the technology from positive to negative. This may be something to keep in mind when reviewing polls on the topic.
Silver points out that while polls show overwhelming support fo the new technology, the number of people who fly and have experienced the new screening is relatively low.
The T.S.A. is fond of citing polls which suggest that about 75 or 80 percent of air travelers approve of the new machines. There are a couple of issues having to do with the timing of these surveys, however. Most of them were conducted in January, immediately after the failed attempt last Christmas day by a Nigerian man, who had concealed explosives in his underwear, to blow up a plane travelling from Amsterdam to Detroit — during which time concern about air travel security would naturally have been quite elevated.
…
What I think we need to know then, is how those who have actually traveled through an airport that uses the full-body scanners feel about them — particularly if they’re people who fly frequently and are therefore going to bear the burden of any inconvenience, embarrassment, invasion of privacy or health risk brought on by the new technology.
My guess is that a majority of such passengers will still approve of them: Americans are willing to tolerate a great number of things at the airport that they would never stand for in other parts of their lives. (Imagine, for instance, if you had to pass through a metal detector on the way into the shopping mall, or were diverted for 15 minutes through a security checkpoint every time that you wanted to drive on the Interstate.)
I haven’t flown since 9/11. I’ve never been particularly fond of flying anyway and now it seems there will be a choice between being x-rayed and, as Dave Barry pointed out, having the pictures beamed who knows where or being groped. I think I’ll drive or stay home for a while.
Religious Freedom in America
18 Aug 2010 Leave a Comment
in Civil Liberties, Human Rights, Politics Tags: 9/11, Democrats, George W. Bush, Maureen Dowd, Michael Bloomberg, New York Islamic Center, President Obama, Republicans
George W. Bush was right. [Never thought I would ever write that sentence.] The war on terror is not a war on Islam. So why are our political leaders like President Obama and the Anti-Defamation League so skittish about saying that it is perfectly OK for a religious institution to build whatever they want on private property? Would there be this kind of fuss if the Methodist Church decided to build a community center two blocks from Ground Zero? I think not.
I’ve been searching through a number of websites to see if there were an accurate number for the Muslims who were killed in the collapse of the World Trade Center on 9/11 without success. The numbers I’ve found range from 40 to as many as 200. It really doesn’t matter except that the survivors who think building an Islamic Community Center near Ground Zero seem to have forgotten the diversity of people who died.
According to Maureen Dowd in her column in today’s New York Times, there “…already are two mosques in the same neighborhood — one four blocks away and one 12 blocks away.”
[A worshiper enters Masjid Manhattan, which is sandwiched between two bars on Warren Street, about four blocks from the World Trade Center site. It was founded in 1970]
So what exactly is up with the President who made a strong, clear statement and then took at least a step back? Is it the political staff who worried that because of his name and the fact that some people still insist that he is Muslim it is bad for him to say there is a fundamental right to build an Islamic Community Center even if it is 2 blocks from Ground Zero?
Dowd points out
Let me be perfectly clear, Mr. Perfectly Unclear President: You cannot take such a stand on a matter of first principle and then take it back the next morning when, lo and behold, Harry Reid goes craven and the Republicans attack. What is so frightening about Fox News?
Some critics have said the ultimate victory for Osama and the 9/11 hijackers would be to allow a mosque to be built near ground zero.
Actually, the ultimate victory for Osama and the 9/11 hijackers is the moral timidity that would ban a mosque from that neighborhood.
A bit of advice from one of your supporters Mr. President: Do and say what you think is the right thing. Then don’t try to take it back. I believe that one of the reasons your popularity is falling is because you are seen as too calculating.
One bit of refreshing news is the open letter from six Muslim/Arab Republicans.
While some in our party have recently conceded the constitutional argument, they are now arguing that it is insensitive, intolerant and unacceptable to locate the center at the present location: “Just because they have the right to do so – does not make it the right thing to do” they say. Many of these individuals are objecting to the location as being too close to the Ground Zero site and voicing the understandable pain and anguish of the 9-11 families who lost loved ones in this horrible tragedy. In expressing compassion and understanding for these families, we are asking ourselves the following: if two blocks is too close, is four blocks acceptable? or six blocks? or eight blocks? Does our party believe that one can only practice his/her religion in certain places within defined boundaries and away from the disapproving glances of some citizens? Should our party not be standing up and taking a leadership role– just like President Bush did after 9-11 – by making a clear distinction between Islam, one of the great three monotheistic faiths along with Judaism and Christianity, versus the terrorists who committed the atrocities on 9-11 and who are not only the true enemies of America but of Islam as well? President Bush struck the right balance in expressing sympathy for the families of the 9-11 victims while making it absolutely clear that the acts committed on 9-11 were not in the name of Islam. We are hoping that our party leaders can do the same now – especially at a time when it is greatly needed.
Dowd cites two other Republicans
So look where we are. The progressive Democrat in the White House, the first president of the United States with Muslim roots, has been morally trumped by Mayor Michael Bloomberg and Gov. Chris Christie of New Jersey, two moderate Republicans who have spoken bravely and lucidly about not demonizing and defaming an entire religion in the name of fighting its radicals.
I have just heard that New York Governor David Patterson, a Democrat, was trying to set up some negotiations which would result in the Community Center being built on an alternative site. The President can start to redeem himself by calling Patterson and urging him to stop any such effort.
I say boo to the cowardly Democrats and good for the reasonable Republicans striking a blow for religious freedom. Let’s not let our fear of terrorist attacks let the extremists win.
Prop 8 is ruled illegal
04 Aug 2010 1 Comment
in Civil Liberties, Civil Rights, Gay Marriage, Politics Tags: CA Prop 8, Civil Rights, Gay Marriage, Gay Rights
In a ruling my husband said he could have made, Judge Vaughn Walker held this afternoon that the Califorina voter approved proposition is unconstitutional. The Prop 8 Suporters are expected to appeal and to argue that Judge Walker is gay and therefore biased.. I call this grasping at straws.
The Washington Post quoted Governor Schwarzenegger who as Govenor was the noninal defendant.
In a statement, California Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger (R) said, “For the hundreds of thousands of Californians in gay and lesbian households who are managing their day-to-day lives, this decision affirms the full legal protections and safeguards I believe everyone deserves.”
You may recall that the case was aruged by what has been described as the legal “odd couple”. The New York Times put it this way
…the plaintiffs’ case was argued by David Boies and Theodore Olson, ideological opposites who once famously sparred in the 2000 Supreme Court battle beween George W. Bush and Al Gore over the Florida recount and the presidency. The lawyers brought the case — Perry v. Schwarzenegger — in May 2009 on behalf of two gay couples who said that Proposition 8 impinged on their Constitutional rights to equal protection and due process.
The San Franciso Chronicle reported
Within minutes of the ruling, Maria Ydil, 31, and Vanessa Judicta, 32, headed to City Hall to apply for a marriage license. It was not immediately clear if they would get a license or be allowed immediately to marry.
A crowd trailed behind singing, “The Chapel of Love.”
While they were allowed to fill out paperwork, they were denied a license because the judge issued a stay on enforcement of the ruling pending further hearings on the issue, a city official said.
From the Times
“Being gay is about forming an adult family relationship with a person of a same sex, so denying us equality within the family system is to deny respect for the essence of who we are as gay people,” said Jennifer Pizer, the marriage project director for Lambda Legal in Los Angeles, who filed two briefs in favor of the plaintiffs. “And we believe that equality in marriage would help reduce discrimination in other settings because the government invites disrespect of us when it denies us equality.”
Between this decision making its way though the appeals process and the Massachusetts decision on the Defense of Marriage Act, the Supreme Court is going to have a pivitol role in the next step toward equal rights. I will be posting more on this in coming days, as I digest the ruling, but I think that the Loving v. Virginia decision is finally going to be extended to same sex marriage as well.
Taxes and Gay Marriage
18 Apr 2009 Leave a Comment
in Civil Liberties, Gay Marriage, Politics Tags: Defense of Marriage Act, Ellen Goodman, Gay Marriage, Stephen Colbert, Taxes
I wrote about a lawsuit filed in Massachusetts to end the Defense of Marriage Act back in March and yesterday Ellen Goodman published a good piece about why this is important. Titled “A Strange Duel Citizenship”, Goodman writes
THEY ARE NOT the only married couple in America who talk about taxes and ulcers in the same sentence. Nor are they the only couple who believe they are paying more than they should. On that ground they are part of a noisy majority.
But they are a couple for whom tax season also entails an identity crisis. You see, Melba Abreu and Beatrice Hernandez file state taxes as what they are – a legally married Massachusetts couple. But under federal law, they have to file federal taxes as what they aren’t – two single women.
This identity crisis is not just some psychological blip on the cheerful landscape of their family life. In the last four years, the government’s refusal to consider them a married couple has cost the writer and the CFO of a nonprofit about $5,000 a year. As Beatrice puts it, “We don’t know anyone for whom $20,000 and counting isn’t significant.”
This is not about forcing states to choose to marry people. It is about the simple act of recognizing legal marriages in other states. It is not different from my straight marriage being recognized in Massachusetts even though I got married in Virginia. Goodman concludes
So what do you say about an out-of-date law that enforces an identity crisis? What do you say about a law that “defends” marriage by denying it? The winds are blowing, but in a very different direction.
Amendment to this post
When I wrote this on Saturday morning, I hadn’t seen Stephen Colbert’s video mocking the anti-gay marriage ad – which he describes as combining the 700 Club and the Weather Channel. Take a look.
Secret Memos
07 Mar 2009 Leave a Comment
in Civil Liberties, Politics Tags: Bush Administration, John Yoo
The George W. administration was fond of secrecy: secret renditions to foreign countries, secrect meetings to develop an energy plan, and secret legal opinions were among the secrets. We’ve known about the existance of the John Yoo memos to justify just about everything for a while now, but the content is now public and he is either a very bad lawyer or he wanted to please his masters at Justice and in the White House so much he would write anything thing.
John Dean has a long essay in FindLawanalyzing the Yoo memos and their effect of the Office of Legal Counsel.
In reading these newly-released memos, along with the previously-released documents relating to the use of torture as an interrogation technique, it is pretty clear who was the bad apple at OLC, it was the lead attorney in pursuing these extreme and baseless OLC positions law professor John Yoo. It is likely that Yoo did the drafting, and then either he or his boss, the Assistant Attorney General in charge of OLC, Jay Bybee, signed off on the memos. Bybee now sits on the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit.
Dean also discusses the quality of Yoo’s legal work
Because Yoo became the leading legal adviser to the Bush White House after 9/11, many have looked closely at his scholarship, and more will likely scrutinize Yoo’s work with this new release of his OLC work product. When writing Broken Government, I paused to look at Yoo’s work and frankly was shocked to find such an intelligent person engaging in blatant intellectual dishonesty. It was not merely occasional excesses. Rather, when I examined his book War By Other Means, I found page after page of his material to be filled with deliberate distortions. In my book, I set forth example after example of his technique, and in doing so, I did not even scratch the surface of his deceitful methods of advocacy.
Also, I found that I was not alone in questioning Yoo’s intellectual integrity. For example, Georgetown law professor David Luban, when reviewing Yoo’s book War By Other Means for the New York Review of Books(Mar. 15, 2007), reported that “Yoo argues forcefully and intelligently, but not always honestly. Half-truths, straw men, double standards, selective quotations, significant omissions, and caricatures of his opponents’ positions – all are characteristic of War By Others Means.” [Emphasis added.] Unfortunately, this is how Yoo wrote legal opinions for OLC as well, which was very much contrary to the prior standards of that office.
So, are we going to prosecute Yoo and Bybee? Maybe they really didn’t have any evil intent, but they were interested in justifying the actions of those they worked for and those actions lead to violations of little things like the Geneva Conventions and the Convention Against Torture.
Seven newly released memos from the Bush Justice Department reveal a concerted strategy to cloak the President with power to override the Constitution. The memos provide “legal” rationales for the President to suspend freedom of speech and press; order warrantless searches and seizures, including wiretaps of U.S. citizens; lock up U.S. citizens indefinitely in the United States without criminal charges; send suspected terrorists to other countries where they will likely be tortured; and unilaterally abrogate treaties. According to the reasoning in the memos, Congress has no role to check and balance the executive. That is the definition of a police state.
That is Marjorie Cohn’s take on Alternet. She concludes
There are more memos yet to be released. They will invariably implicate Bush officials and lawyers in the commission of torture, illegal surveillance, extraordinary rendition, and other violations of the law.
Meanwhile, John Yoo remains on the faculty of Berkeley Law School and Jay Bybee is a federal judge on the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals. These men, who advised Bush on how to create a police state, should be investigated, prosecuted, and disbarred. Yoo should be fired and Bybee impeached.
President Obama is probably smart to not lead the charge, but to let Congress and the natural course of events to dictate prosecution. He and Eric Holder should just continue to mine the archives and release information. I have to believe that prosecutions will happen in the natural course of events.
Meanwhile over at the blog RedState, the most recent post is Warner Todd Hudson’s Fist [sic] Kill the Lawyers in which he rants about a Boston Globe story about lawyers getting laid off. (Why anyone would rejoice at anyone being laid off, I’m not sure but that is for a different discussion.) Hudson concludes
So, I rejoice at the troubles seen by Boston’s legal eagles and I hope their discomfiture is felt in every city of the land. I further hope that many of them find useful work in some furniture store or perhaps a nice Taco Bell somewhere. At least they’d finally be serving the public instead of milking them dry.
Anyway, let’s not kill all the lawyers in literal fashion. But let’s encourage them to seek a new profession, shall we?
Can we start with Yoo and Bybee?
