arizona and the communists

I live in Eastern Europe--you know, former Warsaw pact.  Where the commies were, and still are to a degree.  I moved here with my parents back in 1994--the wall had fallen, and freedom had come ... sort of.  Back in those days, freedom meant a weird combination of excessive license (widespread ignoring of the smoking and drinking ages, pornography plastered everywhere, etc) and residual aspects of the former totalitarian system that were simply so ingrained in people's psyches that no one realized that they actually were residual aspects of the former totalitarian system--things like document checks.

Things have gotten better now, but the early years were bad.  I have lots of horror stories--my family being stopped while driving solely for the purpose of checking documents and then detained for hours of harassment.  Being held at the border from 1:00 AM to 6:00 AM while customs officials ripped open boxes of breakfast cereal checking for God knows what, then made us load it all back into the car, drive five feet, and go through the procedure again.  The constant paranoia of being stopped on the street (we were pretty obviously foreigners in those days) and arrested/detained/harassed because the cop didn't like you, or the i wasn't dotted, or, woe betide you, you had forgotten any one of the numerous documents which you had to have available to produce on demand.

Abuses like these are not unique to our historical era--they led our founders to include the fourth amendment in the bill of rights--which states, in essence, that you can't be arrested, searched, or spied upon unless the police have good reason to suspect that you have committed a crime.

This leads us to Arizona's new immigration law.  The bill modestly states that "there is a compelling interest in the cooperative enforcement of federal immigration laws" in the State; in effect, the lawmakers claim that what they want to do is to make sure that immigration policy is actually enforced.  This is ... odd.  We're passing laws that say we have to follow the laws?  In and of itself, there's nothing particularly wrong with government thinking that laws should be enforced--that's more or less what government does--though in this particular case the undue emphasis on enforcing certain laws does raise the question of motivation, which I believe to be animus against Hispanic/Mexican immigrants.

The bill goes rather beyond that, however:

FOR ANY LAWFUL CONTACT MADE BY A LAW ENFORCEMENT OFFICIAL ... WHERE REASONABLE SUSPICION EXISTS THAT THE PERSON IS AN ALIEN WHO IS UNLAWFULLY PRESENT IN THE UNITED STATES, A REASONABLE ATTEMPT SHALL BE MADE, WHEN PRACTICABLE, TO DETERMINE THE IMMIGRATION STATUS OF THE PERSON.  THE  PERSON'S IMMIGRATION STATUS SHALL BE VERIFIED WITH THE FEDERAL GOVERNMENT ...

This is the "Papers, please" clause.  On the one level, all right, when policemen suspect someone of committing a crime, they check it out.  But again, why point it out?  This is what policemen do, they don't need another law to tell them to do their jobs--unless the whole point of the law is to tell them to crack down, or else to wink at reasonable suspicion and reasonable attempt, in violation of the fourth amendment.  If a policeman thinks that you're illegal, he makes a check.  Why does he think you're an illegal?  Despite their repeated denials that it is because of racial profiling, no one has provided any other answer.  How does he make a check, other than demanding to see your documents?  No one knows that, either.  Will you be detained while he checks your papers against the federal government's records?  Well, it would be really stupid to let you go while he figures out whether or not you broke the law, wouldn't it?  What happens if you're an American citizen who went for a walk without your driver's license?  Well, you get arrested, because the law gives the cops the right.


In other words, the situation in Arizona today is exactly what I went through in Eastern Europe in the bad old days right after the fall--cops have the right to stop you on the street and demand documents, and God help you if they aren't in order.  More than that, the law makes provision for people to sue police officers and departments if they suspect that these or any other immigration policies are not being pursued to their fullest extent.


For me, this embodies what's wrong with the Right--over the past year and a half, 'communist' has become a catch-all epithet for anyone who would use the government to do anything besides coddle the rich and start wars.   Now, they do to immigrants (and brown citizens) what the real-life, flesh-and-blood communists actually did to me while their epistemic echo-chamber resonates with thunderous applause.

sticking it to the nazis

In my previous post, I made some uncharitable comments about the pro-life movement.  In my defense, whenever you have a movement that claims that a new Holocaust is going on right under their noses and then backs away in collective horror whenever someone acts out the logical consequences of that belief, it becomes nearly impossible to speak truthfully of that movement without being uncharitable.


Prima: My God we're slaughtering millions just like Hitler!
Secunda: That's awful!  What should we do?
Prima: Well, you're going to need to vote Republican in November, and then again in 2012, after which we'll wait for all the liberal Supreme Court justices to age out and then replace them with our own people, then once we have a firm majority we'll launch a complicated legal challenge which after several years will then reach the Court, which will deliberate for several months before finally overturning the forty-year-old Roe v. Wade, removing the judicial obstacle.  Afterward, there will be long and complicated state by state battles creating a patchwork of senseless and conflicting laws across the country, some of which might ban abortion to one degree or another in certain states.
Secunda: Ummm ...
Prima: Well, if you don't like that, you can vote Republican in November and when we get a two-thirds majority in both Houses of Congress* we might be able to pass a constitutional amendment which would then need to be ratified by 3/4s of the states.  If enough states ratify it--which may or may not every happen and could take years of acrimonious legal struggles (during which millions more babies will have died) even if it does--then whatever forms of abortions banned by the as-yet-unwritten amendment would be ended forever!
Secunda: Ummm ...
Prima: Don't forget to vote Republican and send us money!  Gotta stop the carnage!

At least Petain had the balls to admit that he worked for the Nazis rather than soliciting donations on the premise that he did not. 

The movement has degenerated into an endless feedback-loop of ever more violent rhetoric; partially it is a cynical ploy for votes and money, partially it is a fear of female sexuality and desire to enforce sexual rules by punishing those who do not conform, partially it is a desperate need to feel morally superior.

Perhaps some people really believe that the practice of abortion is murder on the grand scale, but none of them act like it.  What should ordinary Germans have done while their government slaughtered millions?  I ask the question seriously: what actions should ordinary Germans have taken to avoid moral culpability in the crimes of their regime?  Stood up and been arrested?  Gone on strike?  Emigrated?  Engaged in resistance or terrorist activities?  Sheltered the intended victims?

Are you doing any of that?  Or are you just checking the box next to the 'R' every four years, showing up at an occasional potluck protest with your friends, and maybe even writing a check or two while congratulating yourself on your moral superiority to those nazi babykillers?

Their actions are woefully inconsistent with their stated premise; abortion will never be banned**, and on some level they know it.  So, to satisfy their need to get the next fix of moral superiority and to punish the evildoers they grow ever more petty.  Ban abortion?  Impossible.  Civil disobedience?  Inconvenient.  Pass a bill requiring rape victims to have an ultrasound probe shoved up their vagina before they can abort, or another one removing the legal obligation of doctors to inform parents*** that their child will be born with Down syndrome, Harlequin ichthyosis, or Treacher Collins?

That'll show those goddam nazis!

-----------------------
*This has not happened for either party since 1964.

**Some might disagree with that assessment; I have my reasons for thinking so, and I might examine them in a future post.

***The bill says that doctors cannot be sued for withholding information or providing inaccurate information about a pregnancy, which does in fact remove the obligation.

cause and occasion

In a previous post, I maintained that right-wing groups were externalizing their impulses and blaming the democrats for the violence and anger that has occurred. That's true, but it doesn't really answer the question of why people are upset.

You almost have to feel sorry for people who, dismayed at the direction that their government was taking, innocently sent out a call to 'Teabag the Whitehouse' without first consulting Urban Dictionary and were treated to thirty seven hours of dick jokes on MSNBC and an indelible moniker that they hate.

Almost. At least until one of them bawled me out about my usage of the term being a sign of my vicious intolerance. I've studied three foreign languages, and in the process said a lot of really stupid things--some of which I still get ripped on about today--but it doesn't make the people who chortled sneering elitists. That was the exact moment that I lost all sympathy for them over the nickname they inadvertently gave themselves.

Now, I'm familiar with the cries of astroturfing! that many like to throw around, but I only buy it to a degree. Did they receive sponsorship from partisan hacks? Yes. Has Fox news been cheerleading them under the thinnest veneer of reporting? Yes. Have them been egged on by demagogues? Yes. But underneath all that, there remains a core of genuine sentiment--they are angry, they do feel disaffected and perhaps even a little afraid and bewildered.

I'm not saying that I agree with what they feel. I'm not saying that I agree with what they say. I'm not even saying that the things they say are the real reason that they feel the way that they do--and I am not, at present, accusing them of being disingenuous. You're all familiar, I'm sure, with the way that tension can build and build and build in a relationship, and then suddenly explode into a knock-down, drag-out fight over whose turn it is to wash the dishes? Well, this fight is about the stimulus. And then health care. But if it weren't the dishes then it would have been the laundry.

Baby, why you gotta make me hit you?

The most popular pickup line at my college was: "God told me to ask you out." You see a girl, you think she's hot, but wait! Surely this thought had to come from somewhere! Surely it couldn't have come from my own mind, oh no, surely a thought with the promise of such a sweet loving reward must have come from God.

Conversely, if your thoughts about the girl were strictly of a carnal nature and your better angels were hard pressed to resist, then it was the devil that was tempting you.

There's a lot that goes into this kind of thought process. This particular form results from an evangelical upbringing that deems every soul an arena in which no lesser foes than God and Lucifer himself do daily battle by way of manipulating impulses and events re-imagined as signs. Tell a child to seek God's leading and he'll seek it. Tell the same child that the devil will attack him, and he'll look for that, too--and if he looks hard enough, he'll find it.

But mostly it's a way of ducking responsibility by externalization--it's not me having lustful thoughts, it's satan tempting me. It's not me risking rejection, it's God's plan. The thought is merely the incidental result of some phenomenon outside your own mind.

'God told me to ask you out' is mostly a joke. It can also take other, less amusing forms: it's why 'the girl' was 'asking for it', it's why women wear burkas instead of men wearing blindfolds, and it's the answer to the question, 'Baby, why you gotta make me hit you?'

It's rationalization by externalization, and it's a dangerous step: you are no longer responsible since the impetus comes from elsewhere, from the other, from the victim.

Death threats in American politics are par for the course, and there are procedures set up to deal with that sort of thing. But the response to the passage of the healthcare bill crossed the line into actual violence--not just riot-style violence, which often happens when large groups of angry people get together, but personal violence perpetrated by individuals against individuals.

And instead of condemning the violence, the entire right is fanning the flames, starting with Sarah Palin's 'Reload!' But more importantly, from the top to the bottom, the message is clear: blame the victims. From the guy who successfully called for vandalism warning Democrats of the "unintended consequences of their actions" to Newt Gringrich saying,

I would condemn any kind of activity that involves that kind of personal threat. But look, I think there’s something very disingenuous about the Democratic leaders who attacked the tea party movement, who refused to hold town hall meetings, who refused to go back home, who kept the Congress locked up in Washington, and are now shocked that people are angry. I think the Democratic leadership has to take some moral responsibility for having behaved with such arrogance, in such a hostile way, that the American people are deeply upset.

These people who have been fanning the flames of discontent for months. But now that actual violence has started, the same folks who want everyone else's social benefits slashed because of personal responsibility are, with one voice, denying any and all personal responsibility.

Baby, why you gotta make me hit you?

facebook and teh ghey, pt 3

Today I'll be finishing up the series started here and here. In them, I was going through a Facebook discussion I had in which two opponents argued that discrimination against gays should be okay. I identified the seven main points that they made, and in this entry I will be discussing the final two.

6) You must respect me despite the fact that I just called you an abomination who is guilty-by-association of child molestation. "We don't have the luxury of hoping the altemative [sic] lifestyle person is one of the good ones," writes one opponent.

I responded: "would you be offended if i implied that you were guilty-by-demographic of the abuse of children? or if legal measures were taken to discriminate against you on the basis of being a straight, older middle-aged man (by your picture)?

i imagine you would be, but that's EXACTLY what you're doing. i work in orphanages and actually know children who have been abused, sold into prostitution, or kidnapped and tortured. all, without exception, by straights, almost all of whom were male, and most of whom were middle-aged. in fact, the vast majority of ALL such crimes are committed by straight* men.

every abused child i know (and there is quite a list) has been abused by people-like-you (straight), not people-like-them. stop martyring children to justify your homophobia. it's factually wrong and morally disgusting."

To which he replied: "I love how you want "equal" rights yet seem more than willing to attack me personally for disagreeing with you. I guess perhaps you then are a heterophobe. If you want respect you first have to give it, obviously you have not learned that yet."

You see how it works? He claims the right to discriminate against every gay and transgendered person out there because of the danger that they represent of molesting children. But if you point out obvious facts--every abused child I know was abused by a straight person--and ask him how he would feel if someone treated him the same way, then you're gay yourself, guilty of personally attacking him, and undeserving of any respect because you have shown him none.

Now, I won't stoop to the level of explaining his insinuation that I am a homosexual in the light of his marked tendency to projection ("We aren't like you so in your mind it makes us evil" says the person who thinks gays are evil). Nor will I relate it to 'protesting too much' as one of the main causes of homophobia.

But I am thinking it.

When you feel that it is your right to discriminate against others, then of course you're going to feel that stopping discrimination is trampling on your rights. If your self-respect requires you to consider yourself better than others, then of course you are going to view their claim to equality as disrespecting you.

7) My right not to see you trumps your right to exist. I mention this last not because I need to refute it--indeed, anyone who actually thinks this is immune to argument--but because I want to point it out. "someone going off on how 'different' people are an abomination doesn't have the space to complain," I told one opponent. he replied:

"When those expressions have a negative impact on my family I have the right. You don't like it you have the right to disagree with me but not to force me into something detrimental to my family. Doesn't mean I don't want to stop you from being you just that I don't want that in my inner circle."

This was in a conversation in which both he and the other chap had argued that children seeing gays is detrimental: the man who wrote that had praised the entry in which my other opponent said, "I don't think it decent to put a gay male in charge of a young classroom when his lifestyle is not shielded from the children."

They're hiding behind their children again, but there it is: gays, if you go out in public, you better act straight.

My right not to see you trumps your right to exist.


------------------------------------------------
*I may have been reaching on my definition of 'straight', as many pedophiles aren't straight or gay. But the sentence is true if you read 'non-gay' instead. I also may have been reaching on calling him straight.

facebook and teh ghey, pt. 2

Continuing a theme from the other day, in which I dissected a Facebook discussion about discrimination against gays. My various opponents raised several points, and since I view them as typical of the anti-gay rhetoric as a whole, we're going through them one by one here. They were:

1. That if the petition were realized, then it would require us to hire wacked out cross-dressers in it for the lifestyle to take care of our children, and that discrimination against all gays and transsexuals was justified to prevent that result.
2. Gays are attracted to same-sex children.
3. Children might ask questions about gays.
   
4. America is a Christian nation so Christian rules ought to apply.
5. The Bible says homosexuality is wrong.
6. You must respect me despite the fact that I just called you an abomination who is guilty-by-association of child molestation.
7. My right not to see you trumps your right to exist.

I covered 1 - 3 in the previous post, so we'll pick up with 4 here.

4) "Being that this country was founded upon Christian values," he wrote, "why should we now work to legalize and perpetuate the homosexual lifestyle?" Well, first off, no: no it was not. America was founded specifically on Enlightenment principles and English common law:

"The United States of America have exhibited, perhaps, the first example of governments erected on the simple principles of nature; and if men are now sufficiently enlightened to disabuse themselves of artifice, imposture, hypocrisy, and superstition, they will consider this event as an era in their history…

"It will never be pretended that any persons employed in that service [making the US government] had interviews with the gods, or were in any degree under the influence of Heaven… it will forever be acknowledged that these governments were contrived merely by the use of reason and the senses."
--John Adams, "A Defence of the Constitutions of Government of the United States of America" (1787-88)

Much as I love John Adams, he was of course dead wrong: it is pretended that the founders were under the influence of Heaven. But there is further evidence in the great mass of complaints about the godless nature of the new Constitution: without a religious test, wrote one, the following groups might come to power: "Ist. Quakers, who will make the blacks saucy, and at the same time deprive us of the means of defence--2dly. Mahometans, who ridicule the doctrine of the Trinity--3dly. Deists, abominable wretches--4thly. Negroes, the seed of Cain--Sthly. Beggars, who when set on horse back will ride to the devil--6thly. Jews etc. etc. ...", and, "should [the President] hereafter be a Jew, our dear posterity may be ordered to rebuild Jerusalem." Writes another from the same source: "as there will be no religious test, [the Quakers] will have weight, in proportion to their numbers, in the great scale of continental government."

Note that the objection isn't that the Quakers might take over, but that they might get the same rights as me.

I include these quotes deliberately, because they contain a blatant admission of what "America is a Christian nation" always means: fear and hatred of the "other" (non-whites, non-Christians, and Christians whom they disagree with), and a desire to exclude the other, not from having special rights, but from having any rights or representation at all.

There are two more problems with #4: the first is, who decides what Christian principles are? I am Christian, but my view of Christian morality is markedly different from that of my opponent. Why should his interpretations take preference over mine? The final problem of course, is that even if the country were founded on Christian principles and we could reach some consensus as to what those were, there is no particular reason to enshrine any give one of them into law. It is a sin against charity to force others to follow a moral code they do not share absent a clear benefit to society. Thus, banning murder benefits society. Banning gay marriage, as many states now demonstrate, does not.

5. In fact the Bible does have several verses which condemn homosexuality in one form or another. (Curiously, although Paul speaks disparagingly of lesbianism, it is never explicitly forbidden.) I know what the text actually says, I merely disagree, or else think it no longer applicable. I demanded several times an explanation as to why the prohibition on male homosexuality (there is no prohibition on lesbianism) still applied, but several others (mixed fabric and shellfish, for example) did not. My opponent misunderstood "mixed fabric" as "cotton", and offered the following defense: "I agree times have changed and cotton shirts are a way of life. Unfortunately it would mean financial ruin for my family to spend its time making our own clothes, and I believe God wants me to provide for my family more than he wants me to [put the necessary effort into this]." He went on to add: "I've made it abundantly clear that [God] values all his laws."

Except when they might inconvenience you, amirite?

Either the OT law still applies or it doesn't. If parts of it do but others do not, then which parts and why? I have never--not once--gotten an answer other than "avoiding mixed fabric is inconvenient but gays are icky." My position is consistent: I don't think that Leviticus still applies. Anyone who quotes it though, stands condemned by their wardrobe if not their conscience. This, however, is quite a broad topic and perhaps deserves its own post (or series of posts) later.

But I'm afraid that I've gone on far longer than I intended to yet again, so we'll deal with the final two another day.

facebook and teh ghey

I've just been embroiled in one of those marvelous Facebook comment wars: the sort that starts out by liking a friend's link to a petition to end workplace discrimination against gays and transsexuals and winds up as a thirty-comment train wreck covering such diverse topics as whether or not the Texas school board really cut Thomas Jefferson from their curricula and whether or not discrimination against gays is okay to protect our children.

The main objections to the original link (which advocated doing away with discrimination against gays and transsexuals) were:

1. That if the petition were realized, then it would require us to hire wacked out cross-dressers in it for the lifestyle to take care of our children, and that discrimination against all gays and transsexuals was justified to prevent that result.
2. Gays are attracted to same-sex children.
3. Children might ask questions about gays.
   
4. America is a Christian nation so Christian rules ought to apply.
5. The Bible says homosexuality is wrong.
6. You must respect me despite the fact that I just called you an abomination who is guilty-by-association of child molestation.
7. My right not to see you trumps your right to exist.

I'll be going through these slowly over the next couple of days, and hopefully doing a better job--or at least a more systematic one--than I did in the heat of the moment.

In regards to 1), I believe that there has been a certain confusion regarding the difference between not hiring someone due to discrimination and not hiring someone because they aren't qualified. "Currently a person with historically bad credit or a criminal record of theft would not be offered a job as a company's Controller [sic] or CFO; that is discrimination," wrote my opposite.

Of course, it's not. It's basic good sense not to hire someone who isn't qualified for the job; it's discrimination when you determine that people are unqualified based on the larger group to which they belong, especially if membership in said group is involuntary. For a teacher to flaunt their sexuality in the classroom is unacceptable, whether straight or gay. Anyone who did so would be unqualified for the position. But to deny such work to all gays and all transgendered persons due to the hypothetical sins of an imagined few is discrimination. There's just no other word for it.

2) The truth of the matter is that gays aren't attracted to same-sex children any more than heterosexual adults are attracted to opposite-sex children. Another study of all the children "referred to a subspecialty clinic for the evaluation of suspected child sexual abuse" at a regional children's hospital concluded that "In [the 269 legitimate cases with an adult offender], two offenders were identified as being gay or lesbian." Less than 1%, fudging between 0% and 3.1% with the margin of error. Research mentioned here concluded: "we never found that androphilic (i.e., a preference for male adults) men had any greater relative erotic interest in children than did their gynephilic (i.e., a preference for female adults) peers." Homosexuality is a sexual attraction for adults of your own gender. Pedophilia is quite distinct, and is a sexual attraction for children on the basis of age, usually without regard to gender.

3) You laugh, but they said it: "I don't think it decent to put a gay male in charge of a young classroom when his lifestyle is not shielded from the children. ... Why should a straight kindergartner have to come home to ask questions about their gay teacher?" Well, why should a white student have to come home and ask questions about their black teacher? Why should a hermaphrodite have to come home and ask questions about his straight teacher? Why should a Muslim student have to ask questions about his Christian teacher? Why, indeed, should we have to tolerate or look at anyone who is different from us? (This also relates to 7 and I'll deal with it more in depth there.) Because we are all different from someone, and the sooner that we learn about those differences and learn to respect them, the better. Any kindergarten student sufficiently astute to notice that his teacher was gay is probably sufficiently astute to be okay with that.

In the meantime, this is growing rather long, so I think that I will close and deal with the last four in the next entry.