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7/17/23

7/17/2023

FLY THE FLAG. EAT YOUR BROCCOLI. AND DON’T OVERTHROW THE GOVERNMENT

HAS IT COME TO THIS?
   Do liberals have to boast about their patriotism?
   Do we have to fly the flag?
   Sermonize about family verities?
   Lecture about good table manners?
   Yes, to all of this. And more.
   The very kinds of things liberals used to sneer at, mock, ridicule and smugly take for granted have now become a sacred personal, individual responsibility if our country is to survive.
    It’s a sign of how low Donald Trump and his thug cultists have brought the USA that liberals now have to come out the closet and openly proclaim our undying love of and devotion to the world’s greatest democracy.
   Used to be we could leave all of this self-serving posturing to the conservatives, who wrapped themselves in the American flag and appointed themselves as fanboys of the family, custodians of the Constitution, military militants, foster parents of free enterprise.
   But now, the Right has taken America on such a dangerous wrong turn that it’s up to the Left to set things right.
   And It’s Donald Trump’s fault.
   He’s taught half the country that kindness, honesty, sportsmanship, compassion, law-and-order and the Constitution don’t matter. That it’s okay to lie, cheat, bully, grab strangers’ genitals, collaborate with The Enemy and plot against the government. An entire political party – that would be the Republican Party - has ingested all of his sacrilege and turned sedition into a new religion.
   Leaving Liberals no choice but to become the new flag-wavers, public patriots and Constitutional choristers.

LET ME DIGRESS HERE to say that a) this is not a joke; and b) it’s critical we make a huge change if our country is to emerge from the nightmare of the last seven years.
   Just documenting that Donald Trump is a political criminal, a faker and a traitor doesn’t do it anymore. It’s no longer enough to catalogue Trumps sins and the treachery of his Republican acolytes.
   For one thing, it doesn’t work.
   Trump can do anything, and it doesn’t matter. He can grab pussies. Redraw weather maps. Call counties shitholes. Cage children. Cajole a secretary of state to “find” votes. Fumble Covid, allowing thousands to die. And toss paper towels at hurricane victims. Trump can embrace Vladimir Putin, a dictator who meddled in an American election, which once would have been an act of war, then deputize a mob to to assassinate Trump's own vice president.
   None of that matters to The Base, and perhaps to half the country’s voters, who soon could put him back in the White House.

WHAT TO DO?
   The sane half of America has to rescue the whole of the country. And job one is to celebrate, honor and embrace basic values, so that ordinary, usually anonymous Americans continue to be the country’s guardians and its true heroes.
   That’s the big lesson of the January 6 insurrection at the Capitol, and Trump’s massive before-and-after conspiracy to nullify the election. Thousands of people most of us never heard of stuck to their principles and did their jobs. They counted votes, threw out frivolous lawsuits, repelled the mob and gave their lives.
   What stood between democracy and dictatorship were individuals, with principles, who knew right from wrong and did something about it.
   I hate to say this, because it’s so corny, but all of this starts at home. And at the playground, on the football field, in the classroom, at the library, during dance rehearsal, in the mosque, wherever it is that children grow up and where grownups decide what kind of people they've become.
   It never occurred to me that Liberals would have to have to say anything about this, in part because it was shameless, self-serving Republican boilerplate.
   Really, you shouldn’t have to say this sort of thing – I love my children, I love my country, I’m nice to our dog. Just as church-goers shouldn’t have to brag about how church-going they are, or how much you give to charity, volunteer as a tutor or give $1 to the guy at the stoplight who might not be as hungry as his sign says.
   But our country, our democracy is at a life-and-death moment, and not one we asked for, any more than millions of ordinary people wanted when they went off to defeat Adolf Hitler. Freedom was not so much in the hands of generals and presidents, as it was in the care of mechanics, window-washers, insurance salesmen, lathe operators, fledgling lawyers and thousands of others who hadn’t decided what they’d do if they were allowed to live.
   In the decades after World War II, it wasn't that the Left didn’t care about our country, only that we never had to think about it, much less boast about it. Quite the contrary, love of country was assumed as people were burning flags, draft cards and bras, shouting ‘Hell, we won’t go,’ and singing 'We shall overcome.' Patriotism was a given, which was why so many demanded that a flawed country pay attention to civil rights, women’s rights and environmental justice.
   But now we have to talk openly about the basics of right and wrong, because good and bad are being challenged at every level of American public life.
   We have to demand, both of our children and ourselves and fellow adults, that we pay attention to matters of right and wrong. We have to resurrect the whole concept of Shame, and it’s Goody Two-shoe’s cousin, Pride.
   That it’s right to tell the truth; wrong to tell a lie.
   It’s bad to be a bully.
   It’s right to defend the weak.
   It’s wrong to be a poor loser.
   It’s okay to be polite. Wrong to grab someone’s crotch.
We shouldn't steal, cheat or be a sneak.
   Raise the flag. Follow the news. Do your homework. Brush your teeth. Feed the dog. Don’t skip civics class if you’re lucky enough to be in one. Read a banned book. Don’t cuss (so much). Look up, occasionally, from your phone. Don’t run the red or floor it through the yellow. Don’t make fun of people’s clothes or their discovery that they’re a different gender. Wash the dishes. Change your socks. Be civil to your parents. Don’t argue with the ref. Don’t just pretend to be nice. Pay your taxes. Don’t yell at the kids. Don’t talk with your mouth full. Make your bed. Eat your broccoli.
Give a damn.

4 Comments

7/3/2023

2 Comments

THE POWER OF THREE
OUTNUMBERED, A TRIO OF SUPREME COURT JUSTICES SPOKE ELOQUENTLY ABOUT THE COURT’S RETREAT ON CIVIL RIGHTS

A WISE TRIO. These spotted owls in Kathmandu, Nepal appeared on The Guardian newspaper's website, and reminded me of the three dissenters in last week’s Supreme Court retreat on civil rights. CREDIT: Prakash Mathema/AFP/Getty Images **

TO THE THREE DISSENTERS on the U.S. Supreme Court, thank you.
      Thanks for being such good losers, which I mean as a compliment. This trio of wise women refuses to stay quiet, despite being horribly, often hopelessly outnumbered. They keep the fires of American compassion, common sense and progress glowing.
      No fun, being on the wrong end of the equation.
      Six to three.
      But the trio’s writings give us hope, establishing an archive of legal theory and reason that will be a resource to correct the misdeeds of the court’s current right-wing majority, hell-bent on undoing decades of reform.
      Some commentators have criticized the quarrelsome tone of the exchanges between the court’s liberals – Justices Sonia Sotomayor, Elena Kagan and Ketanji Brown Jackson - and its conservatives - Chief Justice John G. Roberts Jr., and Justices Brett M. Kavanaugh, Amy Coney Barrett, Clarence Thomas, Samuel A. Alito Jr. and Neil M. Gorsuch. But I welcome the rancor. This is when the justices and their smarty-pants clerks, who do a lot of the scut work, shed legal-speak to talk clearly, and even eloquently, about their nation-shaping decisions.
      I was thinking about the role of dissent as I was looking over one of two disturbing decisions the court dropped on Bad Friday, June 30, the last day of the court’s current session. (It’s always a relief when the court takes a break, even knowing that not all the justices have paid for past vacations).
      The case I was reading was 303 Creative LLC, et al. v. Elenis, et al., No. 21-467. And let me apologize for taking up your time on a holiday weekend with this kind of thing. Diving into a legal opinion is only slightly less exciting than reading instructions for assembling your new, potentially explosive, backyard grill.

THE JUSTICES: Front row, from, left: Sonia Sotomayor, Clarence Thomas, John G. Roberts, Jr., Samuel A. Alito, Jr., Elena Kagan. Back row: Amy Coney Barrett, Neil M. Gorsuch, Brett M. Kavanaugh and Ketanji Brown Jackson. CREDIT: Fred Schilling, Collection of the Supreme Court of the United States

THIS IS THE CASE in which the high court, 6 to 3, supported a Colorado website designer, Lorie Smith, who didn’t want her one-person company, 303 Creative, to invent websites for gay people’s weddings. She said that same-sex marriages were “false,” because God ”sanctions only a man-woman union, and that such a marriage “violates God’s will.” She wasn’t opposed to working with same-sex customers on a variety of web projects, just not on their weddings.
      Smith hadn’t dealt with the issue in real life. Her artistically customized wedding sites were still in the planning stages as she filed suit because of “worries” that Colorado’s public accommodation laws – developed to forbid restaurants, hotels and many other businesses from keeping out Blacks, Jews, women, as well as gays – would force her to create websites in which she didn’t believe.
      Critics of the lawsuit, including Justice Sotomayor, who wrote the dissent and was joined by the two other liberals, said this reasoning was a backdoor way of slamming the front door on wedding-bound same-sex persons, and inevitably, this would lead to lots of other retreats from hard-won civil rights advances.

BUT GORSUCH, looking at it from designer Smith’s point of view, said enforcement of the Colorado public accommodations laws would force her to express views she didn’t believe. And a lot more mischief could come from that kind of enforcement.

Gorsuch wrote:
      “… the government could force a male website designer married to another man to design websites for an organization that advocates against same-sex marriage . . . Countless other creative professionals, too, could be forced to choose between remaining silent, producing speech that violates their beliefs, or speaking their minds and incurring sanctions for doing so.”
      Gorsuch cited past Supreme Court decisions about free speech, such as one which allowed school students to observe their beliefs as Jehovah’s Witnesses by not forcing them to salute the American flag or say the pledge of allegiance.

Gorsuch wrote:
      “Like many States, Colorado has a law forbidding businesses from engaging in discrimination when they sell goods and services to the public. Laws along these lines have done much to secure the civil rights of all Americans. But in this case, Colorado does not just seek to ensure the sale of goods or services on equal terms. It seeks to use its law to compel an individual to create speech she does not believe. The question we face is whether that course violates the Free Speech Clause of the First Amendment.”
      As a writer, I find Gorsuch’s reasoning intriguing, placing the Court as a principled champion of the First Amendment, which I happen to believe is the Constitution’s most important provision. Sure, plenty of writers will write the things that the person who pays them wants them to. But there’s always the writer’s choice not to do that.

ALTERNATIVELY, Gorsuch could be doing the devil’s work, using noble words to accomplish something evil.

Sotomayor wrote:
      “Today is a sad day in American constitutional law and in the lives of LGBT people. The Supreme court of the United States declares that a particular kind of business, though open to the public, has a Constitutional right to refuse to serve members of a protected class.”
      “The Court does so for the first time in its history, By issuing this new license to discriminate in a case brought by a company that seeks to deny same-sex couples the full and equal enjoyment of its services, the immediate, symbolic effect of the decision is to mark gays and lesbians for second-class status.”
           Where will it stop? she asked. Could a designer refuse to create a website for an interracial marriage? A company selling stationery might refuse to sell a birth announcement for a disabled couple because she thinks such couples shouldn’t have children. A business that offers family portraits could limit them to “traditional” families. Smith would be allowed to post a sign: wedding-minded gays not welcome.

Sotomayor wrote:
      “Around the country, there has been a backlash to the movement for liberty and equality for gender and sexual minorities. New forms of inclusion have been met with reactionary exclusion. This heartbreaking. Sadly, it is also familiar.”
      “When the civil rights and women’s rights movement sought equality in public life, some public establishments refused. Some even claimed, based on sincere religious beliefs, constitutional rights to discriminate. The brave Justices who once sat on this Court decisively rejected those claims.”

HAVING READ BOTH he opinion and its dissent, I can say that Gorsuch got one thing right:
   “It is difficult to read the dissent and conclude we are looking at the same case.”
      On one hand, Gorsuch made a convincing argument that the case might be quite individual – about one website designer, who considers herself an artist, who puts her heart and soul into her work and has deeply held beliefs that would be violated if forced to take on particular assignments.

Gorsuch wrote that much of the dissent:
   “...focuses on the strides gay American have made toward securing equal justice under law. And no doubt, there is much to applaud here. But none of these answers the question we face today: Can a State force someone who provides her own expressive services to abandon her conscience and speak its preferred message instead?”

Sotomayor, in dissent, wrote with passion rarely present in an official document, about the effect of discrimination against gays and lesbians in the marketplace:
      “Ask any LGBT person, and you will learn just how often they are forced to navigate life in this way. They must ask themselves: If I reveal my identity to this co-worker, or to this shopkeeper, will they treat me the same way? If I hold the hand of my partner in this setting, will someone stare at me, harass me, or even hurt me? It is an awful way to live. Freedom from this way of life is the very object of a law that declares: All members of the public are entitled to inhabit public spaces on equal terms.”

TO ME, the persuasiveness of the justices’ writings is one of the most problematic parts of this case, which is all the more ironic because some of it is about free speech. Because we have capable, skilled, talented writers making convincing cases for any side of any debate.
      But that in this case, what matters in isn’t settled by words but by numbers.
      Six to three.
      If you’re in the majority, your assignment is to make sure the words support your superior mathematics. You might even believe what you’re writing, but it’s not required. It could be the same for the dissenters: lay the groundwork for reform against the day, probably later than sooner, when the mathematics do change.
      But words really do count.
      In the long term, they matter more than the numbers.
      I’m betting that Sotomayor, and her two colleagues, are correct, that the majority decision is a dangerous backsliding of hard-won elements of civil rights justice, a subterfuge that uses the First Amendment to promote a nasty purpose.
      And it’s a worthy mission for the dissenters to say so.

Sotomayor wrote:
      “The unattractive lesson of the majority opinion is this: What’s mine is mine, and what’s yours is yours. The lesson of the history of public accommodations law is altogether different. It is that in a free and democratic society, there can be no social castes. And for that to be true, it must be true in the public market.”

      In words, there is both power and hope.
* * *

(* * As noted in the caption, the owls' photo is from The Guardian. CLICK here to go to the site).

2 Comments

7/17/23

FLY THE FLAG. EAT YOUR BROCCOLI. AND DON’T OVERTHROW THE GOVERNMENT

7/3/2023

THE POWER OF THREEOUTNUMBERED, A TRIO OF SUPREME COURT JUSTICES SPOKE ELOQUENTLY ABOUT THE COURT’S RETREAT ON CIVIL RIGHTS

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THE POWER OF THREE
OUTNUMBERED, A TRIO OF SUPREME COURT JUSTICES SPOKE ELOQUENTLY ABOUT THE COURT’S RETREAT ON CIVIL RIGHTS