ReligiousLeftLaw.com

Thursday Black Friday Ironies

    At the corner of Wall and William Streets in downtown Manhattan, just up the stairs from the 2 and 3 subway stop, in front of the Cipriani restaurant frequented most nights by glitterati delivered in limousines and welcomed by non-whites in top-hats and tails, next door to where A. Hamilton lived when the new federal government worked in New York, one block from the stock exchange and from Federal Hall where G. Washington first was sworn-in as President, and three blocks from (a) Trinity Church where Secretary Hamilton and his beloved Betsy Schuyler are interred, (b) the Federal Reserve Bank of New York where Wall Street’s banks are supposed to be regulated, (c) T. Jefferson’s erstwhile residence as first Secretary of State, and (d) Zuccotti Park where the ‘Occupiers’ first modeled an ideal community in 2011, there stands a gray metal news kiosk.  A bent, weathered old fellow clad in an oily tan jacket, who chain smokes and smells of cigars all the time pedals newspapers, magazines, and beverages here.  It is always affecting to watch this man patiently plying his trade, patronized as he is by the pushy and chesty young shaved-headed men, cloaked in expensive but ill-fitting coats, who work here as traders.  At least as remarkable this week, however, is a blue billboard on the kiosk’s east face.  This reads as follows:

We’re not for everyone.  Just the 1% that matter.

Byzantium Security

Elite Protection for the World’s Elite.

    I am not making this up (though apparently Cinemax did).  Sometimes circumstances throw up juxtapositions that are so rich in irony that you cannot outdo them, even by ‘mak[ing] [things] up.’  This week’s kiosk billboard is in a certain sense one of those cases, even if intentionally - and indeed brilliantly - manufactured as a television promotion.  What could be more remarkable than the sign’s ersatz brazen appeal to financial elites who would probably rather not be exposed as elites, here at ground zero of their characteristic daily frenzies?  Or its doing so within earshot or eyeshot of the homes of that apostle of the American ‘yeoman republic’ (Mr. Jefferson) and the founder of the Manumission Society of New York (Mr. Hamilton)?  Or its doing so within eyeshot or earshot of the site where the first popularly elected national chief executive of the modern era (Mr. Washington) was inaugurated, of the symbol of democratized finance (the NYSE), of the symbol of popular government’s control over finance (the FRBNY), of the symbol and spiritual home of ‘the 99%’ (Zuccotti Park), and of that potent symbol of God’s stooping down to the humble status of man (Trinity Church)?  And who could miss the significance of this company’s name – ‘Byzantium’ – as if lower Manhattan were a mosaic fortress of gilded beauty, Justinianian Roman Law order, and Orthodox spirituality rung round by ravenous Avars, Bulgars, Crusaders and Ottoman Turks?

    I’d like to suggest, though, that the ironies here, rich and evident as they are, are nevertheless outdone by those on more subtle display worldwide in the lead-up to ‘Black Friday’ this week.  And in this latter case, as it happens, the irony does not seem to be intended. 

    As some will have heard or have read, yesterday saw Walmart employees commencing a labor action for higher pay, while millions of other Americans began Giving Thanks and celebrating the Festival of Lights or the beginning of the Christ-Mass season by mobbing ‘big box’ stores in search of temporarily sale-priced goods – an ugly development which policy wonks now must ironically celebrate for its salutary effects on a still slumping economy.  As some will also have heard or have read, the United States sent B-52 bombers into airspace over the East China Sea this week, to register American rejection of a recent unilateral assertion, by ‘Communist’ China, of sovereignty over the space in question. 

    What’s ironic about all of this, you ask?  Well, consider:  For nearly a hundred years, American laborers struggled for recognition of collective bargaining rights, then patiently but firmly collectively bargained for living wages and humane working conditions.  Over time, their efforts bore fruit, and the nation in consequence became more prosperous, on fairer terms, than probably any society in history had managed to date.  Yet then, nearly as soon as the victory had been won and American workers had grown able to purchase their own homes, send their children to university, and reasonably expect their descendants to live better than they had lived, it was all thrown away.  Their government entered into multiple trade agreements that put American labor into competition with barely paid slave- and prison-labor toiling in inhuman conditions abroad – particularly, though not solely, in China.  Unionized domestic manufacturing jobs dwindled, and American labor was left to seek low-paying, non-unionized ‘service’ and ‘retail’ jobs in their stead.  By far the largest source of the latter, it turns out, is Walmart, which also turns out to be the principal emporium at which Americans purchase the aforementioned prison- and slave-manufactured goods whose ‘outsourcing’ to China and elsewhere has thrown American labor out of decently paying work in the first place. 

    But there is more.  If the front page of Friday’s New York Times is to be believed, a great many Walmart and similarly situated retail employees are unable to afford even the cheap, often chintzy and toxic slave-produced products on Walmart’s and other ‘big box’ stores’ shelves.  They can only buy these things by taking on consumer debt – debt that stems ultimately from … you guessed it, China and other newly manufacturing nations that have been steadily racking up trade surpluses with us, and debt that, when taken on in excess, fuels asset price bubbles and busts of the kind with whose sequels we’re still struggling.  These same employees were also required to work on Thanksgiving Day itself, so as to ‘backwardate’ Black Friday back into Thursday and thereby monetize the one remaining non-monetized holiday we had left. 

    Walmart should not be uniquely blamed for this, of course, since if it did not skimp on wages it would be outcompeted by other 'big box' outlets that would.  (That’s why civilized nations pass living wage legislation, after all – to forestall wage-cutting arms races.)  Heck, it even emerges that Walmart has a heart too, since its management is both (a) encouraging non-starving employees to give generously to starving fellow employees, and (b) assisting its employees with filling out application forms for various forms of public welfare assistance.  But this will of course bring further government expenditures of the kind that so agitate ‘austerians’ in our Congress, which of course will be piled atop further military spending needed to register our objections to further Chinese projections of military power across the East China Sea – projections that we make possible, indeed subsidize, by giving away both our manufacturing capacity and our living-wage jobs, and projections that we will finance our objections to by … borrowing from China.      

    Now I have suggested that this is all very ironic – more ironic even than the ‘Byzantium Security’ billboard in lower Manhattan.  But is it merely ironic, or is it insane?  Simply give away your manufacturing capacity and your living-wage jobs – the source of your nation’s broadly shared prosperity and power – to a nation you treat as your adversary.  Thereby impoverish your laborers - the backbone of your nation and its economy - and subsidize your adversary.  Next put your impoverished laborers to work in emporia that serve as no more than outlets for your adversary’s cheap toxic products – products which, though cheap, nevertheless few of your impoverished laborers are paid enough to afford.  Now borrow from your adversary in order to provide public assistance to your impoverished laborers and to finance your military challenges to the new military adventures that your adversary is undertaking, which adventures, again, you have made possible in the first place by giving your adversary your manufacturing capacity and your living-wage jobs.  Merely ironic?  I’m going to go with ‘insane’ here.  It looks crazy.  It seems an abomination, a profound injustice, and a national suicide attempt all at the same time. 

    Is this perhaps our nation’s way of doing penance for all the injustice it did to the continent's original inhabitants after being assisted by them in the leadup to that first Thanksgiving Day?  Were it so, I suppose we could say that at least it’s well motivated.  I think, however, we might do a better job of it, and thereby repent more productively, were we to take these two steps:  First, either bring the manufacturing jobs back home or require, as a prerequisite to continued liberal trade, that ‘outsourced’ employees be given ownership shares in all firms – domestic and foreign – that benefit by their being outsourced.  (Share, in other words, those vaunted ‘gains’ wrought by ‘free trade’ with the victims of free trade.)  And second, when domestic prosperity is thereby restored, get serious about aiding those worldwide who are ‘underdeveloped’ – not by immiserating domestic labor, but by assisting the development abroad of both (a) domestic technologies and infrastructures, and (b) internal, not external, markets for goods and services.  Stop robbing Peter to pay Paul.  Enable Peter and Paul to pay themselves and one another instead.  Then we’ll have no more ironic Black Fridays.                          

The Parsonage Exemption and Constitutional Glare

A few days ago, a federal district court judge in Wisconsin struck down the so-called "parsonage exemption," under which practicing clergy get to exclude many of their housing expenses from taxable income.  Judge Barbara Crabb held that the exemption, included in § 107 of the Internal Revenue Code, violated the Establishment Clause as, among other things, an unjustified special favor to organized religion.  Now, I'm generally a "strict separationist" on Establishment Clause questions.  But this decision is quite wrong.  And it misunderstands an important piece of our church-state dispensation.

A Thank You Note to Pope Francis

Your Holiness --

As we approach American Thanksgiving, it is time to express gratitude for a very important development in the life of the Catholic Church, which I very much love.  And that is the grace of your pontificate.

It began in those exciting early days.  Recall the foot-washing ceremony on Holy Thursday?  What did the foot-washing represent?  Did it symbolize Jesus commissioning an all-male priesthood? Or did it stand for something else?  Perhaps Jesus' awareness that those who lead must first of all serve.  When you washed the feet of those youthful prisoners, boys and girls, Christians and non-Christians, you made it clear that Jesus' message of ultimate self-sacrifice in the service of others is that it must have universal appeal.

And you have been living up to that ideal in your own public ministry.  Your wreath-laying at Lampedusa was heart-warming even while it was heart-wrenching.  You reminded us that desperate immigrants, who have done nothing wrong aside from searching for a better life, are routinely blotted from our view. Their lives are led and lost on the invisible margins, and you made that visible to us.  And the visit you paid to the Brazilian slum, where you showed and shared your love, that reminded us of what your namesake, St. Francis, would have done.  And we know that St. Francis acted in imitation of Jesus.

You know and feel in your bones that the great crisis confronting the world today is the worship of Mammon.  Money has become the new global deity, commanding universal tribute, universal obeisance.  It is, you said, the "idol" before which the world bows down.  But as we know from the Gospel, we cannot serve both God and Mammon.  I pray that you draw the Church into effective action on behalf of the poor.  This would be in keeping with the priority Jesus set in the Gospels.

I am grateful for that meeting you had with the Latin American nuns in early June.  The good nuns you hosted harbored a great fear that they might be investigated by a hostile Church bureaucracy, the way their sisters in North America had been.  You put their minds at ease, reminding them not to worry about making mistakes: "Perhaps even a letter of the Congregation for the Doctrine [of the Faith] will arrive for you, telling you that you said such or such thing. Explain whatever you have to explain, but move forward." "It is necessary to shake things up," you told those sisters.  And you have not shied away from doing that yourself, your Holiness.

Remember how you said "gay" on your return flight to Rome after World Youth Day in Brazil?  "If a person is gay, and follows the Lord, and has good will, then who am I to judge?" This was a truly remarkable statement.  Efforts have been made to minimize it.  Commentators persistently try to misinterpret it as applying exclusively to priests and candidates for the priesthood.  For sure, the question you were asked dealt explicitly with a priest you had appointed to high office, but your answer was not confined to that situation.  It was general, meant to apply to clergy and laity alike.

At the same time, you have always -- conspicuously, consistently -- avoided the harsh condemnatory language of the Catechism where gays are concerned.  Changing doctrine is hard, but changing tone, shifting emphasis, these are welcome first steps.  The Church, after all, practiced de facto religious tolerance long before Vatican II recognized religious liberty as a human right.

I am grateful for your openness to culture.  You do not see the world in dualistic terms.  It is not "us against them."  You appreciate that human beings are admixtures of flawed sinfulness and genuine greatness.  You understand that culture, which is merely human experience writ large, comprises the same admixture.  Even a great sinner is capable of good deeds.  And even a great sinner can be forgiven.  This does not mean that evil is overlooked or excused.  Rather, it means that the wholeness of persons and societies are taken into account.  And I think that this means the end of the "culture war."

The Church should not, of course, surrender on essential principles.  But Church leaders should come to know that it is one thing to cooperate with the political process to achieve worthy ends and another thing altogether to take political stands, finding one party's platform praiseworthy while denouncing the other side as representing "intrinsic evil."

You set a good example of how a prelate must approach politics when you took your valiant stand on Syrian intervention.  You realized that violence begets violence and your call for peace, which was not driven by partisan motives but by a desire to spare innocent lives, transcended narrow political boundaries.  Your prayers were heartfelt and I think they achieved tangible results.  Thank you.

I look forward to next year.  I pray that you are not captured by your handlers, that you keep your spontaneity, and that the Gospel always remains foremost.  You've certainly helped to renew my faith.

Cross-posted at: http://www.huffingtonpost.com/charles-j-reid-jr/a-thank-you-note-to-pope_b_4326988.html 

Abortion and Food Stamps

In an apparent effort to limit the number of abortions, Texas requires doctors who perform abortions to have admitting privileges at a nearby hospital. The requirement is preventing 1/3 of the doctors who perform abortions from offering such services despite the conclusion of the district court judge that the requirement serves no medical purpose. That judge enjoined enforcement of the law; a federal appeals court reversed pending its consideration of the appeal; and the Supreme Court 5-4 refused to intervene.

Thousands of women in the interim will be affected. From the Republicans perspective this is a victory for the life of children.

But these are the same Republicans who have voted to cut food stamps. Their concern for children dissipates when they are born. 22% of American children live in poverty. Cutting food stamps (now known as SNAP benefits) will wreak significant damage. 90% of SNAP benefits are exhausted by the third week of each month. 58% of those receiving SNAP benefits turn to food banks or soup kitchens at least 6 months a year. Food banks, soup kitchens, and other charities come nowhere close to meeting the whole problem of hunger, and the Republicans know it.

Meanwhile, businessmen enjoy tax subsidized lunches; big agriculture enjoys massive subsidies; and Congress considers even deeper cuts in SNAP benefits. As John Kenneth Galbreath once said, we have socialism for the rich and capitalism for the poor.

I understand traditional Catholics. They oppose abortion, but they believe government has a responsibility to feed the hungry, clothe the naked, and provide housing for the homeless.

But I do not understand most evangelical and fundamentalist Christians. They apparently think that denying food stamps to the poor in a time of high unemployment is consistent with Christianity. I think it is consistent with moral leprosy. 

When Buddhists Resort to Violence

Buddhism is generally seen as associated with non-violence and peace. These are certainly both strongly represented in its value system. This does not mean, though, that Buddhists have always been peaceful. Buddhist countries have had their fair share of war and conflict, for most of the reasons that wars have occurred elsewhere. Yet it is difficult to find any Buddhist rationales for violence, and Buddhism has some particularly rich resources for use in dissolving conflict. Overall, it can be observed that Buddhism has had a general humanizing effect throughout much of Asia. It has tempered the excesses of rulers and martial people, helped large empires (for example, China) to exist without much internal conflict, and rarely, if at all, incited wars against non-Buddhists. Moreover, in the midst of wars, Buddhist monasteries have often been havens of peace.—Peter Harvey

Inspired by a post by Kenan Malik, “Buddhist Pogroms and Religious Conflicts,” I’ve assembled a small list of titles (below) that treat the topic of Buddhists resorting to violence in the context of social and political conflicts, especially Buddhists whose individual and collective identity has become entangled if not fused with nationalism. Malik begins his piece with the dire situation of the Myanmar’s (Burma’s) Rohingya:

“The Rohingya are Muslims who live mostly in Rakhine, in the north west of the country, bordering Bangladesh. Early Muslim settlements date back to the 7th century. Today, in a nation that is 90 per cent Buddhist, there are some 8 million Muslims of which probably a quarter are Rohingya. Many feel they are fighting for their very existence.

The military junta that came to power in Myanmar in 1962 (or Burma as it was then) has, over the past half century, sought to build popular support for its rule by fomenting hatred against minority groups. The Rohingya have been stripped of citizenship and officially declared foreigners in their native land. Restrictions have been placed on the Rohingya owning land, travelling outside their villages, receiving an education and having children.

The recent successes of the democracy movement has paradoxically only worsened the problems of the Rohingya. The junta, still clinging to power, has sharpened its anti-Rohingya rhetoric in an attempt to bolster its position. The democracy movement has refused to support the Rohingya for fear of alienating its largely Buddhist constituency. The leader of the democracy movement, the Nobel Laureate Aung San Suu Kyi, has been shamefully silent. When asked to condemn violence against the Rohingya, the furthest she has been willing to go is to condemn violence in general. Many members of her National League for Democracy are openly involved in extremist anti-Rohingya organizations.

The result has been over the past year an unprecedented series of pogroms against the Rohingya. Villages, schools, workplaces and mosques have been attacked and torched by Buddhist mobs, often aided by the security forces. Hundreds of Rohingya have been killed and some 140,000 left homeless.

The anti-Muslim campaign has been led by monks who justify their actions as in keeping with the demands of Buddhism. The principal anti-Rohingya organization, the 969 movement, takes its name from the traditional nine qualities of Buddha, six qualities of his teachings and nine qualities of the monks. Its leader, a monk named Wirathu, has reportedly called himself the ‘Burmese bin Laden.’ Muslims, he insists, ‘breed quickly and they are very violent and they eat their own kind.’ Because ‘the Burmese people and the Buddhists are devoured every day, the national religion needs to be protected.’ Another prominent 969 monk, Wimala Biwuntha, insists that without the anti-Royhinga campaign ‘we’ll lose our religion and our race.’ Myanmar’s minister of religious affairs, Sann Sint, has backed the anti-Rohingya campaign.”

Malik also introduces us to the historic mobilization of Buddhist chauvinism against the Tamils in Sri Lanka, with the end of the war against the Tamils finding that chauvinism now directed at Muslims!

One of Malik’s conclusions is especially important, having implications beyond Buddhism. He argues that despite the prominent role of religious identity as an important variable in these violent conflicts,

“it would be as wrong to see many, perhaps most, of these conflicts as purely religious confrontations as it would be to see the anti-Rohingya pogroms as a religious war. Many have, like the confrontations in Myanmar and Sri Lanka, complex social and political roots, as groups vying for political power have exploited religion and religious identities to gain support. The importance of religion in these conflicts is often less in creating the tensions than in helping establish the chauvinist identities through which certain groups are demonized and one’s own actions justified.”

It is no doubt true that many “New Age,” “liberal,” and even “secular” Buddhists have romanticized and idealized Buddhism generally, succumbing to Orientalist illusions (most vividly perhaps in the case of Tibetan Buddhism) or fantasies that prevent them from coming to grips with the darker realities of “Buddhism on the ground” in countries like Myanmar, Sri Lanka, and Thailand. I suppose we might find some consolation in the fact that Buddhist groups and organizations like the Buddhist Peace Fellowship and the International Network of Engaged Buddhists have taken on the task of educating themselves and others about the Buddhist resort to violence in the contemporary world.

Violent Buddhists: A Select Bibliography

• Bartholomeusz, Tessa J. In Defense of Dharma: Just-War Ideology in Buddhist Sri Lanka. London: RoutledgeCurzon, 2002.
• Dalton, Jacob. The Taming of the Demons: Violence and Liberation in Tibetan Buddhism. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2011.
• Ives, Christopher. Imperial-Way Zen: Ichikawa Hakugen’s Critique and Lingering Questions for Buddhist Ethics. Honolulu, HI: University of Hawai’i Press, 2009.
• Jerryson, Michael K. Buddhist Fury: Religion and Violence in Southern Thailand. New York: Oxford University Press, 2011.
• Jerryson, Michael K. and Mark Juergensmeyer, eds. Buddhist Warfare. New York: Oxford University Press, 2010.
• King, Winston L. Zen and the Way of the Sword: Arming the Samurai Psyche. New York: Oxford University Press, 1993.
• Tambiah, Stanley J. Buddhism Betrayed? Religion, Politics, and Violence in Sri Lanka. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 1992.
• Tikhonov, Vladimir and Torkel Brekke, eds. Buddhism and Violence: Militarism and Buddhism in Modern Asia. New York: Routledge, 2013.
• Victoria, Brian Daizen. Zen War Stories. London: Routledge Curzon, 2001.
• Victoria, Brian Daizen. Zen at War. Lanham, MD: Rowman and Littlefield, 2nd ed., 2006. 
• Yu, Xue. Buddhism, War, and Nationalism: Chinese Monks in the Struggle against Japanese Aggressions, 1931-1945. New York: Routledge, 2005.

Further Reading:

• Cavanaugh, William. The Myth of Religious Violence: Secular Ideology and the Roots of Modern Conflict. New York: Oxford University Press, 2009.
• Harvey, Peter. An Introduction to Buddhist Ethics. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2000.
• Kakar, Sudhir. The Colors of Violence: Cultural Identities, Religion, and Conflict. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 1996.
• Kippenberger, Hans. Violence as Worship: Religious Wars in the Age of Globalization. Stanford, CA: Stanford University, 2011.
• Lopez, Donald S., Jr. Prisoners of Shangri-La: Tibetan Buddhism and the West. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 1998.

The “Joint Plan of Action” between Iran and the P5+1

On the “Joint Plan of Action” agreement just reached between Iran and the P5+1,* please see this Arms Control Law blog post by Dan Joyner. Be sure to read the important material contained in the many links (including the text of the agreement) as well.

*The P5+1 is a group of six world powers which in 2006 joined the diplomatic efforts with Iran with regard to its nuclear program. The term refers to the five permanent members of the UN Security Council, namely, the United States, Russia, China, United Kingdom, and France, plus Germany.

“Israel’s Policy of Erasure”

A Palestinian man sits by the remains of his house destroyed last month in Aqraba village near the West Bank city of Nablus. The Israeli military said it demolished four structures that had been built illegally in the village. (Nasser Ishtayeh/Associated Press)

From Saree Makdisi in today’s Los Angeles Times:

A path to peace between Israelis and Palestinians requires not simply dealing with settlements but with the whole complex of displacement, suffocation and erasure.

“The revelation last week that Israel wanted to plan for 20,000 new settlement housing units received the usual outraged responses from around the world. Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, mindful of a backlash in the midst of the Iran nuclear negotiations, walked the revelation back, but not very far.

Just a few days earlier, Secretary of State John F. Kerry, in Israel trying to keep peace talks afloat, reiterated the U.S. view in an interview: ‘We do not believe the settlements are legitimate. We think they’re illegitimate.’

Settlement expansion, we are constantly told, is the stumbling block to the fragile negotiations between Israelis and Palestinians. The settlements are eating up the territory that is supposed to provide the basis for the creation of an independent Palestinian state. If only there were a settlement freeze, some say, one last chance for peace might be salvaged.

All of that may be true enough as far as it goes. But in fact, Israeli settlement expansion is meaningless when it’s considered in isolation. And that is how it is usually considered, given how much media attention the word ‘settlement’ garners every time it comes up.

There are, however, other, individually quieter, smaller, less visible — but collectively far more significant — events taking place on a daily basis.

Indeed, the settlement program is only one component of a broad complex of Israeli policies that has come to define the rhythm and tempo of life for Palestinians, not only in the occupied territories but inside Israel itself. These policies express Israel’s longstanding wish to erase the Palestinian presence on land it considers its own.

Consider, for example, this stunning statistic from the United Nations Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs, or OCHA: On average, every week so far this year, Israel has demolished about 13 Palestinian-owned structures in the occupied territories (up from a weekly average of about 12 last year). The structures include water cisterns, barns and family homes that Israel claims violate the draconian rules it imposes on Palestinian life.

Sometimes these demolitions effectively obliterate entire communities at once.

On Aug. 19, according to OCHA, Israel destroyed all the structures in the East Jerusalem Palestinian community of Tel al-Adassa. The same week, Israel re-demolished the Palestinian village of Araqib, in southern Israel, as it has done more than 50 times since 2010. On Sept. 11, Israel bulldozed almost all the structures in the West Bank herding community of Az Zayyim, rendering dozens of people homeless. Days later, Israel demolished all the homes of the village of Mak-hul in the Jordan Valley, and declared its ruins a closed military area, preventing the villagers’ return.

And so it goes — a litany of catastrophes occurring on a small scale, in communities you have never heard of, all the year round.

These acts of eradication are a matter of routine practice, so routine that they rarely attract international media attention. Neither does the regular vandalizing, bulldozing or burning of Palestinian-owned olive trees , either by Jewish settlers — who generally act with legal impunity — or by the Israeli army.

According to the U.N., settlers cut down 100 trees Nov. 9; they damaged 400 trees from Oct. 29 – Nov. 4, and 30 the week before that. And, again, so it goes—week in, week out. More than 38,000 trees have been destroyed in the last four years , a devastating loss for Palestinian farmers.

Individually, these acts of violence affect only a dozen people or a single tiny community. But they add up. If I may borrow a phrase from Charles Dickens, it is like being stung to death by single bees. Slowly, methodically, deliberately, Israel is attempting to grind an entire people into the dust.” [….] The remainder of the article is here.

Ah, you say, Makdisi is dispositionally biased, after all, he’s an American of Palestinian and Lebanese descent, and perhaps even more telling, a nephew of the late Edward Said! Such a complaint is rightly dismissed as a textbook example of an abusive and circumstantial ad hominem. Nonetheless, let’s assume for the sake of argument that judgment contains a small dose of truth. I would then ask you to read the latest book of an award-winning journalist of “Jewish heritage,” Max Blumenthal’s Goliath: Life and Loathing in Greater Israel  (New York: Nation Books, 2013). Now examine Makdisi’s piece again and tell me he’s off the mark.

We’ll end with a few words from the preface to Blumenthal’s book:

“…[M]y subject is the State of Israel during a period of deepening political and societal crisis. Most Americans know far less about this situation than they do about the political polarization in their own country, but it is an issue on which they have opinions—and an issue of paramount significance to US national security and relevance to their own professed values of democracy, equality, and decency. And it is American tax dollars and political support that are crucial in sustaining the present state of affairs. I want to show what they are paying for, the facts as they really are today, in unadorned and unsanitized form, without sentimentality or nostalgia.”

My select bibliography for the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.

Why Love Prevails: What Is Marriage?

Does love make a marriage?  Or does sex?  And if sex makes a marriage, then what kind of sex?  These were central themes of a debate I participated in at the University of Notre Dame on Nov. 9th, where I discussed these questions with two proponents of a highly traditional understanding of the marriage relationship, Ryan Anderson and Sherif Girgis.

Anderson and Girgis are among the co-authors (with Robert P. George) of the new book, "What Is Marriage?  Man and Woman, A Defense."  To summarize their argument:  Marriage can only be brought about by engaging in a particular type of sex act, heterosexual coitus.  Nothing else can substitute for this constitutive element.  Nothing else can take its place.

Marriage, on their account, is a "comprehensive relationship."  Indeed, it is the primordial comprehensive relationship.  What makes it so?  To Anderson and Girgis, the case for marriage begins with the human body. The body is made for unity with another human being.  And that unity is uniquely achieved through heterosexual coitus.

Marriage, they maintain, is a kind of friendship, but it is also more than friendship.  For friendship is a mere "union of hearts and minds," while marriage is a unity of "mind and body" (p. 33).  And this unity of mind and body is achieved, can only be achieved, through heterosexual coital coupling.  Such coupling, they continue, confers something more than intimacy, something more than emotional closeness, because it is ordained to bring into being the next generation.  And for that reason, marriage is also permanent and exclusive.

Other forms of friendship, other forms of sexual coupling (in our debate they dwelt especially on anal intercourse), by the logic of their argument, are incomplete and should not qualify as marital acts (p. 30).  This, Anderson and Girgis insist, is why the State must continue to retain traditional marriage and why it must reject all other forms of union as unworthy of a similar level of legal protection.  Emotion, for Anderson and Girgis, is an inadequate foundation for marriage, affection a weak and unsteady cornerstone.  Only the singular unity of heterosexual coitus can ever truly create a marriage.

How do we unpack these contentions?  We should begin with the idea of permanence because this is where their argument first begins to crumble.  Marriage is permanent, Anderson and Girgis assert, because two bodies come together and perform acts that may lead to procreation.  As they put it: "In coitus, and there alone, a man and a woman's bodies participate by virtue of their sexual complementarity in a coordination that has the biological purpose of reproduction" (p. 26).  Even where reproduction does not occur, the "coordination toward a single end" is present, and that coordination is enough to create a permanent union.

This is an erroneous understanding of the nature of intimate human relationships.  Heterosexual coitus simply does not incline itself, without more, to the formation of permanent relationships.  Every day, people engage in the most transitory of heterosexual couplings.  There is no intention in these fleeting acts of casual sex to create something permanent.  The intention is nothing more than momentary pleasure.  Permanence is the object that is most devoutly to be feared.

Anderson and Girgis must therefore explain why and how such sexual unions achieve permanence since the people who are having sex do not automatically equate the sex act with permanent commitment.  They try to rescue their case by introducing the idea of the marital vow (p. 34).  The couple swear a solemn promise before God and the State that they will remain together forever regardless of life's vicissitudes.  And then society simultaneously assists them in the fulfillment of that promise and holds them to it, by making exit from marriage deliberately difficult.

But Anderson and Girgis never inquire into why people make marriage vows in the first place.  What causes someone to want to spend forever with another person?  To ask this question requires us to leave the question of bodily design aside and focus more deeply on what really leads people to make permanent commitments.  After all, do people really to one another:  "Well, my bodily design matches yours, so let's stay together forever?"  Really?!

In truth, bodily design has little to do with marriage, understood as a permanent and enduring relationship.  It is, in fact, the very emotion, the human affection, the capacity for friendship, which Anderson and Girgis try to dismiss as insufficient, that makes a marriage.  After all, sex without love is transient pleasure.

The human heart's longing for permanence is not magically conjured into being by the injection of semen into vagina, but arises instead from the deepest wellsprings of human emotion.  It is love which seeks to bring the next generation into being, which clothes and cares for children, which sees them safely into adulthood.  And it is love which explains why childless couples remain together, not, as Anderson and Girgis contend, some sort of "team" solidarity with those couples capable of child-bearing (p. 30).  In that paradigm of marriage for Catholics, the union of Mary and Joseph, it could only have been love that held the Holy Family together, not sex, since Catholics believe that Mary was "ever virgin."

And if marriage arises from love, then who is capable of love?  That is the question posed by advocates of same-sex marriage.  And there we must consult the latest empirical studies, which demonstrate that same-sex couples have at least as good a chance to form loving, enduring relationships as heterosexual couples.

Sexual orientation, it is now well-established, is part of naturally-occurring human variability.  While scientists have not identified precise physiological or psychological reasons why some people are gay and others are not, it is clear that sexual orientation is not a choice.  And it is equally clear that sexual orientation is not something like alcoholism, or a susceptibility to addictive behaviors.  People who are attracted to members of the same sex are as capable as heterosexuals of building emotionally healthy, permanent, intimate relationships with the ones they love.

Indeed, in those parts of Europe that have a long history of same-sex marriage, the divorce rates for same-sex couples are sometimes significantly lower than for heterosexual partners.  Thus in Denmark, where same-sex marriage has been allowed since 1989, "the divorce rate among Danish homosexuals is only 17 percent, compared to 46 percent for heterosexuals."

And if we consider the procreative dimension of marriage, it seems that same-sex couples are faring well by the usual measures of success.  Let us consider an important report which appeared in the Spring, 2013 issue of the journal, "Pediatrics," the "Official Journal of the American Academy of Pediatrics."  Writing on behalf of the Academy, the study called for "support for marriage equality" and the repeal of laws restrictive of the rights of gay couples.  The report concluded that many factors might impair the healthy development of children, "but the sexual orientation of their parents is not among them."

In the end, it is love that makes a marriage, not body parts.  It is love that keeps couples together, that sustains them through hardships and heartaches.  It is love which motivates them to provide well for the next generation.  And it is a love that is not limited to heterosexuals, but that belongs to all human beings capable of warm and tender and feeling for others.

Cross-Posted at: http://www.huffingtonpost.com/charles-j-reid-jr/why-love-prevails-what-is_b_4276518.html 

Giving the Republicans a Free Pass on Their Anti-Welfare Rhetoric

The most recent issue of Dissent contains an open letter by Fred Block and Francis Scott Piven to Hillary Clinton in which they argue she should open a national dialogue contesting the claims of the Republican Party about poverty and welfare. Block and Piven rightly argue that change in the “welfare system as we know it” passed by a Republican Congress and approved by President Clinton has severely damaged the poor. The change abolished the Aid to Families with Dependent Children Program and substituted the Temporary Need to Needy Families. The basic idea was that long term welfare encouraged dependency and discouraged work. For a while, in a good economy, the program was thought to be successful. But the program was unaccompanied by a job guarantee and the lack of a guarantee has made a difference. 4.5 million families were in the AFDC program in 1996 when the program was eliminated. Only 1.7 million families were in the TANF program in 2009 despite the acute distress of the economy.  The program had been cut by 62%.

As Robert Reich reports in his book Locked in the Cabinet, President Clinton, who previously had vetoed similar bills, was urged by a number of people in the administration to veto the bill including, of course, Reich and Peter Edelman, but also Robert Rubin who had fought Reich throughout the administration, but thought this move was simply inhumane. To my surprise, Al Gore encouraged Clinton to sign the bill. In my view, Clinton’s action was not only a craven political move; it tore at the heart of what the Democratic Party had long stood for.

The dependence argument has always been overblown. Sure, some people would prefer to receive welfare than to work, but the claim that most of those on welfare get there or stay there because of laziness (partially fed by racism) apparently relies on the notion that an epidemic of laziness struck the country in 2008 when the economy fell apart (caused in large part by Clinton and Rubin’s deregulation of the banks). Moreover, the dependence argument throws innocent children under the bus in an effort to punish their parents most of whom do not deserve to be punished.

Block and Piven argue that Hillary Clinton should initiate a national dialogue because people are angry about wealth inequality (with the bonuses to Wall Street bankers as but one example); because the plight of the poor not only in the TANF program, but also in the unemployment insurance area is acute; and because of the unconscionable recent cut in the food stamps program. They suggest that the hope that the Republican’s dependence issue would be taken away by the President’s caving in to change welfare as we know it has not worked out. Think of Mitt Romney’s attack on the 47% which includes people on Social Security and those receiving veteran’s benefits.

It would be wonderful if Hillary Clinton heeded the call of Block and Piven. But I doubt she will. Lyndon Johnson declared a War on Poverty, but the word poverty is now rarely uttered by a Democratic politician. It seems to me that there is a special responsibility of religious leaders to follow the lead of Pope Francis in dramatizing the plight of the poor. But it is not enough to expose that plight. The Republicans should no longer be given a free pass on the dependency argument. We need a full out assault. It is time to combat the preposterous suggestion that depriving poor families of food, clothing, and shelter is doing them a favor.      

All Is Lost and the Human Condition

We are born alone, we die alone, and we are swept unremembered into a meaningless eternity.  This is the message a viewer might take away from Robert Redford's performance in his All Is Lost.

The film is a stunning tale of loneliness.  It is set on a sailboat adrift on the Indian Ocean.  Robert Redford -- we are never given his screen name -- is sailing far outside shipping lanes in a part of the world where humans rarely venture.  The opening scene is one of desolation.  His ship has been wrecked and he is writing a note which he intends someone to read.  We are never told, however, who his intended recipient might be.  A wife perhaps?  An estranged lover?  A son or a daughter?  An old college friend?  Or, perhaps just a futile effort at being remembered by someone, somewhere, after time runs out for our protagonist.

After this opening scene, the film fills in a bit of back story.  We learn that Redford is in this predicament because his sailing sloop has been rammed by a random shipping container that had broken loose from one of the large freighters traversing these forgotten waters.  Roused from slumber, Redford must engage in a continuous struggle to save his life.

Like life itself, the movie seems to say, it is a contest Redford is destined and doomed to lose.  Valiantly, he patches the leak with spare fiberglass and epoxy, attaching some wooden planks for added strength.  Having lost electrical power, Redford improvises, creating a manual control for the sloop's bilge pumps, so he might slowly, laboriously drain the water that had poured in from the leak.

But Redford cannot breathe easy.  Briefly, he managed to restore electricity in the hope of communicating with the outside world, but the ship's radio sputtered into silence after a few minutes' fitful service.  Now, Redford is truly alone.

A storm blows up, which wrecks the boat.  In the teeth of the gale, Redford is forced to deploy an inflatable life raft, which he kept tethered to the main vessel.  When calm is restored, he succeeds in transferring some supplies from the sloop to the lifeboat before his fatally damaged sailboat sinks beneath the waves.

Redford's only hope now is the little orange and red oval which has become his world.  In one poignant scene, shot from above, we see Redford curled up, asleep in his tiny bobbing dot, surrounded by a grim and unyielding universe of blue.  Is it a microcosm of the earth in the void of space?  Certainly, I thought so.

Like we do when we encounter the headwinds of life, Redford continued to improvise, in his case brilliantly.  He is a modern sailor accustomed to GPS and the many convenient ways of keeping track of our place in the world.  But thrown into unfamiliar circumstances, he opened a box containing an ancient mariner's sextant.  Reading a how-to manual as he assembled the pieces and gazed at the heavens, Redford charted a course for his little vessel, day-by-day working his way into the Indian Ocean shipping lanes, in the hope that he might be seen and rescued.

But his dream of rescue was dashed.  First one and then another large container vessel loom into view.  Redford shoots off his flares, shouts, tries to draw the attention of the two ships.  But the ships trudge onward, their propellers audibly churning, giving the appearance not of ghost-ships, but of robot-ships, fully automated, dehumanized pieces of machinery carrying their large cargoes of just-in-time inventory in that ceaseless crushing progress we call efficiency.  These lifeless, unresponsive vessels -- are they nothing more than the god of myth and magic, indifferent to the pleas of a humanity born to die?

Redford slowly drifts back out of the shipping lanes.  Venturing into them had been a fool's errand to begin with.  And then another storm brews on the horizon.  Redford is tossed and turned, driven mad by the enclosing reality of personal extinction.  The scene has all the force of the ancient Greek myths, Sisyphus condemned to roll the rock up the hill only to be crushed again at nightfall.

Once again, however, calm is restored.  Redford sees a light at close distance.  He lights a fire to call attention to his plight.  The fire gets out of hand, his little lifeboat is burned, and Redford is thrown into the sea.

The movie is one of the most powerful existentialist statements I have seen brought to film in years.  We are forced to ask:  Is the whole struggle for life pointless?  Meaningless?  The void, the chasm that is deep space, the infinity that envelops us, does anything finally matter?  Why resist the closing of the light?

All Is Lost reminded me, on a surface level anyway, of the Jon Krakauer book (and movie) Into the Wild.  In that story, we see Chris McCandless, a recent Emory University graduate, embark on a solitary (and deadly) quest to find himself in the Alaska back-country.  But that story, finally, is about self-discovery.  It is a more extreme version of Henry David Thoreau on Walden Pond, a search to find human authenticity in the midst of society's vain pomps and hollow glory.

All Is Lost, on the other hand, means to ask a very different question:  Is the human condition futile?  There is no redemption here.  No grace.  No pardon received, though Redford's note in the movie's opening scene tepidly beseeches forgiveness.

As a Christian, I might venture a response to the unremitting bleakness of this canvas.  "God is love," the first Epistle of John proclaims (1 John 4: 16).  The human condition is not one of loneliness but of warm relationship.  We are connected to countless others -- those who lived generations and centuries before us, those who are friends and neighbors and family today, and those generations who are as yet unborn to whom we have the responsibility of good and faithful stewards.

This is what the Redford character is missing and the essential flaw in the existentialist message.  The human community, in Redford's world, has been stripped away and the person stands in solitary oneness against the cosmos.  Redford's character is the Nietzschean Superman, the Ayn Randian striver, but there is no triumph in his life, no final victory, for he dies defeated and alone, cursing his fate.

Our salvation comes from the many sacrifices, large and small, we make for one another, the goodness and kindness we show and share with each other.  We may be adrift in a large and hostile ocean, surrounded by the impenetrable vastness of infinity, and yet if we have each other we are not lost or without hope. All Is Lost -- all, indeed, is lost if we have not love for one another.

Cross-posted at: http://www.huffingtonpost.com/charles-j-reid-jr/all-is-lost-and-the-human-condition_b_4209972.html 

How Even Public Citizen Can be Blinded By the First Amendment into Supporting Corporate Exploitation

Public Citizen thinks of itself as the “countervailing voice to corporate power,” and over the years, it has been exactly that. It is one of the most important voices for the people in Washington, D.C. arrayed against a sea of corporate lobbyists. Nonetheless, I want to focus on two episodes where Public Citizen has advanced the interests of corporate power.

The first was the effort of Public Citizen to establish that certain forms of commercial advertising were protected under the First Amendment. In Virginia State Board of Pharmacy v. Virginia Citizens Council, Public Citizen argued that drug price advertising should be protected under the First Amendment. The Court agreed and firmly established for the first time in our nation’s history that true commercial advertising enjoyed a degree of protection. From the perspective of Public Citizen this was a vindication of the consumer’s right to know. And it set the stage for protection of attorney price advertising as well. But it also set the stage for much more. In particular, the commercial speech doctrine has protected the work of big tobacco. 400,000 people die each year because of the work of the merchants of death and suffering. It is regrettable that the efforts of tobacco companies to secure the addiction of even more smokers now has come to enjoy a mantle of constitutional protection. Moreover, the commercial speech doctrine is being used to undermine various regulatory efforts to combat corporate behavior that uses speech to harm consumers. If Public Citizen had known where the courts would take this doctrinal innovation, I would hope they would have never helped to get this train rolling.

I cannot blame Public Citizen too much because I made the same mistake by arguing many years ago that Virginia Pharmacy was rightly decided. But there is another mistake of Public Citizen that should have been obvious. In 2010, Public Citizen joined with New York attorneys Alexander & Catalano to protect advertisements that were quite different from the informational price advertising in Virginia Pharmacy. The advertisements of Alexander and Catalano called them the “heavy hitters,” contained jingles and special effects, including wisps of smoke and blue electrical currents surrounding the firm's name, and depicted Alexander and his partner as giants towering above local buildings, running to a client's house so quickly they appear as blurs, and providing legal assistance to space aliens. The Second Circuit Court of Appeals in Alexander v. Cahill rightly characterized the speech as irrelevant, unverifiable, and non-informational, but bizarrely ruled that the speech was protected under the First Amendment. I understand that Public Citizen would want to protect the efforts of plaintiff personal injury attorneys to secure clients. But the principle of the case is bankrupt and foreign to the mission of Public Citizen.

The principle of the case does not protect consumer’s rights to acquire information. Alexander and Catalano may be good attorneys, but these commercials provide no information that would justify selecting them. As the court said, the messages are irrelevant, unverifiable, and non-informational. They are exactly the kind of non-rational messages used by corporations to manipulate consumers and to foster a materialistic, hedonistic society. Public Citizen ordinarily stands up as a strong voice against consumer manipulation. I suspect that in this case someone in Public Citizen was shortsighted in focusing on the value of plaintiff attorneys in fighting corporate tortious actions and perhaps in drinking too much First Amendment cool aid.

Don’t get me wrong. Public Citizen does way more good than bad. It is an organization enormously worthy of financial support. But, in my judgment, these blunders are whoppers.