Kingmakers

For the second day in a row, our blogfriend Amanda Marcotte provides the impetus for our blogging.

We call suicide bombers in Iraq terrorists, which they are. But we talk about them and treat them like an opposing army. This is in keeping with our continuing “war on terrorism,” which will presumably end when terrorism itself walks into the oval office, sits down, and hands President Jenna Bush its sword.

But what, exactly, is the reason for treating suicide bombers like enemy soldiers? Why not treat them like criminals?

Many people scoff at this sort of thing, because it sounds like you’re coddling the suicide bombers and the people who encourage them. “Do you want us to slap the cuffs on terrorists, and read them their rights?” they ask. “Should we issue subpoenas against Osama bin Laden?” Then they fall off their chairs laughing. After all, it’s much harsher justice to blow up an enemy than it is to lock up a criminal, isn’t it?

We at the Blasphemy Blog say, emphatically, NO!

It is harsher, yes, but not more effective.

Why? Well, consider that an insurgent army is much more socially acceptable than a criminal gang. When we declared war on terrorism and terrorists, we gave bin Laden and his ilk the cache of an army.

But they are not an army. They are criminals, and should be treated as such. It is not easy to track down and arrest international criminals, but it is possible, and we do it all the time. We seize their assets like we seize drug dealers’ assets. We raid their headquarters like we raid a crack house.

We don’t negotiate with them, though. Why? Because police, prosecutors, and judges do not negotiate with criminals. They don’t have to, because everyone who is not in the gang is on our side. It’s the law-abiding world against al Qaeda.

Or, at least, it should be. Thanks to our decision to treat this like a war, instead of the hunting, capture, and prosecution of some of the worst criminals in history, we might someday be forced to negotiate with terrorists. They’re already talking about bringing the insurgents to the negotiating table in Iraq.

How did it come to this, that we have to treat these criminals like they are a normal political faction? Well, it came to this because we treat Osama bin Laden like he already has what he only covets: a country to rule.

Really. Bin Laden’s end desire is the restoration of the Islamic caliphate. The caliphs were the rulers of the Islamic world when it was a vast empire, the most powerful on earth. (Their seat of power, incidentally, was Baghdad.)

Bin Laden talks about wanting to purify the world through the use of fundamentalist Islam, but Islam under the caliphate was actually pretty decadent. It was also, however, a truly powerful empire that came quite close to overrunning Europe. Bin Laden wants to return to those days. He doesn’t want to revive a religion; he wants to be an emperor.

By declaring war on him and his gang, we’re giving him what he wants. And if we keep treating him like the king he wants to be, someday he, or his grandson, will simply be a king.

What the Supreme Court Will Be Thinking...For a Long Time

Our blogfriend Amanda Marcotte yesterday provided a helpful paean to the Violence Against Women Act (VAWA). This is a federal law that, over the last decade, has managed to dramatically curb domestic violence. It does this by, among other things, providing money to shelters, providing money for police training in domestic violence matters, and making restraining orders enforceable over state lines.

VAWA is up for reauthorization this year; there’s reason to hope it will pass, but you never know, with this Congress.

We at the Blasphemy Blog first learned about VAWA when we studied the 2000 United States Supreme Court Case U.S. v. Morrison. In that case, a young woman who had been raped by football players at the state university she attended sued her school under VAWA, which provided a cause of action for people when state governments fail to protect them from domestic abuse.

You may have noticed that we didn’t mention such a cause of action when we enumerated VAWA’s provisions in the first paragraph. This is because the Supreme Court threw out the lawsuit.

Chief Justice Rehnquist wrote in his majority opinion that he believed the young woman was due her day in court. But, he wrote, Congress did not have the power to let her file a lawsuit in federal court.

Why? Well, Congress’ power under the Constitution is limited. It can’t just make a law about anything it wants to; it can only write a law that exercises enumerated powers. In the case of the VAWA lawsuits, Congress used its enumerated constitutional power to regulate interstate commerce.

But do domestic violence and rape affect interstate commerce? Congress compiled a lot of evidence that demonstrated it did. The Supreme Court ignored it, rejecting the idea that Congress could regulate anything that affected interstate commerce just because it was allowed to regulate interstate commerce.

This is where we stand today. Your state government gets money to protect you from domestic violence, but if they don’t do it, you can’t sue in federal court. (And good luck suing in state court, where judges are elected and therefore allergic to opening new cans of litigation worms.)

Why is this important with regard to our soon-to-be new Supreme Court? Well, lots of Congressional action is based on the interstate commerce clause. Lots of things that we as citizens count on arise from laws passed using the commerce clause. The power to sue under the Civil Rights Act, which was largely responsible for enforcing integration, comes from the commerce clause.

But there has been a backlash in recent years. Lots of conservative jurists really, really don’t like the expansive reading of the commerce clause. They complain that Congress has gotten too good at claiming just about anything could be considered interstate commerce, and they consider it an affront to federalism, and an unnecessary diminution of state power at the expense of the government.

We at the Blasphemy Blog have never understood why letting an individual sue a state in federal court takes away state power to do anything other than commit indiscriminate evil. After all, the government is not the one suing the state; the government is just providing the forum. The individual sues the state, and therefore Congress, exercising an expansive commerce regulation power, has simply granted an individual power over his or her state and local government. And giving individuals power over governments is, in our view, a good thing.

The Supreme Court does not see it this way, currently (except when it comes to medical marijuana). And, thanks to the fact that Republicans pick our Supreme Court Justices, it’s going to stay that way for a while. Justice Sandra Day O’Connor and soon-to-be Justice John Roberts are probably about the same on the interstate commerce issue.

But why such passion for keeping rape lawsuits out of federal court? We at the Blasphemy Blog have no real clue, just a sneaking suspicion that lots of powerful people in this country are still mad about black people getting the vote in the South and want to go back to the days when rich folk could look the other way as the underclass was mistreated.

Because make no mistake: when you take away a person’s right to sue, for any reason, you give the powerful more power over the powerless. The only reason chemical companies don’t dump their toxic waste in Southeastern Washington, D.C., is that the parents of the kids who got sick would sue. DuPont would pay EPA fines all day; just write it off as a business expense. Only the fear of facing down a sick kid in court keeps them honest. Otherwise, what else are they going to do? Write to their Senator?

Are we paranoid to think that the Supreme Court will take away the power to sue, just because a solid majority of Justices are going to believe in a narrow reading of the commerce clause for the next twenty years? You tell us. We’re just glad we don’t live in Southeast.

Rational but not Fair

What is the best way to deal with our instincts about people we do not know?

Imagine that you’re at a sporting event or concert in a large venue. Sitting next to you is a well-groomed young man with a dark complexion that places his ancestry (to your eyes, anyway) geographically somewhere between Bangladesh and Morocco. Before the event begins, he turns to you and asks you, politely, to save his seat while he walks away for a minute. He doesn’t say why he’s leaving. Without thinking, you say, Sure. When he leaves, though, you notice the black bag he’s left on his seat. It’s not that big, but…well, it’s big enough. You can’t help but thinking that the bag might have a bomb in it.

Is it rational or fair to be suspicious of the young man in this situation? Well, we would argue that it is rational, but it’s not fair. It’s rational because being blown up by a bomb left in a public place by a young man of Middle Eastern, North African, or South Asian descent is something that can definitely happen to you in this day and age.

But it’s not fair. Not fair at all. Why? Well, because the guy might turn out to be a Brazilian electrician.

Our rational but unfair fears have some use, true. Your instincts about the young man sitting next to you may be correct, but it’s much more likely, statistically speaking, that they aren’t. Most people, after all, just aren’t terrorists, no matter what they look like.

But couldn’t it better to be safe, and treat all dark-but-not-African-American-dark-skinned people with suspicion? It will cause a lot of hurt feelings, but isn’t that better than being blown up?

Well, think about it this way. If you call security on this guy, there is an infinitesimal probability that he’s carrying a bomb. In that case, he’ll be arrested, and you’ll be a minor hero.

But the much, much larger probability is that he’s just got magazines in his bag, and if you call security, he’ll get embarrassed. Or, he might get angry, because this is the fifteenth time this has happened to him and all he was doing was trying to call home.

When it gets to the fifteenth such incident, what happens to a person’s mind? Does he keep shrugging it off? Maybe he’s a rational guy, too, and he understands the situation. He doesn’t think it’s fair that he, a person just trying to live his life, should be singled out, but, you know, whatever. Life isn’t fair.

But what about the fiftieth time this happens to him? Can he keep shrugging it off even then? What about the hundredth time? Is he still a rational guy after the hundredth time he’s mistreated just because of the way he looks?

Or does he gradually start to hate the way a terrorist hates, because he’s sick of the unfairness of it all?

It’s rational to be suspicious. But we must make sure that our suspicions are always tempered by fairness. And it might be rational to profile someone because of the way they look, but it does a disservice to the inherent uniqueness of human motivation, and it’s just not fair.

Any Volunteers?

Last week the Guardian newspaper revealed that a new word for things that are bad for you has been invented:

According to Dr Judith Reisman, pornography affects the physical structure of
your brain turning you into a porno-zombie. Porn, she says, is an "erototoxin ",
producing an addictive "drug cocktail " of testosterone, oxytocin, dopamine and
serotonin with a measurable organic effect on the brain.

"Eroto"-toxins? Yes, they do sound vaguely frightening, like some made-up alien microbe the crew of the U.S.S. Enterprise was always encountering. We can hear Dr. Crusher saying now, "I've never seen anything like it...his erototoxins are off the scale!"

Ah, we do tease and nag, but Dr. Reisman's new word is not just a hypothesis. Well, actually it IS just a hypothesis. But Dr. Reisman is going to do the research just as soon as she cashes her check:

Under the auspices of Utah's Lighted Candle Society (LCS), Reisman and Victor
Cline, a clinical psychologist at the University of Utah, began raising money
from American conservative and religious organisations. They hope to raise at
least $3m to conduct MRI scans on victims under the influence of porn and so
prove their theories correct.

This makes us think back over the past few years, when we at the Blasphemy Blog were headquartered in Boston. Because Boston is a research hub, we would often see advertisements offering money for people willing to participate in scientific experiments on sleep deprivation, memory, etc. We often wondered, Who would be desperate enough for money that they would be willing to become a guinea pig? (Well, college students, that's who.)

Something tells us that Drs. Reisman and Cline will not have much trouble getting guinea pigs for their experiments; we just don't think it's going to be that hard to locate people willing to watch porn. Even in Utah. We might even imagine the subjects contriving to extend their sessions with the MRI machines beyond the normal duration, perhaps resorting to comical subterfuge.

But who knows? Perhaps they will discover that erototoxins exist after all. Maybe, some day, we will all say to young children we meet, "I've known you since you were just a little erototoxin in your father's cerebral cortex."

What the Supreme Court Will be Thinking

Let us look into the possible legislative future of our country. What concerns will our Congress seek to address in the years to come? Here at the Blasphemy Blog, we are always optimistic and hopeful. In the wildest reaches of our imagination, we allow ourselves to contemplate many possible laws.

What would some of those laws be, you ask? One of them would be a law that gives employees of corporate entities whose jobs are cut a cause of action to claim as damages part of the severance packages and bonuses given to the CEOs of those corporations. Thus, when Carly Fiorina, the CEO of Hewlett-Packard, leaves her post with a severance package of $21 million (including a $7 million bonus) and pension and other benefits totaling $23.5 million, the 14,500 employees of HP whose jobs will now be cut would have a claim on some of that money.

If HP can afford to give its ex-CEO, who wasn’t even a very good CEO, $44.5 million, and also dare to argue with a straight face that it cannot afford to maintain jobs for any of these 14,500 people, we have little sympathy for it. And, if there is no other way to stop this kind of highway robbery, Congress ought to do something. So we at the Blasphemy Blog say, This is America. Let them sue.

Such a law is, of course, unlikely ever to come into existence. But what if it did, or what if a law like it, that dares to restrict CEO bonus and severance money in some way, did exist? What if the employees who lost their jobs could sue? What if they could sue in federal court?

What if the case ended up in the Supreme Court of the United States?

Put quite simply, the current Supreme Court would be fairly likely to give Carly Fiorina all of her $44.5 million. There’s a pretty good argument that forcing a private corporation to transfer assets from one employee to a bunch of other employees is unconstitutional. Still, in the current Supreme Court, the law might have a shot of passing constitutional muster.

The Supreme Court as it shall soon be composed, however, will be far more of a sure thing for Carly Fiorina. Conservative judges like John Roberts always, always deliver for corporations.

Some people think that this is a good thing, because Carly Fiorina is likely to put her money back into the economy, thus generating more jobs. We at the Blasphemy Blog disagree, because we think that most of the $44.5 million is going to end up sitting in banks in the Cayman Islands. Plus, remember those 14,500 employees? They would have spent that money on things like houses, dinners out, and college education. That’s good for the economy, too.

But this isn’t about a sound economy and good growth. This is about fairness. This is about the fact that CEOs make way too much money, which directly insults and injures this country to its core. This is about how Carly Fiorina’s great-grandchildren will have an automatic, unearned advantage against the great-grandchildren of the 14,500 employees she fired.

The President promised, and has delivered, a conservative judge. If this one is not approved, he’ll come back with another, and another, and as many as it takes. There’s going to be a big fight about it. Christian conservatives want to make sure that the new Justice will be on their side. They’re nervous right now; sometimes conservative judges rule their way, but sometimes they don’t.

But the CEOs of America are not nervous. They know they’ll get what they want.

Addendum on Covetousness

Yesterday we were not quite able to explain, even though we knew it to be true, exactly why it would be so good if we had a Supreme Court Justice who "hated the covetous." As usual, Molly Ivins explains it so we don't have to:

"Corporations can file lawsuits and defend lawsuits longer than a normal
human can live."

The woman speaks the truth.

Down With the Covetous

Our blogfriend the Rude Pundit points out that Tony Perkins (the one who works for the Family Research Council, not the one who stabbed Janet Leigh in the shower in the movie Psycho) has requested that the President nominate a Supreme Court Justice who follows the following passage from scripture:

Moreover thou shalt provide out of all the people able men, such as fear God,
men of truth, hating covetousness; and place such over them, to be rulers of
thousands, and rulers of hundreds, rulers of fifties, and rulers of tens...

Hating covetousness? We at the Blasphemy Blog would go along with that. It’s true, hatred of covetousness is not your traditional qualification to be a Justice on the United States Supreme Court, but then, these are not traditional times.

Once upon a time, before we at the Blasphemy Blog were born, Supreme Court Justices were chosen on the basis of having written great treatises of law, like Oliver Wendell Holmes, having distinguished themselves as practicing lawyers, like Thurgood Marshall, or having made political deals with Presidents, like Earl Warren.

Back in the 1980s, though, this system was replaced, out of necessity, with the Dumb Justice system, under which Justices are expected to pretend that they have no opinions about important legal issues. That way, they can claim ignorance when asked about their feelings on the hot button issues of the day, and thereby avoid partisan nomination battles.

It’s also best that a prospective Justice not have published a great deal of legal writing, as such a “paper trail” might also allow people to figure out his or her legal temperament, which, once again, would lead to the bitter partisanship hell of a nomination battle.

Basically, this means that the ideal Justice under the current system should be a blank slate, someone who has distinguished himself or herself by doing something other than lawyering. After all, if you’ve distinguished yourself as a jurist or legal scholar, it means people know what you think.

Unfortunately, this means that the ideal Justice would be someone who hasn’t thought much about anything or written much of anything.

We at the Blasphemy Blog feel that this system has run its course. It’s time for new qualifications, and we agree with Tony Perkins that “hating covetousness” is the way to go. We think that the covetous have enough friends in the federal judiciary, and will be glad for the change.

A Piece of Advice

We at the Blasphemy Blog have some experience with the city of Boston. It has a reputation as a liberal town, but it is also a very tough town. If you're in Boston's doghouse, you do not enjoy it.

Therefore, if we were a Senator who was both running for reelection and down in the polls, we would not take on the city of Boston. We would conserve our energy. But that's just us.

Family Togetherness

Oh, no.

We at the Blasphemy Blog do consider ourselves Christian. However, sometimes we get a bit self-conscious about saying it out loud, or writing it on our blog that anyone is allowed to read. Why?

From the Miami Herald:

A music video that features Barney, Big Bird and
SpongeBob singing a message of family and togetherness will not be distributed
in Broward County schools, after members of a diversity committee deemed it
objectionable...

Officials with the Broward County Christian
Coalition, who viewed the video after hearing from a diversity committee member,
said the underlying message of the DVD and accompanying teaching material
promoted a homosexual agenda.

''We didn't think it was appropriate for such
young children,'' said Barbara Collier, chairwoman of the
coalition...

The controversy stems not from any explicit mention
of homosexuality in the video -- there isn't any -- but from its theme that
people are all part of one big family, a message that, critics contend, could be
construed to include pedophiles and other criminals...

Barney, Big Bird, and SpongeBob singing about togetherness? We do not condone showing such a thing to children, because we do not condone anything featuring Barney.

But should a coalition of Christians expend its energy on preventing the distribution of Barney's togetherness singalong? Are they actually arguing, with straight faces, that children would be harmed by the message that humanity is one big family? Do they actually believe that Big Bird is telling the kids to hang out with their neighborhood bank robber?

The message we take away from the Coalition's argument is that children shouldn't trust anyone but their parents. It's our family against the world, is what they want kids to believe.

It almost sounds like this Coalition is saying that children should stay away from people who are not like them.

Which is enough for us to want to pretend not to be Christian when we're in polite company.

Forgiveness

We at the Blasphemy Blog got a lot of ministry in church this past Sunday about forgiveness. We were reminded about how Jesus asked his followers not to forgive each other seven times, but to forgive each other seven times seven times. This struck us as odd, hearing all this about forgiveness.

But, once we got to thinking about it, we realized: the only thing odd about being told in church to forgive is how rarely it happens.

Seeing as how it is one of the central tenets of Christianity, you'd think you'd hear more about forgiveness. It's not just having to count out those forty-nine forgivenesses; the New Testament is all about turning the other cheek, killing the fatted calf for the prodigal son when he returns, and going to see those who are in prison instead of condemning them.

Moreover, Jesus again and again casts his lot with those who need to be forgiven: the humble tax collector, not the righteous Pharisee; the adulteress, not those who seek to stone her.

Why don’t today’s most public Christians speak more about forgiveness? In the wake of terrible crimes, why don’t the world’s most prominent Christians call out for all of their fellows to forgive the perpetrators?

The crimes are worse, perhaps, than those Jesus imagined, but is it really possible that Jesus intended us to stop forgiving people just because they did great, great evil?

We’re not saying that we have to forgive Osama bin Laden in our hearts; we’re just saying, shouldn’t we be saying that it’s our duty to try to forgive him, even if we can’t quite because his actions were so terrible?

We don’t think this means that we have to stop trying to bring bin Laden to justice; there’s no reason we can’t forgive someone and also hold them accountable. (Whether we can forgive someone and then execute them is less certain, but we’ll throw that switch when we come to it.)

So why didn’t the President, before saying that we would get Osama bin Laden dead or alive, say first that he forgave him? Well, he didn’t say it because it would have made him seem weak and ridiculous.

But why would forgiveness make the President look weak? The President is definitely a Christian; is it not a Christian’s duty to forgive, even if it is detestable to us to do so? How could it be that doing one’s Christian duty would make one look weak?

What we’re getting at is that, frankly, the rules of war and terrorism, as laid out by the actors on both sides, are not Christian. You can argue about whether or not our actions in the War on Terror are justified, but you can’t argue about whether those actions are Christian.

We have answered that question already, through our silence on the matter of forgiveness.

Why We Love America

America, despite its faults, is the kind of country where an overweight, clinically depressed ex-Marine, having hit rock bottom after accidentally running over people with his car, can redeem himself in his own eyes by strapping on a backpack and walking across the country. You get more than a second chance in the United States of America. You get a lifetime of second chances.

Godspeed, Mr. Vaught.

Terrorism

We can’t beat terrorism. Terrorism is not an adversary that can be destroyed; terrorism is a thing that people do.

Declaring a war on terrorism is even more futile than declaring a war on drugs; drugs, at least, are tangible, and could presumably one day be destroyed completely.

We can’t beat terrorists, because every person has the potential to be a terrorist. All you have to do to be a terrorist is get a gun, a bomb, or similar, find a bunch of people, and kill them indiscriminately.

Some people believe that only evil people commit terrorism, and if we destroy evil people, there will be no more terrorism. This belief fundamentally misunderstands human nature. There is no collection of human beings who are evil; there is simply humanity, made up of all of us, and some of us choose to do evil things.

The option exists to commit an act of terrorism, of indiscriminate mass killing. We can, through governance, take some deadly weapons out of general circulation; we can learn who wants to use those weapons to kill and try to stop them; we can punish people who kill. But we cannot destroy the fact that people have the choice to kill each other.

You can’t destroy a concept. Hopefully, terrorism will someday be only a concept, known of but not used. But, even if it’s only in the abstract, terrorism will always be with us.

Spare Us

Not long ago, we at the Blasphemy Blog semi-seriously suggested that, given the epidemic of methamphetamine use in this country, we as a society ought to encourage those people who like to smoke illegal things to smoke marijuana instead. The semi-serious reasoning behind this modest proposal was that meth is really, really bad, whereas marijuana is only sort of bad.

Well, it turns out that the people in charge of our national drug policy disagree with our assessment and are maintaining Mary Jane's status as public drug enemy number one, despite a survey of 500 sheriffs indicating that meth is actually public drug enemy number one.

Why would White House Policy Analyst Dave Murray come to a different conclusion than 500 sheriffs? What does he know that they don't? Well, it comes down to numbers. There are 15 million marijuana smokers in the United States, whereas there are only about a million meth users, these statistics having been helpfully compiled by the Office of Asking People if they Use Drugs. (Just down the hall from the Office of Asking Teenagers if they Have Sex.) Because there are so many more marijuana users, marijuana is a much, much worse problem.

We try not to be cynical at the Blasphemy Blog, but we become very cynical indeed when policy analysts say such silly things. Does White House Policy Analyst Dave Murray also believe we need a national crackdown on littering, since so many more people litter than commit murders? Oh, it makes us so cynical.

We begin to suspect, for example, that a White House Policy Analyst would say such a thing because the meth epidemic affects the rural poor and gay people, neither of whom vote Republican, and the marijuana "epidemic" affects suburban people, about half of whom vote Republican.

But really, we'll try not to be that cynical. What we really want, in our heart of hearts, is for people to stop using meth. Come on, kids. It rots your brain and your teeth. The men who would be the next Willie Nelson and the next Tony Kushner are going to die before they're twenty-five if we're not careful. And we really, really need another Nelson and another Kushner.

So if you must smoke something, please smoke a bowl. This time we're not kidding.