Human Rights

Conspiracy, Human Rights, Idaho Politics, Law and Justice

The Danger Within …

Posted on by mjohnson

“These right-wing extremist groups — first of all, they’re fed with grievances. And whenever you have a charismatic leader that attracts those with grievances against the institutions, against society, and you blame the government or an institution [for] it, and then you build in the violence and the racial, just hatred aspect of it, it’s just a boiling pot, and it could pour over the pot any time into violence. … It’s something that is part of human nature — that whenever you are aggrieved or you feel like you’re a victim, you try to find somebody to blame or an institution to blame. And if the conspiracy theories are fomented and spread … a certain element of those turn violent.”

Former Arkansas Governor Asa Hutchinson, a GOP presidential candidate polling at 1%

——

On a coal-black Friday night just over 40 years ago – April 8, 1983 to be precise – a group of self-described white supremacists, neo-Nazis, Klan members and Christian nationalists ignited fuel-soaked burlap wrapped around a 20-foot-tall cross in a farmer’s field in southern Idaho.

The image of the burning cross may have been more dramatic than the crowd that watched the spectacle. Only about 20 Nazi saluting radicals showed up to shout “white power,” but they symbolized then – and continue to symbolize today – the fraught history of white supremacist hatred that is all too deeply embedded in the DNA of Idaho and much of the Pacific Northwest.

Front page of the Twin Falls Times-News, April 9, 1983

Richard Butler, the dangerous bigot who then led the north Idaho-based Aryan Nations, was dressed that night in Klan robes and made it clear that the cross burning was in response – a moral act, Butler said – to anti-harassment legislation that had recently been approved by the Idaho legislature.

The malicious harassment law did not address a cross burning protest on private land, and the demonstration was on private property, but as the reporter for the Twin Falls Times-News pointed out, “nevertheless, the ceremony served to challenge the law and the establishment that enacted it.” 

The more things change.

This week, as was demonstrated by legal filings presented to an Idaho court, the state’s rightwing radical of the moment, Ammon Bundy, is defying the law and the establishment that enacted it.

Bundy’s prolonged and complicated legal battle with Idaho’s largest health care system has, according to legal representations made by St. Luke’s Health System, involved witness intimidation, bullying and threats to medical professionals.

The hospital system is suing Bundy because of the intimidating protests he and his followers mounted around the downtown Boise hospital. A child of a Bundy follower was involved in a child welfare case, and as a result the youngster was being cared for at the hospital.

Bundy and his network of followers, the People’s Rights Network – some estimates claim the Network includes 10,000 individuals spread across the American west – have spun the circumstances of the child and the hospital into a conspiracy to infringe on parental rights. This is very much a pretense in search of violence.

As the Idaho Statesman reported, the St. Luke’s “suit claims that the defendants posted lies about the hospital system online and did so in part to raise money and gain a bigger political following.” The hospital says it has spent millions to upgrade security even as health care workers have been threatened and harassed in a variety of ways.

And much as Richard Butler did decades ago, Bundy has flipped a middle finger at the courts and law enforcement by failing to honor demands for material, accept subpoenas and by claiming that he is the one being harassed.

A former Boise police captain filed an affidavit on behalf of the hospital in the Bundy case, saying, “It is my opinion that extremist groups like People’s Rights Network have a playbook that involves the intentional use of misinformation and disinformation to radicalize others to take action, including violent action, against individuals identified by the extremist group.”

If you wonder just what Bundy and his band are capable of recall the armed standoff at the Oregon wildlife refuge in 2016. Or the earlier defiance of federal law at Bundy’s father’s ranch in Nevada. Or the demonstrations designed to intimidate and frighten police and elected officials. Who knows what the man’s end game might be, but his history tells us he’s capable of even more and bigger outrages, including violence.

Meanwhile, Idaho is again defined, as it was 40 years ago, as a hateful haven for anti-government radicals who barely bother to disguise the violence lurking beneath their sheets or brewing under their ridiculously large cowboy hats.

What is different 40-years on is the willingness, at least on the part of most of the state’s political leadership, to quietly shrug Bundy’s nonsense off. The official silence is deafening.

Ammon Bundy – in the big hat – on the steps of the Idaho Statehouse

By the time Richard Butler staged his cross burning in the spring of 1983 a bipartisan consensus had formed in Idaho that aggressively and on a sustained basis pushed back against his hatred. A Democratic governor, John Evans, and a Republican attorney general, Jim Jones, regularly condemned the white supremacists. Local groups formed to push back with messages of tolerance and reality. A Republican legislature passed the law referenced earlier. The state’s Human Rights Commission was at the center of the response of decency.

Today, many in the legislature, some even openly, identify with Bundy and his anti-government, conspiracy-driven radicalism. The attorney general openly courts the radical right. The governor apparently believes silence will just make the outrages go away. The sheriff in the governor’s own home county is intimidated by Bundy and his followers.

Hand it to the hospital executives, the health care workers and their lawyers who have carried the battle against extremism, mostly with little political cover.

The success of a Richard Butler or an Ammon Bundy depends upon intimidation and fear. One of the Idaho cross burners said in 1983, “we’re going to have our redress of grievances one way or the other.” After law enforcement personnel confronted Bundy (before they backed down) he said he was being threatened to the point where “I feel like they are going to keep pushing and pushing until I become what they say I am.”

Butler and his violence prone followers were eventually routed in Idaho by a dogged and sustained effort to hold him to account in the courts and in the court of public opinion. Unless Bundy is confronted in precisely the same way he’ll continue and grow his campaign of fear and intimidation. It’s all he’s got to keep his followers riled up and armed.

And like Butler four decades ago, Bundy is also playing a long game.

On that long ago night as the disgusting cross-burning crowd dispersed in southern Idaho, the Times-News noted the bigots “were cheered by the fact that the glowing cross … had attracted a steady stream of car-bound sightseers.”

Most of the gawkers appeared to be teenagers and, as one of the white supremacist said, “that’s OK.”

A Twin Falls Times-News editorial shortly after the southern Idaho cross burning in 1983

Additional Reading:

Republicans ‘glorify political violence’ by embracing extreme gun culture

Continuing the theme …

“Republicans in Idaho have been criticized for ‘glorifying political violence’ after the party hosted Kyle Rittenhouse, the American who shot and killed two people at an anti-racism protest and injured another, as a celebrity guest at a fundraiser.

“The 20-year-old was the guest of honor at a Bonneville county Republican party event, in Idaho Falls, Idaho, on 15 April, where an AR-15 style rifle signed by Rittenhouse was auctioned off as part of a fundraiser and people could buy tickets to ‘Trigger time‘: a Rittenhouse-hosted shooting event at a gun range.”

Read the whole story.

Proud Boys members convicted – 3 reads on the group and right-wing extremist white nationalism

“[T]he more committed members of these and other extreme right-wing groups believe that the U.S. government, as currently constituted, is illegitimate and should be overthrown and replaced with one that is based on white supremacy.”

We should be concerned … really concerned.

The Judge Who Sentenced the Rosenbergs

A new biography of the controversial judge who sent a couple to the electric chair.

“Foremost for any biographer, [Martin] Siegel examines [Irving] Kaufman’s conduct in the Rosenberg case. In total, it’s a disturbing portrait. Kaufman lobbied to try the case, exercised his discretion at times to support the government at trial, and sentenced Ethel Rosenberg to die even though her role in the conspiracy was minor. The judge also engaged in improper ex parte—private, one-sided—discussions with prosecutors during the trial. However, this was not known until the 1970s, more than two decades after the Rosenbergs were executed.”

From The Washington Monthly.

Thanks for reading. Be careful out there. Vote …

Civil Rights, Civil War, Human Rights

Conflict Entrepreneurs … 

Posted on by mjohnson

“It is clear to us based on the gear that the individuals had with them, the stuff they had in their possession and in the U-Haul with them, along with paperwork that was seized from them, that they came to riot downtown,” said Coeur d’Alene Police Chief Lee White.

It’s not every day you see a Pacific Northwest law enforcement official make such a statement. Get used to it. You’ll see something similar again soon, likely many similar things.

The 31 members of the white supremacist group calling itself Patriot Front who were arrested last week at a northern Idaho Pride Day celebration may seem, at least at first blush, to be little more than a handful of neo-Nazi losers and cranks, white men who hate the idea that the United States is a nation of ethnic and religious diversity. But it would be a mistake to dismiss these dangerous men as anything less than what they are: domestic terrorists.

Patriot Front members arrested in Coeur d’Alene, Idaho

Patriot Front’s “manifesto” states the group’s aspirations in language that would please the old Aryan Nation’s bigot, Richard Butler. “A nation within a nation is our goal. Our people face complete annihilation as our culture and heritage are attacked from all sides.”

The leader of the group – its membership is estimated at a few hundred young men spread across the country – is a Texan named Thomas Ryan Rousseau. Rousseau first came to prominence in Charlottesville, Virginia in August 2017 when some of his followers participated in the infamous “Unite the Right” rally.

Not long after that shameful racist gathering – then-President Donald Trump excused the violence as a protest against removal of Confederate monuments even as one life was lost as torch bearing marchers chanted anti-Semitic slogans – Rousseau said: “America our nation stands before an existential threat. The lives of your children, and your children’s children, and your prosperity beyond that, dangle above a den of vipers. A corrupt, rootless, global, and tyrannical elite has usurped your democracy and turned it into a weapon, first to enslave and then to replace you.”

Charlotteville 2017

Trump’s comment that at Charlottesville there were “some very bad people … but you also had people that were very fine people, on both sides” was widely condemned, but also entirely excused by most Republican politicians. Since Charlottesville, Patriot Front and similar groups – the Proud Boys and Oath Keepers, for example, who led the January 6 attack on the Capitol – have grown more aggressive and more violent.

These radical, rightwing groups have become, as political scientist Barbara F. Walters has written, “conflict entrepreneurs,” who exist to create the kind of confrontation, provocative and potentially violent, that was barely avoided in Coeur d’Alene.

Walters, in her recent book How Civil Wars Start and How to Stop Them, writes alarmingly of the United States nearing the point where radical right groups engage in sustained violence, often marked by assassination attempts, ambushes and attacks on police or the military. They seek chaos, Walters believes, in order to destabilize a fractious and already troubled democratic system.

Author Barbara F. Walters and her new book – a strong warning to the U.S.

Walters and other scholars have documented the rise of such groups and their tactics around the world and contend the U.S. is entering a period of sustained rightwing violence, something the FBI has issued warnings about for years. Think of the sectarian “troubles” in Northern Ireland that fractured that divided land for a generation, or the tribal violence in Rwanda, or the still raging civil war in Syria.

Only a failure of imagination based on a clear-eyed understanding of what rightwing terrorism is capable of prevents most Americans from understanding the depth of this threat.

Patriot Front has demonstrated in Philadelphia, leafleted in Vermont and the campus of the University of West Virginia and led anti-immigrant protests in California. In Brooklyn a year ago, members vandalized a George Floyd statue and defaced a mural in Richmond commemorating Black tennis great Arthur Ashe. Patriot Front members have been involved in anti-abortion rallies, as well.

The group’s national reach and level or coordination is obvious given that those arrested in northern Idaho came from at least 11 states and just happened to show up packed into a rented U-Haul truck wearing hoods and carrying shields and apparently some weapons. The objective was clearly to provoke a confrontation, create chaos, grab headlines and then slink out of town.

So, what should Idaho officials be doing about these dangerous radicals? First: take them seriously – absolutely seriously. No longer ignore them. Do not fail to name what they are doing or denounce what they profess to stand for. This demands a full-on mobilization of state and local law enforcement and aggressive prosecution.

Instead, Idaho Governor Brad Little issued a mealy-mouthed statement extolling everyone’s right to peaceful protest and praised the police response. Little did not deplore the white supremacist agenda of Patriot Pride. The governor did not link the radicals to a growing national movement to disparage members of the LGBTQ community. And Little did not summon the courage to be outraged by members of his own party cheering on white supremacists and hate spreaders.

As Rebecca Boone of the Associated Press reported, “a lawmaker from the northernmost region of the state, Republican Rep. Heather Scott, told an audience that drag queens and other LGBTQ supporters are waging ‘a war of perversion against our children.’” That is an outrageous, untrue and dangerous accusation that deserves only censure.

The non-response by Idaho conservatives is a big tell. Brad Little and most Republicans are afraid of the radical right because they realize they constitute the growing racist and hateful wing of the GOP. They will come to rue their inaction because inaction will foster more hate.

Consider this: One of those arrested in Coeur d’Alene came all the way from Alabama. Doug Jones, a former Alabama senator and one-time prosecutor who finally brought to justice the racist Klan murderers of four little Black girls in a Birmingham church in 1963, issued a stern warning during an interview with the Idaho Capital Sun.

“There’s a reason they felt like they could do this. There’s a reason that a guy from Alabama went all the way out there,” Jones said. “There are gay pride events going on all over the country. Why did they pick Idaho? It’s because of a conservative government that they felt like they could do it and they would be part of the community as opposed to being an outlier. And … I believe all people in Alabama and Idaho are much better than that, and they believe in decency, civility and giving everybody equal opportunities.”

Maybe. We should hope so. But it’s equally possible the opposite is true. It was once said that “Idaho is too great for hate,” but hate now seems to be the state’s brand and Republican elected officials are empowering the hate.

—–0—–

Additional Reading:

A few other items I came across this week that may be of interest …

How the Crazy Plays in Wisconsin

A scathing piece here from the Wisconsin Examiner about the crazy “election fraud” investigation of a former Wisconsin Supreme Court justice, Michael Gableman. For months now Gableman has engaged in an expensive, nonsensical exercise to show that there was fraud in Wisconsin’s handling of the 2020 presidential election. The Big Lie has turned into a Big Con, as Gableman has spent hundreds of thousands in taxpayer dollars to only ensnarl himself in litigation, controversy and, as seems increasingly likely, legal contempt for not responding to demands for records.

Reporter Ruth Conniff:

“What is Gableman hiding? Keystone Kops-style incompetence, wasting money and coming up with nothing are the hallmarks of his ridiculous probe, which he and [Wisconsin House Speaker Robin] Vos justify as an effort to increase ‘transparency’ and public confidence in Wisconsin elections. We already know Gableman used the taxpayers’ funds to attend a conspiracy theory conference hosted by MyPillow CEO Mike Lindell and to visit Arizona to inspect its discredited audit.”

Clowns will clown. Here is the link.

Steve Bannon and the Politics of Bullshit

And speaking of bull excrement – Steve Bannon!

Damon Linker on the full-time provocateur and danger to the Republic.

“Bannon knows what he hates. Liberals. Progressives. The left. China. But what’s the alternative? It can’t be anything that resembles the Republican Party of the past, because he hates that, too. What then? He can’t really say. In place of a vision of a better world, he offers only negation. His ‘ideal’ future is one of leveling destruction—like the skyscrapers collapsing, one after another, in the final scene of the movie Fight Club. What comes after the skyline has been reduced to rubble, Bannon hasn’t a clue. All he knows is that he wants to be the one to place and detonate the TNT.”

Discount him as a crank, a grifter, an unmade bed of radical, neo-fascist garbage, but don’t think he is not one dangerous SOB. As Charlie Sykes of The Bulwark once said of Bannon: “A clown with a flamethrower still has a flamethrower.”

Link to Linker.

Trump’s useful thugs: how the Republican party offered a home to the Proud Boys

I stumbled across this excellent piece from 2021 in researching this week’s column.

Armed and violent

“Dwindling enthusiasm for the militias and Patriot movement during the Bush era was transformed by the election of Barack Obama in 2008 and the development of the Tea Party, which according to the journalist David Neiwert, became ‘a wholesale conduit for a revival of the Patriot movement and its militias.’ This convergence proved fertile ideological ground: the radical libertarianism of the Tea Partiers intermingling with the chauvinism of the militias and their white nationalist allies, bonded with the conspiracy theories of Alex Jones, Fox News propaganda and what the historian Greg Grandin once described as ‘an almost psychotropic hatred of Barack Obama.’

“Many members of these groups would go on to become staunch Donald Trump supporters, and while the Republican party has traditionally sought to maintain a certain plausible deniability in its relationship with the fringe right, the Trump campaign threw open Pandora’s box, welcoming the avowed white supremacists, antisemites and fascists who stalked the ideological fringes of US politics.”

This Guardian story will help you understand the growing radical base of the modern GOP.

The January 6 Committee’s Fatal Connections

Garrett Epps in the Washington Monthly outlines why the January 6 hearings really, really matter.

“If I am right about this narrative strategy, future public hearings will show us a desperate, unmoored Trump reaching out for violent helpers—a through line between the president and the two neofascist street gangs, the Proud Boys and the Oath Keepers, who were the most aggressive and organized part of the mob that sacked the Capitol on January 6. On the one hand, we have the fascist leaders conferring in a parking deck; on the other, we have a president who seems to know that something big is about to go down.”

I do hope people are paying attention. Here’s the link.

Buchwald in Paris: Letters from Steinbeck, and an Invite to the Most Famous Wedding in the World

I’ve forever been a fan of the legendary humor and political columnist Art Buchwald.

Didn’t he LOOK like a columnist?

For a long time I had a Buchwald quote on my desk: “Lunch is the power meal in Washington, D.C.,” he once wrote. “It’s over lunch that the taxpayer gets screwed.”

I can’t wait to read this new biography of the man called Funny Business. This excerpt deals with the years Buchwald and his wife lived in Paris while he writing for the International Herald Tribune.

“They mingled with Ingrid Bergman; Audrey Hepburn; Lena Horne; Mike Todd and his beautiful young wife, actress Elizabeth Taylor; and the Duke and Duchess of Windsor. Ann and Art spent one bizarre evening with the Windsors when the Duke played recordings of ‘patriotic German songs’ and sang along with great delight. ‘He was a dimwitted man,’ Buchwald later wrote, ‘and I always believed England [owed] Wallis [Simpson] . . . for making him give up the crown.'”

Good stuff. The author is Michael Hill.

Back next week – God willing and the creek don’t rise. Be well. Thanks for reading.

Boise, GOP, Human Rights, Politics

Focus…

Posted on by mjohnson

It is often said – and correctly so – that we live in tumultuous times. Our devices spew forth a never-ending avalanche of information, much of it of dubious veracity. The “news cycle” is non-stop, populated by presidential tweets and cable news talking heads that aim not to inform, but mostly seek to agitate and “win” the narrative story line of the day. 

The wheat is easily lost in the chaff. Disinformation and misinformation flourish. It can seem impossible to keep up or make sense and it is increasingly likely that we miss the important, while overwhelmed by the irrelevant. 

Here are three stories that hit my screen in the last week, stories that seem to me to demand urgent attention and comprehensive political action.

The Brookings Institution rolled out a study of four U.S. cities last week, Boise included, that is both fascinating and sobering. In a nutshell the study finds that Boise’s economic engine, the principle power behind Idaho’s sustained economic growth, is fragile and subject to collapse. 

Boise: Prosperity may be fleeting

The goose that laid the golden egg for the Idaho economic has been high tech, but Brookings starkly notes, in language you rarely hear from Idaho policy makers, that the goose is ailing. Hewlett Packard, which once employed 7,000 in the Boise Valley, now has 1,500. Micron, the homegrown success story, has half the 12,000 workers it paid at its peak. And, “despite Idaho’s generous state subsidies and a long local history as a darling firm in Boise, Micron chose Manassas, Virginia for its newest expansion, a $3 billion dollar investment expected to create about 1,000 jobs.”

“Recent economic growth has primarily come from non-tradable service sectors rather than from growth-sustaining, export-driven sectors,” the Brookings researchers said. “Population growth resulted in part from retirees who drive housing prices, but who have less incentive to fund public goods such as education and workforce development.” 

And, not surprisingly, at all levels Idaho’s woefully inadequate educational system is in no way ready to support the kind of jobs that can continue to fuel the state’s economic growth. The Brookings study said “the Idaho Department of Labor projects 49,000 unfilled jobs by 2024, 36,000 of them in science, technology, engineering, and math,” but that the state produced only 2,000 graduates in those fields in 2016. Little wonder decent jobs flow to places with better educational stories to tell. 

Idaho’s much ballyhooed efforts to improve college graduation rates have been a demonstrable failure. As Idaho Education News reporter Kevin Reichert noted recently, “With a completion rate mired at 42 percent, Idaho has made little progress toward the 60 percent threshold.” Even if Idaho some how sees a dramatic improvement in college completion rates it likely can’t meet high-tech needs that Reichert said “might take a completion rate approaching 80 percent.”

The second story, with a Spokane dateline, might not seem all that connected to the Brookings study about the state’s fragile future economy, but it is. Associated Press reporter Nicholas K. Geranios’s story was about how far-right extremist groups have never really left northern Idaho and eastern Washington despite the fact that two decades ago, the high profile Aryan Nation’s compound near Hayden Lake was wiped off the map. 

A street sweeper follows a parade led by white supremacist Richard Butler, riding in car with megaphone, Saturday, Oct. 28, 2000, in Coeur d’Alene, Idaho. Aryan Nations leader Butler filed for bankruptcy on Monday, Oct. 30, days before he was to relinquish control of his 20-acre compound to satisfy part of a civil rights lawsuit. (AP Photo/Tom Davenport, File)

Idaho’s national image, with direct impact on the state’s economic vitality, has too often in the past been linked to white supremacist and hate groups. It still is and, at some level, support for those on the dangerous fringe has gone mainstream, or at least what passes for mainstream, in the region’s Republican Party leadership. 

“In the county that is home to Hayden Lake,” Geranios wrote, “Republicans last month passed a measure expressing support for U.S. entry of a prominent Austrian far-right activist who was investigated for ties to the suspected New Zealand mosque gunman.” 

The woman who made the request of Kootenai County Republicans “was a big promoter of the hoax known as ‘Pizzagate,’ telling her online followers Hillary Clinton and other high-profile Democrats were involved in satanic rituals and child sex trafficking tied to a Washington, D.C., pizza restaurant.” That conspiracy theory, completely debunked of course, is still being widely promoted by various right wing media outlets. 

That Republican Party officials would traffic in such nonsense is cause for profound concern and should immediately be repudiated from the highest levels, including from Gov. Brad Little. That GOP leaders haven’t disowned such behavior will only encourage more extremists to be more extreme.

The third story is related to the second. The London-based Institute for Strategic Dialogue (ISD) made a deep dive into various efforts to influence the recent European Union elections by what it called “tactical adoption of the ‘Putin playbook’ by non-state actors, from far right online militias to populist parties in their use of automated influence operations.” In other words, far right actors are continuing with renewed determination to undermine democratic institutions in Europe and, as special counsel Robert Mueller made crystal clear this week concerning Russian interference in the 2016 election, also in the United States. 

ISD is a collection of business, academic and political leaders dedicated to pushing back against those who are “promulgating hate, division and conflict.” The group succinctly described the methods, including campaigns aimed at “distorting the political debate through the promotion of outrage, amplified by social media (often inorganically) and exploiting the traditional media’s desire to appear impartial to seize the agenda.” 

In Europe the groups “build up their own highly partisan media channels” and they “take aim at the courts, forcing judges to retire early as in Poland and Hungary and pack the courts with compliant officers.” 

“Public officials that don’t toe the new regime’s line are sidelined or replaced” often with a campaign of “smearing and intimidation, as happened to the Hungarian central bank governor.” 

If you don’t believe the very foundations of representative democracy are under assault you’re not paying attention. Which closes the circle back to persistent inadequate attention to education. Without better education at every level, combined with knowledge of how to discern facts from disinformation, we risk being overwhelmed by our tumultuous times. 

We must focus on what’s important. 

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(This piece originally appeared in the Lewiston, Idaho Tribune on May 31, 2019)

Human Rights, Idaho Politics

Wait. Wait.

Posted on by mjohnson

By all appearances Idaho State Senator Brent Hill, the Rexburg Republican who is the president pro tem of the state senate, is a thoughtful, nice guy. He runs the state senate with a light tough, frequently invoking a “come let us reason together” demeanor. He seems far removed from the angry, fearful, resentful base of the Republican Party in the Era of Trump.

Yet, Hill’s recent decision to shelve again for another year any legislation that would extend human rights protections to Idaho’s LGBT community is, sadly, very much in keeping with current GOP orthodoxy of marginalizing communities that fall outside the party’s fearful, overwhelmingly white, religiously conservative base. Hill is practicing, or more correctly allowing to continue, the old conservative politics that preach that “the time is not yet right” to bring full human rights protections to fellow citizens too often left in the dark shadows of discrimination and hatred. 

Protesters at the Idaho State Capitol in Boise pressing the legislature to “add the words” to protect LGBT citizens under the state’s human rights law.

In a recent op-ed calling for more talking and no legislative action again this year, Hill struck what seems on the surface to be a moderate, caring tone. No doubt he meant to strike such a tone, but his language is as disappointing as it is misleading. 

As Hill wrote the “only viable solution [to LGBT protection under Idaho’s human rights statute] is a balanced approach—one that will provide protection against discrimination based on sexual orientation while simultaneously safeguarding the right to fully exercise religious convictions.”

He called for more dialogue because, as Hill wrote, “it takes time … for people to better understand the concepts of this balanced approach and focus on the benefits it provides them.” It takes time, Hill said, time that Idaho’s overworked lawmakers just “do not have in the current legislative session.”

We just need more time. More time to talk. More time to reason. More time. More time. 

Brent Hill surely did not intend for his manifesto for more talking to echo the calls of many religious leaders of the 1960s who counseled Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. to go slow in the pursuit of civil rights for African-Americans. Hill perhaps didn’t intend to imitate those who counseled King to slow down, but he did just that. And King’s answer in 1963 remains today’s best answer to those, like Senator Hill, who counsel delay rather than provide moral leadership. 

Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. at the time he wrote his “letter from the Birmingham jail” in 1963

“We know through painful experience that freedom is never voluntarily given by the oppressor; it must be demanded by the oppressed,” King wrote from the Birmingham jail where he was imprisoned for demonstrating not for “a balanced approach,” but for immediate justice and equality. 

“Frankly, I have yet to engage in a direct action campaign that was ‘well timed,’” King wrote to those who were critical of his aggressive efforts. “For years now I have heard the word ‘Wait!’ It rings in the ear of every Negro with piercing familiarity. This ‘Wait’ has almost always meant ‘Never.’ We must come to see, with one of our distinguished jurists, that ‘justice too long delayed is justice denied.’”

Currently the Idaho Human Rights Act provides statutory protection for someone with strongly held religious beliefs, but a LGBT citizen has no protection under the law from discrimination related to employment, housing, public accommodation, and education.

And Senator Hill must know the argument that someone’s religious beliefs should allow them to deny another person’s fundamental human rights is, unfortunately, as old as America’s long toleration of racial hatred and as wrong as segregation. 

As Dr. King knew – and died proving – rights are not merely granted they are won through demands and political action, including shaming the reluctant and those who counsel patience. Unfortunately, slow rolling before doing the right thing is part of Idaho history. Idaho was very late in adopting a day honoring Dr. King with some arguing as recently as 1990 that the country’s greatest civil rights warrior was a troublemaker unworthy of celebration. 

It took four tries to adopt legislation authorizing kindergarten in the 1970s and now the fearful, resentful caucus stalls legislation to begin to provide pre-K education. Republicans can’t even agree on a measure outlawing child marriage. 

Not liking that voters can actually put issues on the ballot and pass them into law Republican Senator C. Scott Grow of Eagle would make Idaho’s already extremely difficult initiative process next to impossible by adding new requirements for signature gathering. Grow talks about his proposed limitations on citizen political action as though it were a mere tweak of the law that implements what is embedded in the Idaho Constitution. His argument is flimsy and dishonest. Grow is proposing a fundamentally undemocratic measure designed not to empower citizens, but to diminish them. Other lawmakers would happily thwart the overwhelming will of Idaho voters by imposing conditions on access to medical care.  

Make no mistake, the Idaho Republican Party, the party that has embraced a leader who, as conservative columnist Michael Gerson has written, “has made the denial of dignity to certain people and groups a political rallying cry,” is acting true to form.  

Year after year, the party purposefully denies basic human rights to a sizeable group of Idaho citizens because they can’t get beyond their own intolerance. To give into such fear, resentment and old-fashioned bigotry, particularly in the guise of protecting religion, is an odious failure of moral leadership. 

It takes courage, an attribute often lacking particularly in a one-party state, to stand up and be counted on what simply amounts to doing the right thing. Imagine if Brent Hill, a widely acknowledged decent and intelligent politician, would put the moral weight of his powerful position behind pulling Idaho forward to the benefit of thousands of his fellow citizens? Would he catch some grief from the fear mongers and haters on the far right? Of course he would. He should wear that pushback as a badge of honor.

Delay can be comfortable for those who know no discrimination. 

—–0—–

Human Rights, Nebraska, Trump

Moral Clarity…

Posted on by mjohnson

      “Why are we having all these people from shithole countries come here?”

Donald J. Trump, meeting with members of Congress about immigration

—————-

I grew up in western Nebraska and South Dakota. My mother and dad, and folks on both sides of our family, lived in this part of Middle America for generations. Some still do. These places – the sandhill country of Nebraska, the Black Hills of South Dakota – are part of my personal story. It is impossible, I think, not to be formed by the landscapes, the rhythms, the attitudes of “our” places. I grew up white in white America. It was who I was.

The most diverse place I’ve ever lived.

It wasn’t until we moved to Rock Springs, Wyoming – I was entering the seventh grade – that I really had personal exposure to people different than my family and me. It’s not an overstatement to say that place changed my life.

Rock Springs, a tough, blue collar railroad and coal town, remains the most ethnically diverse place I have ever lived. I got acquainted with and played basketball in the high desert of southwestern Wyoming with a couple of African-American teammates, the best players on the team. One kid had a Japanese-American background, another Hispanic, and others could trace their ancestry to southern Europe. Our neighbors played bocce, a game as foreign to me as polo, but as common in Italy as baseball is here. My mother and dad were invited to a Greek wedding in Rock Springs. That was an eye opener for those Cornhuskers.

And she may not have known it, but I had a serious crush on a girl named Johanna. She was Jewish, I think, and as I recall her ancestors emigrated from Poland. She was also the smartest kid in my class – quiet, studious, serious. I wonder to this day if she has had a good life.

Those years in Rock Springs have stuck with me for lots of reasons, but mostly for what the daily exposure to kids and cultures different than me – a kid of modest middle class white privilege – did to change my view of my country and myself. After a few years in Wyoming we moved back to South Dakota, sixty miles as the crow flies from the Pine Ridge reservation, the land “given,” as white folks like to say, to the Oglala Lakota band of Sioux.

The sand hill country of western Nebraska

I had no immediate epiphany about race and class as I started high school, but something happened, gradually, after that move back to the prairie. The routine white culture stereotyping of Native Americans – they can’t handle their booze, they’re lazy, they’re happy in their poverty – started to sound odd and wrong to me. I had played ball with and against some of these guys. They were anything but lazy.

Billy Mills, a native of the Pine Ridge, won a Gold Medal in the 10,000 meters in the 1964 Olympics. It was the first time – the first time – a U.S. athlete ever won that medal. That’s not lazy.

Would not a Sioux culture that produced a Crazy Horse, a Sitting Bull, or a brilliant historian like a Vine Deloria, Jr. be worthy of celebration? Why did so much of the dominant white culture demean the native culture? Why did folks who had never had a conversation with a Native America make up stories? What did they fear? Why did they say those things?

Historian Vine Deloria, Jr., a Standing Rock Sioux

Coming from people I knew and liked these often-hateful comments, a variation of “the soft bigotry of low expectations,” made me understand, really for the first time, that such attitudes are learned behavior. No one is born a bigot. Racism is not genetic. Attitudes about race and class, like table manners, are learned behavior. My native land seemed awash in ignorant stereotypes that made those not like us, less than us.

I found it difficult and awkward to confront someone who said something not just wrong, but hateful. The easy thing to do is to cringe, be quiet and move on. But in the long run that sort of attitude – staying quiet, not speaking, letting it slide, may be even more damaging than the harmful, hateful words of a bigot.

I admit I’ve not always spoken up and too many times I’ve looked at my shoes wondering what to do or say. I knew what I felt. Few of us want to create a scene or risk a relationship by actually exercising the courage of our convictions. Now, I’m too old, seen too much and believe too much in the idea of America to bite my tongue. By not confronting the kind of hate we have seen from the top of American politics for the last two years we encourage it. We condone by not condemning.

The old, enduring Republic we have – and I hope will continue to have – has been confronting over the last few days yet another moment that cries out for moral clarity. I applaud those who have spoken out against obvious racism and I wish many more had voiced objection, spoken moral truth to power. Those who where there and have said nothing are as guilty as I have been when I sat quietly while some joker popped off in a bar, in the office or at a family gathering. Bigots love a moral vacuum. Exposure, condemnation and rejection are the disinfectant racists cannot tolerate. You don’t defeat evil by pretending not to hear it or see it.

The New York Times has produced a useful summary of those who have spoken up at this moment of moral testing. Sadly, the list of those saying nothing is a great deal longer than the list of those who have.

There is no excusing the timid, ignorant, small and bigoted man who happens to occupy the office Lincoln once held. He is a product of his environment. For crying out loud his father marched in a Klan rally. His inherited wealth reeks of his white privilege, even as he fails to acknowledge his own immigrant story or that two of his three wives came here by choice. His entire campaign for the highest office in the land was built on a foundation of division and discord. He is so fundamentally lacking in self-awareness – or so overwhelmingly invested in continually appealing to the very worst among his followers – that he will never be different. We can bemoan that, but we need not accept it or act as if it does not matter. It does matter. Racism thrives in denial.

We can all say, loud and often – not in my country, not given all our history, not in this land we appropriated from those who really are the original Americans. No, it is not going to happen in this country built on the backs of slaves. Not in my country where immigrants – my ancestors and surely yours – did the crappy jobs, believed in the dream and saved and scrimped so that we might go to school, live in a decent house and afford health insurance.

Philip Kennicott, writing in the Washington Post, asks the right question about this moment of moral clarity. “What I want to know is how the men in the room with him reacted,” Kennicott wrote this week. “This is the dinner table test: When you are sitting and socializing with a bigot, what do you do when he reveals his bigotry? I’ve seen it happen, once, when I was a young man, and I learned an invaluable lesson. An older guest at a formal dinner said something blatantly anti-Semitic. I was shocked and laughed nervously. Another friend stared at his plate silently. Another excused himself and fled to the bathroom. And then there was the professor, an accomplished and erudite man, who paused for a moment, then slammed his fist on the table and said, ‘I will never listen to that kind of language, so either you will leave, or I will leave.’ The offender looked around the table, found no allies and left the gathering. I don’t know if he felt any shame upon expulsion.”

We know the man who brought us to our moment of clarity knows no shame. But what about those who were there and heard him, observed his body language, wondered if what they had just heard could possibly be in the heart and on the lips of the president of the United States?

There are issues that transcend politics, that speak to bigger, more important truths. The current occupant of the White House again forces us to confront a fundamental question of human existence: who are we and what do we want to be?

If we speak up now we are answering that question.

If we stay silent we answer as well.

 

Baseball, Carter, Catholic Church, Cenarrusa, Climate Change, Guns, Human Rights, Idaho, Nobel Prizes, Politics

The Lessons of Carter…

Posted on by christian

“I would like the last Guinea worm to die before I do.” – former President Jimmy Carter on his campaign to wipe out the parasitic disease that has historically afflicted millions in Africa.   

– – – –

It took Jimmy Carter’s brain cancer to show me what is so sorely missing from American politics – humility and class; lack of self-pity and abundance of humor.

Mention Carter at a dinner party or a ball game and you’ll almost certainly get some spirited conversation going. The comment will likely range from “the worst modern president” to “a smart guy just not up to the job” to the “best ex-president we’ve ever had” to “history will treat him pretty well.”

ATLANTA, GA - AUGUST 20: Former President Jimmy Carter discusses his cancer diagnosis during a press conference at the Carter Center. on August 20, 2015 in Atlanta, Georgia. (Photo by Jessica McGowan/Getty Images)
ATLANTA, GA – AUGUST 20: Former President Jimmy Carter discusses his cancer diagnosis during a press conference at the Carter Center. on August 20, 2015 in Atlanta, Georgia. (Photo by Jessica McGowan/Getty Images)

The news conference last week where Carter calmly, factually, stoically and with humor and grace discussed his cancer, its treatment and his long life was a sterling reminder for me of what a fundamentally decent and quintessential “American” man he is and has always been. Who in the current field attempting to grab the brass ring of the presidency has even a fraction of Carter’s self-awareness and humility?

When asked if he had any regrets, Carter said he wished he might have been smart enough to have sent another helicopter on the hostage rescue mission to Iran in 1979. Had that mission succeeded – a crash in the desert doomed the chance – Carter would have had his Bin Laden moment and might well have won re-election against Ronald Reagan in 1980. A less secure, less comfortable-in-their-own-skin public person would just have said in response to that question – “Regrets? I have no regrets…”

During the run-up to the remarkable election of 1976, I interviewed both Jimmy and Rosalyn Carter. Fresh out of college, I was working at a small radio station in eastern Iowa when Mrs. Carter came to town. In her own quiet and persistent way Rosalyn was pursuing the breakthrough “Iowa strategy” that allowed a little known Georgia governor to launch a successful presidential campaign. Carter was the first to understand that Iowa’s quirky caucus system could be a launching pad for a little-known candidate. I don’t remember what I asked the spouse of the candidate in the fall of 1975, but I do remember her poise and kindness. She had all day, or so it seemed, for a bumbling young radio reporter.

Carter with Idaho Senator Frank Church
Carter with Idaho Senator Frank Church

By early 1976, I had moved to television and to Idaho, and Carter made a stop in Boise while campaigning for votes in that state’s caucus. I distinctly remember elbowing into a hot, sticky and very crowded meeting room at the old Holiday Inn near the Boise airport to watch Carter meet the press. After answering the obligatory questions from the traveling press corps – I particularly remember a hectoring Sam Donaldson of ABC – Carter took time to do one-on-one interviews with we locals. I think I asked a probing question about whether the candidate thought he could win Idaho’s caucus vote and, of course, he said he could. He didn’t. Favorite son Senator Frank Church entered the race and won Idaho.

Still my memory of Carter all these years later – and of also of President Gerald Ford, who I also interviewed in 1976 – is that of a low-key, thoughtful, decent men in control of their egos and motivated, as we hope all candidates are, by the right reasons.

Carter’s quiet and controlled personality was once mocked by many who saw the Georgia peanut farmer as out-classed by the Georgetown set, but they had it wrong. Carter possessed real American values. He regularly taught Sunday school, – he still does – built homes for Habitat for Humanity and carried his own suit bag off Air Force One. The same quiet, understated, but effective approach has marked the work of the Carter Center in Atlanta, which has focused on health issues in Africa and the advancement of peace through democratic institutions around the world.

Carter in Nigeria
Carter in Nigeria

Carter’s post-presidential good work earned him a Nobel Prize and with nary a hint of scandal about money or purposes.

Carter’s after White House life stands in stark contrast to the activities of Bill and Hillary Clinton. Carter has let his good work speak for itself, while the Clinton’s work is subsumed amid the flaunting of their big money connections and holidays in the Hamptons. Humble it isn’t and Carter could teach them a thing or two if they where humble enough to listen.

Faced with one last and inevitably losing fight, Jimmy Carter has again struck a grace note, as his one-time speechwriter James Fallows has observed. “The 1970s are so dis-esteemed,” Fallows wrote in The Atlantic, “and Carter has been so vilified (in counterpoint to the elevation of Reagan), and the entire era is now so long in the past, that many people may wonder how Carter could have become president in the first place.”

The key to answering that question, Fallows said, and I agree, is contained in Carter’s approach to his own discussion of his perilous health and his exemplary life. If you haven’t seen the clip you should. This is the way real people talk minus the calculation and self-centeredness of political life.

The common narrative around Carter’s presidency is that he failed, but history, which rarely treats one-term presidents well, will record that the power of his will brought Israel and Egypt to peace at Camp David and his Baptist sense of right and wrong helped power the controversial decision to relinquish to the Panamanians the canal we once stole fair and square. Completion of the Alaska conservation legislation – during a lame duck session of Congress no less – will forever rank as one of the greatest conservation accomplishments by any administration. Carter’s focus on human rights in foreign affairs, again much mocked during his tenure, still demands, as it should, a central place in American policy.

Carter with Egypt's Sadat and Israel's Begin
Carter with Egypt’s Sadat and Israel’s Begin

But here is the real measure of Carter: his quiet, thoughtful approach to public life during his presidency and after is a genuine model for how to behave in the public arena. He would never have won a shouting match with a Christie or a name-calling contest with a Trump. Today we identify political leaders by their cult of secrecy and sense of entitlement, their self-absorption or that all-too-familiar strut of self-assurance without the burden of accomplishment. Carter was – and is – different.

America suffers a civility and humility deficit. It’s reflected in our politics and our popular culture. There is a coarseness, a meanness, an emptiness that sucks the air out of what is really important. The insufferable Ted Cruz, for example, a man with more self-regard than public accomplishment, waited hardly a day after Carter’s cancer announcement before taking to the stump to lambast the former president’s record. Nice touch.

Carter said he’s at ease with whatever comes, his faith intact, thankful for friends and for his vast and important experiences. We all reach this point eventually, staring our own mortality full in the face and most, I suspect, would hope to exhibit Jimmy Carter’s sense of peace about a life of purpose, meaning and service. 

For one, brief moment last week Jimmy Carter reminded us what a well-composed public life can look like. It’s not about bluster and bling, not about the nasty and fleeting. It is about decency, composure, respect, modesty and, yes, good humor. God knows we need some more of all that and a 90-year old man with brain cancer reminds us that he has done his part to try and help make all of us a little better. We should all be so lucky. 

 

2016 Election, Climate Change, Egan, Gay Marriage, Human Rights, Idaho Politics, Uruguay, World Cup

So Goes Indiana…

Posted on by christian

Indiana Religious Freedom Law OppositionSomewhere, maybe, there is a political operative for one of the Republican presidential candidates who is sitting at a desk, hunched over a computer smiling at the viral news that the Grand Old Party has taken a another hard right turn into the war zone of culture, but some how I doubt it.

The #indiana has, at least for a few more days, reshaped and shuffled the pre-primary primary season for the Republican Party and I’m betting no one from Jeb Bush to Ted Cruz was really looking to be defined by the actions of the Indiana state legislature. But, you try to go to the White House with the issues you have, as Donald Rumsfeld might say.

Indiana, home to great basketball, fast motor racing and St. Elmo’s Steakhouse (one of the greatest I’ve ever visited), has discovered the power of social media this week. When Indiana Governor Mike Pence signed a “religious freedom” law into effect a few days ago he set off a national debate vastly beyond anything the Hoosier state has seen in a long, long time. The time that 30t-mushnick-300x3001former Indiana basketball coach Bobby Knight threw a chair hardly registers compared to the shock of Pence and Indiana Republicans touching a new third rail of American politics – discrimination couched as expressions of religious belief.

But first, let’s consider the politics. According to the Gallup polling organization, the level of acceptance of homosexuality in the country is at an all-time high – more than 60 percent – and even higher among younger Americans. Support for same sex marriage has crossed the same threshold of acceptance. According to Pew Research, opposition to same sex marriage stood at 65 percent in 1996, but by last year public opinion had shifted dramatically with 54 percent of Americans now approving of the idea.

It is not necessary to be an MIT math whiz to see that the world has changed and the pace of change is only likely to accelerate as younger Americans, vastly more accepting of all types of diversity, assert themselves in the economy and politics. The modern Republican Party is on the wrong side of this divide.

Second, in the wake of the still unfolding Indiana firestorm, Republicans find themselves in the almost always uncomfortable political position of debating the technical, legal aspects of a law. When a politician is forced, as Pence was, to say that a law he signed is not a license to discriminate against gay and lesbian Americans and then forced to explain legally how that is possible, you have the political equivalent of explaining how a watch is made when the public just wants to know what time it is.

Whether it has been completely fair or not, the Indiana legislation has been forever defined as at a minimum, opening the door to discrimination based on sexual orientation. Republican candidates have been reduced to explaining what the law doesn’t do rather than what it was reported to accomplish. So far they have mostly botched the task.

The backlash, both politically and otherwise, has been intense. One of the best Tweets I’ve seen was from the Indianapolis Motor CBcAf8RUQAEEr0q.jpg-largeSpeedway, home of the legendary 500 mile race. The Speedway’s famous sign simply spelled out: “We Welcome Everyone.”

A lengthening parade of some of the biggest business brands in the country – Nike, Walmart, Apple, Twitter, Yelp, Levi Strauss, Eli Lilly and Accenture, among others – have publicly opposed the Indiana law. The NCAA has essentially said it will not allow future big-time college athletic events in Indiana. (When the NCAA looks good in comparison, #indiana, you have a problem). All this, too, creates political fallout, as Bush will undoubtedly find when he goes calling for campaign cash in Silicon Valley this week. More importantly, business is signaling that discrimination is bad for, well, business.

So, if the politics of discrimination against gay and lesbian Americans – or even the appearance of discrimination – doesn’t make political sense, and with many of the usual business allies of the Republican Party in revolt against an Indiana-type law, why do it? [Arkansas Republican Governor Asa Hutchison apparently asked that question when presented with a similar proposal in his state. Hutchison, after first indicating he would, now says he’ll not sign the legislation.]

I think Amy Davidson, writing in The New Yorker, has the answer to the why question.

“The Indiana law is the product of a G.O.P. search for a respectable way to oppose same-sex marriage and to rally the base around it. There are two problems with this plan, however. First, not everyone in the party, even in its most conservative precincts, wants to make gay marriage an issue, even a stealth one—or opposes gay marriage to begin with. As the unhappy reaction in Indiana shows, plenty of Republicans find the anti-marriage position embarrassing, as do some business interests that are normally aligned with the party. Second, the law is not an empty rhetorical device but one that has been made strangely powerful, in ways that haven’t yet been fully tested, by the Supreme Court decision last year in Burwell v. Hobby Lobby. That ruling allowed the Christian owners of a chain of craft stores to use the federal version of the RFRA (the Religious Freedom Restoration Act) to ignore parts of the Affordable Care Act. Ruth Bader Ginsburg, in her dissent, argued strongly that the majority was turning that RFRA into a protean tool for all sorts of evasions.” She was correct.

In short, the efforts in Indiana and Arkansas involve crafting laws sufficiently vague and open to wide interpretation expecting that the new statutes can serve as a vehicle to get a case in front of a judge who might rule in a way that creates an eventual avenue to the Supreme Court. The Indiana law is not so much about making public policy that can be debated and clearly understood, as it is about teeing up a legal argument that leaves the dirty work of defining the line between religion and discrimination to five conservative justices. Any bets on how that comes down?

Indiana’s governor, in denying the discriminatory intent of the law in his state, said the new statute, “only provides a mechanism Penceto address claims, not a license for private parties to deny services.” Or perhaps more correctly, as Davidson writes, the Indiana law provides “a mechanism to discriminate, rather than a license. What it certainly will do is give some people more confidence to discriminate. But is that what Indiana really wants? And is that what the G.O.P.’s 2016 candidates should be looking for?”

Interestingly, in a debate that mirrors the on-going debate in Idaho (and elsewhere) over creating specific state-level prohibitions against discrimination directed toward gays and lesbians, the perfect fix for the Indiana dilemma is merely for the legislature to create such protections in law. So far that remedy, a specific statement of public policy opposed to discrimination, hasn’t been a serious part of the discussion in Indiana. Of course, Idaho continues to dance around that clear choice, as well. As this debate continues to unfold, Idaho policy makers might want to listen closely. It is not completely farfetched to think that Idaho could become Indiana.

But here is the ultimate political, indeed moral, bottom line: If you are reduced to arguing that something you have done in the name of “freedom” isn’t really designed to create an ability for some people to deny freedom – that’s what discrimination is – against some other people, while couching it all in the smoke of “restoring religion” you are likely on the wrong side of a very dubious argument, not to mention history.

 

Climate Change, Egan, Human Rights, Idaho Politics, Libraries, Organized Labor

Third Act for a Bomb Thrower

Posted on by christian

He was one of the most polarizing political figures of the last half-century in Idaho, a union and gay rights basher who was part of the Tea Party before we called it that and before the Republican Party came to be too dominated by, well, guys like Gary Glenn.

GlennLong-time observers of Idaho’s politics – and now Michigan politics – will recognize his name and his tactics, including the brash one-liner, the scorched earth approach to every issue, the politics that reduce your opponent to a beast determined to ruin the culture. Those who long for a politics where opponents aren’t routinely demonized will not be surprised that Glenn, the one-time Idaho bomb thrower, is these days lobbing his grenades as a duly elected state representative in Michigan. You can be forgiven for thinking Idaho’s gain has become Michigan’s loss.

Wearing his religion on his sleeve, Glenn is in the forefront of efforts to deny marriage rights to gay couples in Michigan. Glenn’s American Family Association Michigan chapter – he’s the president – is widely described by human rights organizations as a “hate group.” As a legislator, Glenn is still advocating low taxes – or perhaps no taxes – and opposing a Republican governor’s plan to invest in Michigan infrastructure. And, of course, Glenn has ridden his “right-to-work” hobbyhorse for thirty years, all the way to Midland, Michigan, while preaching “freedom” for everyone but those unfortunate souls who happen to disagree with him.

At a state university in Saginaw, Michigan recently two dozen students showed up to protest an appearance by the former Idaho firebrand. According to the local newspaper the students, taking exception to Glenn’s harsh anti-gay rhetoric, chanted, “Hey, ho, Gary Glenn has got to go” and “2, 4, 6, 8, Gary Glenn is full of hate.” The Southern Poverty Law Center, the civil rights group Saginawthat once had a hand in driving the Aryan Nations out of Idaho, reports on its website that Glenn offered these helpful comments about gays in 2001: “As with smoking, homosexual behavior’s ‘second hand’ effects threaten public health….Thus, individuals who choose to engage in homosexual behavior threaten not only their own lives, but the lives of the general population.” Some things never change.

The Hired Gun…

If you want to mark a date on the calendar when Idaho politics truly began to change for the worse you could start with the day in 1985, when the Idaho legislature, after a bruising political battle, passed anti-labor “right-to-work” legislation over the veto on then-Governor John V. Evans. When unions succeeded in getting the issue on the ballot in 1986 the resulting campaign was particularly ugly. Glenn, a fresh-faced newcomer to Idaho – some called him not incorrectly a “carpetbagger” – orchestrated that nasty battle utilizing the kind of over-the-top tactics of intimidation and exaggeration – union “thugs” where threatening western civilization – that have become the norm in politics.

Before Glenn and the National Right-to-Work Committee targeted Idaho with bundles of outside money and deployed the politics of “if you’re not for us, you are against us,” Idaho was an organized labor backwater. In modern times the state had little history of labor unrest, but the unionized miners, timber workers and electricians tended to support Democrats who advocated for better schools and better paying jobs. Labor’s foot soldiers and campaign money never – at least not since the early 1950’s – gave Democrats a majority in the Idaho Legislature, but they did help keep the party competitive and helped elect guys like Evans, Frank Church and my old boss Cecil Andrus.

There are endless debates about the economic impacts of right-to-work on wages, job creation and the quality of employment opportunities and you can find studies and experts to support almost any point of view, but it’s beyond denial that the passage of the law in Idaho dealt a big blow to the Democratic Party. This was, one suspects, a big factor in Wisconsin Governor Scott Walker’s recent push to make that once labor friendly state the latest to put the state between union members and management.

It is also clear that Idaho’s ranking in one important economic category – personal income – is hardly an advertisement for the wonders of anti-labor public policy. According to Department of Labor statistics, “Idaho ranked dead last in 2013 with individual median income at $27,932 — likely aided by the fact it was at the bottom of all the states for the median income for women, $21,908. The Idaho median income for men was $33,623 — good for 48th place.”

If you like one-party government populated by a crop of legislators who now pass resolutions calling for the “impeachment” of federal judges who rule “incorrectly” on same sex marriage, oppose a Hindu prayer to open a legislative session, continue to defund education and deny basic human rights protections to the LGBT community then Gary Glenn deserves honorary Idaho citizenship. The do-almost-nothing Idaho legislature (remember, it wasn’t always so), is a monument to the lack of a political middle in the state and that too has roots in the long ago battles that Glenn and like minded allies stoked for maximum partisan mileage.

As an historical footnote, I remember some Idaho Republican legislators in the 1980’s who were dubious about right-to-work potatoes_0asking why it was OK to mandate that every Idaho hop or potato farmer pay an assessment to support a state-mandated commodity commission, but the principle of every union member paying dues to support has bargaining organization was “coercion” and “a denial of freedom.” One man’s freedom is another’s “compulsory” union dues or, if you prefer, mandatory, state-sanctioned assessments on pea and lentil growers. I’m still waiting for the Idaho “freedom” movement to outlaw mandatory assessments on farmers, which exist, of course, in order to market products and advocate political causes for a special interest group. Journeymen plumbers are obviously in a different class. Talk about a closed shop.

Right-to-work legislation has never about “freedom,” as Glenn peddled the concept, but rather represented a cynical two-pronged strategy to weaken collective bargaining and erode support for Idaho Democrats. It worked like gangbusters and had the additional benefitunion of depressing wages.

After steamrolling the right-to-work effort in Idaho, Glenn was hired as the political operative for the state’s cattle ranchers and tried, with some success, to use that platform to create his own path to political power. The cattle lobby was a “voluntary” organization were members paid “dues,” but you won’t find many cowboys who don’t volunteer and ante up. More freedom, I guess.

Cece Andrus famously refused Glenn admission to the governor’s office in those days and did not, as Glenn’s partisans incorrectly claimed, “throw him out” of the big office on the second floor of the Idaho Statehouse. Andrus, with no use for completely partisan hired guns like Glenn, loved to say that he most certain did not “throw” Glenn out, which would have been impossible since the hired gun never got his brand new Tony Lamas across the door jamb.

Glenn next brought his polarizing brand of partisanship to the Ada County Commission and spent two contentious terms mostly preening for television cameras and fighting with other elected officials. Before long he lost a Republican primary for Congress and decamped for Michigan and, one might hope, obscurity. But not so fast. In 2012 Glenn unsuccessfully sought the Republican U.S. Senate nomination in Michigan, but that run merely served to open his third act and he captured a seat in the state legislature in 2014. You have to give the guy credit; he is a political survivor.

The Third Act…

I believe Glenn when he says, as he did in an Idaho Statesman piece marking the 25th anniversary of right-to-work coming to Idaho, that he is a “true believer” in his brand of ultra-conservative politics, the kind of politics that gains him regular attention from civil liberties groups who monitor the hateful drivel of Glenn and other divisive personalities like Glenn Beck and the radio preacher Bryan Fisher, two more professional agitators with Idaho antecedents.

Glenn is a true believer, but also a first-class opportunist, one of those people in politics who live to divide and chide. He’s made a living pumping out his anti-gay, anti-union, anti-tax mumbo jumbo, but beyond being against people not like him you have to wonder what he has to show for a lifetime of agitation?

Gary Glenn reminds me all these years later of the great question Lyndon Johnson asked of another fear and hate monger, George Wallace, during the darkest days of the voting rights struggle in 1965. “George,” LBJ said to the blustering Alabama governor, “what do you want left after you when you die? Do you want a Great…Big…Marble monument that reads ‘George Wallace – He Built?’…or do you want a scrawny pine board laying across that harsh, caliche soil, that reads, ‘George Wallace – He Hated?’”

Glenn left a questionable and negative mark on Idaho and now builds a dubious mark, as successful opportunists tend to do, in a new venue where, one suspects, all his nasty history is little understood. Still, his long “career” begs the question of just what has he built and what has his disdain for those who think differently really accomplished? He has certainly succeeded in keeping himself in the public eye and, ironically for someone who has so consistently preached the anti-government gospel, Glenn has once again landed on the public payroll, a perfect place from which to lament all the evils of government. As the same time, and in the name of “liberty” and “freedom” he has long championed causes that deny rights to others, while helping breed the absurd levels of animosity that are at the center of what passes for politics these days.

Michigan must be proud. Hate has a new lease on life. Mr. Glenn has opened his third act.

 

2014 Election, Arizona, Baseball, Cenarrusa, Church, Climate Change, GOP, Human Rights, Idaho, Politics, Supreme Court, Tamarack

Heart and Soul

Posted on by christian

rs_560x415-140224091818-1024.roccos-chicago-pizzeria-arizona-legislators-022414The political and social fault lines in the modern Republican Party have been showing again for the last several days in Arizona. The Republican governor, Jan Brewer, vetoed a piece of legislation this week that was widely seen as opening a path of overt discrimination against gays. The veto came after days of increasingly negative attention focused on Arizona; attention that included corporate worries about the legislation’s impact on business and threats to cancel next year’s Super Bowl game in suburban Phoenix.

Brewer, an often erratic politician who once championed most causes of the far right of her party, took her time in doing it, but she ultimately saved the state’s Republicans from themselves. The hot button bill, pushed by conservative religious interests and passed by the Arizona legislature with only GOP votes, underscores once again the fractured nature and fundamentally minority bent of a Republican Party that vowed to renew itself after losing the White House again in 2012.

Gov. Brewer, who seems to be term-limited from running again in the fall, but still hasn’t said whether she would contest such an interpretation, underwent a full court press from the “establishment” wing of the GOP who called on her to ax the handiwork of Republican legislators. Arizona Republican Sen. John McCain and Jeff Flake both urged a veto. Apple, American Airlines, the state Hispanic chamber of commerce and a pizza shop in Tuscon that vowed to protest by refusing to serve Arizona legislators swarmed the governor. In the end it might have been the National Football League, plagued with its own image problems, that helped the governor decide to do the right thing; the right thing politically, economically, morally and for football fans.

The Republican Party’s national dilemma with issues like Arizona’s gay bashing legislation – and similar legislation in several other states with strong GOP majorities  – is neatly summed up in a comment from Mark McKinnon, the ad guy who made TV spots from George W. Bush in both of his successful elections.

“In this country, the arc of human rights always bends forward, never backwards,” McKinnon, a co-founder of the centrist group No Labels told Politico recently. “So these kinds of incidents are always backward steps for the Republican Party because they remind voters they are stuck in the past.”

Voters are being reminded of that reality in lots of places. In Oregon, some of the state’s most conservative Republicans are blasting the fellow GOP organizers of the 50 year old Dorchester Conference; denouncing them as “liberals” intent on advancing a pro-gay, pro-abortion, anti-religion agenda.

“In light of the unveiled agenda to promote and celebrate liberal causes like abortion-on-demand, pet campaign projects like ‘republicanizing’ same-sex marriage and the attack on people of faith and their religious liberties many of us do not feel that our participation in this year’s Dorchester Conference is welcomed,” one of the offended right wingers told The Oregonian.

In Idaho a conservative former Republican governor, Phil Batt, went straight at his party and Gov. Butch Otter over the state legislature’s failure to even consider legislation to add fundamental human rights protections for the state’s gay, lesbian and transgender population. Batt, with his own gay grandson in mind, wrote in an op-ed: “I would like to have somebody explain to me who is going to be harmed by adding the words to our civil rights statutes prohibiting discrimination in housing and job opportunities for homosexuals. Oh, I forgot, that might hurt the feelings of the gay bashers.”

It seems like a life-time ago that national Republicans, reeling from the re-election of the President Obama, commissioned an assessment of what the party needed to do to re-group in order to effectively contest a national election again. Like many such high-level reports, this one generated about a day and a half of news coverage and went on the shelf never to be read again. The GOP report outlined the demographic challenges the party faces and why the divisive debate in Arizona that quickly went national is so very damaging to party’s long-term prospects. Here are a couple of relevant paragraphs from the GOP’s Growth and Opportunity Book that was produced just over a year ago.

“Public perception of the Party is at record lows. Young voters are increasingly rolling their eyes at what the Party represents, and many minorities wrongly think that Republicans do not like them or want them in the country. When someone rolls their eyes at us, they are not likely to open their ears to us.”

And this: “Republicans have lost the popular vote in five of the last six presidential elections. States in which our presidential candidates used to win, such as New Mexico, Colorado, Nevada, Iowa, Ohio, New Hampshire, Virginia, and Florida, are increasingly voting Democratic. We are losing in too many places.”

In the face of this incontrovertible evidence Republicans have rolled out legislation like SB 1062 in state after state further alienating not only gay and lesbian voters, but likely most younger and independent voters. The GOP refusal at the federal level to even go through the motions of working on immigration reform seems certain to drive more and more Hispanic voters – the fastest growing demographic in the nation – away from Republicans candidates. At some not-too-distant point the political math, even in John McCain’s Arizona, becomes impossible for the GOP.

It is true that in our political history the fortunes of political parties regularly ebb and flow. The Whigs worked themselves out of existence in the 1850’s unable to find a set of positions that might bridge regional and ideological barriers and sustain them a national party. Immediately before and for years after the Civil War Democrats became largely a regional party that failed to command a national majority and elect a president in the years from 1856 until 1884. Teddy Roosevelt split the GOP in 1912 helping elect only the second Democratic president since the Civil War and his distant cousin Franklin, with the help of a Great Depression, created an enduring Democratic coalition – farmers, big cities ethnics, organized labor and the South – that lasted for two generations until moral and political battles over civil rights finally ceded the South to Republicans, a hand-off that now leaves that region as the only dependable base of the Republican Party.

In almost every case in our history when a party stumbles, as national Republicans stumble now, a unifying figure has emerged – FDR for Democrats in 1932 or Ronald Reagan in 1980 for the GOP – to offer a message that smooths over the ideological fissures. In the meantime, and lacking a unifying messenger, national Republican battles played out over the most polarizing issues – witness Arizona – will hamstring the party from moving forward.

Conservative commentator Myra Adams recently detailed ten reasons why the GOP is floundering as a national party. Adams remembered that the much maligned Millard Fillmore – he was president from 1849 to 1853 – was the last Whig Party president and she speculated that George W. Bush might well be the last Republican president. Her reason number nine for the current state of the national GOP was most telling. The party, she wrote, “is growing increasingly white, old, Southern, and male, which alienates majorities of younger voters, Hispanics, African Americans, gays, teachers, young professionals, atheists, unmarried women, and even suburban married women.”

In the end, the issues for Republicans are more serious even than the demographics. The party failure to re-cast itself by looking forward with attitudes and issues that address an America in the 21st Century is, to say the least, a risky gambit. Yet, the kind of a makeover that is needed seems increasingly unlikely, at least in the near term, when the loudest voices speaking for Republicans are constantly playing to a narrower and narrower group of true believers, while denying – as the 87-years young Phil Batt suggests – that the cultural and political world is passing them by.

Increasingly outside forces and insurgents like Texas Sen. Ted Cruz rather than sober-minded realists dominate the party’s message. The Koch brothers, aiming to keep beating the anti Obamacare drum, have hijacked the GOP message for the coming mid-term elections. Look for the totality of the GOP message this year to be about the evils of the health care law (and the “socialist” president) even as a new Kaiser Health poll shows Americans are increasingly comfortable with the much-debated law. Kaiser’s survey shows that fully 56% of those surveyed favor keeping the law as is or keeping it and making improvements. Only the GOP base is clamoring for something different and even those numbers are shrinking.

Another overly influential outside voice, the Heritage Foundation, was still trying to explain why the Arizona legislation was “good public policy” after Brewer’s veto. And the guy with the loudest (and meanest) GOP megaphone, Rush Limbaugh, always eager to double down on a lost cause, said Brewer was “bullied” into her veto position in order to “advance the gay agenda.” All that plays well tactically with the “increasingly white, old, Southern, and male” base of the GOP, but leaves much of the rest of the 21st Century United States very cold indeed.

Lacking the re-boot that many Republicans wisely advocated after the last national election the party, as Mark Mckinnon says, will continue to be stuck in the past. The really bad news for national Republicans is that elections are always about the future.

Books, Climate Change, Football, Human Rights

Remarkable, But Shouldn’t Be…

Posted on by christian

140209211519-michael-sam-top11-single-image-cutIt is a given that our culture is obsessed with football. A Super Bowl game that quickly became non-competitive recently drew 111 million fans. Top level college football programs averaged more than 45,000 fans per game last season. In football crazed communities from Boise to Tuscaloosa the college game is an occasion for tailgate parties that often begin the night before the kickoff. National “letter of intent” day when high school stars commit to college programs gets way more media coverage than the Syrian civil war.

You might say football is in a way a metaphor for American culture. We love the ritual and root for our favorites, while quietly wondering about the lasting impact of sanctioned violence on young brains. We exalt the elite coaches and their seven figure salaries all the while secretly knowing that college should be more about the classroom than the locker room. Perhaps the football-as-life metaphor never fit more snugly than yesterday when a University of Missouri defensive lineman Michael Sam, a likely high National Football League draft pick, let the world know what his teammates had known all season long.

Michael Sam, a strapping 6 foot 2 inch, 260 pounder, the best defensive player in the best football conference in the country, is gay. His knowing Missouri Tiger teammates selected him as their most valuable player after a season in which they had come to know the real Michael Sam. I can’t help but juxtapose that kind of courage and sensitivity against the head-in-the-sand bias and insensitivity of too many politicians from Boise to Sochi.

Michael Sam’s announcement almost seemed timed for maximum impact on our culture, and to his credit his timing also served to put his standing in a future NFL draft in some peril.

As the New York Times noted, “Mr. Sam enters an uncharted area of the sports landscape. He is making his public declaration before he is drafted, to the potential detriment to his professional career. And he is doing so as he prepares to enter a league with an overtly macho culture, where controversies over homophobia have attracted recent attention.” The guy who was credited with 11.5 sacks during Missouri’s 12-2 season instantly became a symbol of how quickly public attitudes are changing regarding matters of sexual orientation and, at the same time, Michael Sam set himself up – potentially – for the kind of abuse pathfinders often encounter.

The University of Missouri has something to teach the larger society about all this. “We’re really happy for Michael that he’s made the decision to announce this, and we’re proud of him and how he represents #Mizzou,” Missouri coach Gary Pinkel said in a statement Sunday night. The coach’s classy responses came in reaction to Sam’s interviews with ESPN and the New York Times announcing he’s news.

Professional sports, perhaps particularly the NFL, have long been the athletic equivalent of the Idaho Legislature when it comes to recognize the fundamental human rights of our fellow citizens. Yet, as Jackie Robinson demonstrated in another civil rights context more than half a century ago, sports can also help the larger culture confront fundamental issues. Sportswriter Juliet Macur correctly says the slow, stone-by-stone dismantling of a professional sports wall of discrimination toward gays can now, thanks to Michael Sam’s courage, fall as though pushed by a bulldozer wearing Number 52.

“Same-sex marriage laws have been passed in many states,” Macur writes, “with more to come. Gay rights have been a major issue at the Olympics in Russia, where the government last summer passed a law that prohibits the transmission of ‘gay propaganda’ to children, prompting many groups and some athletes to speak out.

“Even Pope Francis has, in his own way, recently expressed support for gays, shocking conservatives when he said, ‘Who am I to judge?’ He said people ‘should not be marginalized’ because of their sexual orientation and ‘must be integrated into society.'”

Billie Jean King, who President Obama wisely asked to represent the United States at the Sochi Olympics (and in the process stuck a thumb in the homophobic Valdimir Putin’s eye), tells CBS that it “really it gets down to humankind. … We just happen to be gay. … We need to really shift where it’s a non issue. When it’s a non issue, it will mean we’ve arrived. It won’t happen in my lifetime but it’s definitely a civil rights issue of the 21st century.”

Here’s hoping Missouri’s Michael Sam has a great NFL career, but even if that doesn’t happen this articulate, intelligent young man will have displayed the kind of personal courage that some folks in public life would do well to try and emulate. Or, put another way: if Sam had enough courage to sit for an interview with the New York Times and ESPN and discuss the most personal aspects of who he is, perhaps its not asking too much that state legislators in Boise and other state capitols finally summon enough personal and political courage to really deal seriously with the civil rights issue of the 21st Century.

We should long for the day when it isn’t.