Month: October 2017

I love my strongly Conservative friends. They are such a reliable source of essay prompts and blog material. Today’s catalyst was the following:

What’s the end game, lefties? What’s your desired outcome in this cultural war you’ve waging? Is it to take over everything in America, run every institution in your own image, whatever that is? Or is it to destroy them all, as is now happening with the BSA and the NFL?

There is so much I could unpack in this comment, such as the fact that the BSA is actually keeping boys and girls in separate Cub Scout dens, or that one would think that the values of the Boy Scouts would be values they would want girls to have as well, or the fact that what is happening with the NFL is not an attack on the anthem, but rather kneeling for the freedoms that we pay lip service to in the anthem, but that we don’t see on the streets.

But that’s not what caught my attention. It was the phrase “culture war.”

We have so many wars in this country: culture wars, a war on Christmas, a war on values, a war on women, a war on drugs — one might forget what war is. It is not a heated political discussion. It is a dirty battle in which people not only may die, but do die, from the actions of the enemy. It was World War II and the Korean Conflict, the Vietnam War and the War in Afghanistan. It is people coming back mangled and in pieces, or in coffins. I know war. The culture war is not a war, and you have no right to trivialize war and its horrors by equating the two.

But if this is to be a “war”, exactly what is at stake here? You notice that they never quite say. A recent This American Life touched upon the issue quite well, however.  What is being attacked is the traditional “American” culture of the early 20th Century: a culture where whites had unquestioned privilege, where women were second class citizens, where blacks and minorities were less than third-class citizens. It is a culture where sex was binary, relationships were normative, society was clearly Christian if not Protestant, and other religions were second-class or at least subject to prejudice. This was Jim Crow and Antisemitism. But of course, one cannot say that one longs for such things — there is the belief that the “thought police” (otherwise known as the dreaded Liberal) will come for you. So what you long for — what you say is under attack — is American Culture and American Values.

Look at the examples in the essay prompt. The kneeling football players are “insulting the anthem” by standing up for the rights of blacks to walk and drive in our cities without harrassment. In their eyes, the anthem stands for the values above, and standing up for the rights of minorities goes against those values.

The BSA? Well it is those pesky girls invading our boys only spaces. The Boy Scouts — in their eyes, mind you, not the eyes of the BSA — is where boys can be boys, and learn the right values such as how to treat women. I wonder if Harvey Weinstein or even our humble President was a Boy Scout. After all, we all remember what he tried to teach the Boy Scouts.

The folks who are up in arms about a culture war appear to want the culture as it was in the days of Queen Victoria and Charles Dickens. Workhouses for the poor. Women either put up on a pedestal for modesty and virtue, or treated as sluts and whores. White men as the unquestioned Gods of society, unquestioned pillars of virtue. Society as a Christian one, with Christian values and feigned charity towards all, but all the wealth for the upper crust. That is the fictional movie image. For most of those living it, life was shit.

We are not dealing with culture wars. We’re dealing with cultural shift. We’re dealing with a world that has come to realize that all people have worth and value. We’re dealing with a world that has slowly, begrudgingly, come to realize that everyone deserves to be treated fairly and with respect, irrespective of those aspects they can’t control, such as skin color, sex, gender, orientation, social strata, religion, genetic predispositions — otherwise known as pre-existing conditions. We aspire for healthcare independent of pre-existing conditions. Why can’t we aspire for a society that does the same.

It is especially significant to see such an essay prompt on today, National Coming Out Day, when we should feel free to say what we are without fear of recrimination or reaction. Coming out is more than just stating your orientations or attractions — it is announcing to the world a public acknowledgement of who and what you are.

So, in that spirit, and in the spirit of making clear what side of the “culture war” I’m on: I’m a clear and present Liberal. I’m a Humphrey-ite Democrat. I believe in those progressive values that all are valued, that your right to practice your religion and beliefs ends where my right to practice mine begins. I believe that my body is my body, and your body is your body, and her body is her body, and none of us should be telling or legislating what we can be doing with it.  I believe we all have to stand up for what we believe in.

So is there a culture war? Yes, but not in the way you think. It is not the white patriarchal culture that is dying however. It is women who can’t get abortions. People that can’t afford healthcare or housing. LGBTQ…. who are being beaten in the streets or blown up in the clubs. It is blacks dying in the streets at the hands of law enforcement, or minorities dying at the hands of immigration officials. It is those who are defending the “traditional” culture who are perpetrating the war: they are bringing physically lethal weaponry to battle that most dangerous weapon of all: the idea of equality and justice.

So, how did I do on the essay, teach?

Sometimes, all it takes is a phrase to start my mind going. In this case, it was a post by a friend of a meme that said: “There is something wrong in a society in which guns and ammunition are a right, but healthcare is a privilege.” My response was that it sounded so 18th Century. I meant that in all seriousness. Let me explain.

Like anything, our country and its governing documents are a product of the time it was born, just like (although many won’t admit it) the Bible was written through the eyes of the times in which it was written. Reform Judaism, the movement to which I belong, teaches that we must continually reinterpret those timeless lessons for today’s times and values.

Consider when this country was formed, and when the Bill of Rights was written. There was persecution from England against speech and the practice of religion. There was regular quartering of soldiers in homes, and the British were confiscating guns and disbanding militias so the the people couldn’t fight back. There was slavery, and state militias were being used to enforce owner’s rights. Women were second class citizens with defined roles, and in many states, non-whites were not even citizens. Gay relationships were certainly in the closet, and as for the rest of TQ…. — you didn’t hear about it. Healthcare was non-existent or poor, and land was cheap. Anyone could be a self-starter, and redefine their identity. The world was much simpler, and the weapons less powerful. There was a fixed aristocracy, and the power of what we now call Evangelical Christianity wasn’t there. Most of the Founding Fathers were Deists. Society was such as non-Christians were fewer and less well integrated. Eastern religions? What were they? Non-Europeans or non-Africans. Miniscule populations at the time in the Americas.

This was the environment in which our Constitution and the Bill of Rights was written. It reflected the humans that wrote it, who wrote it with their immediate needs and concerns in mind. It was not intended to speak to all times; it was known by its founders to be imperfect. Consider this: We can amend the Constitution. We can’t amend the Bible. Whose authors thought it was perfect?

We’re in the 21st Century. We need a Bill of Rights for today, that reflect the timeless notion in the Declaration of Independence: “We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.” and in the Preamble to the Constitution: ” establish Justice, insure domestic Tranquility, provide for the common defense, promote the general Welfare, and secure the Blessings of Liberty to ourselves and our Posterity”.

What should be in this bill of rights (we can argue about citizens vs residents vs …):

• To ensure life: All citizens must have access to a basic level of health care and preventive medicine: not only to protect their lives, but to ensure that which is communicable does not infect others.
• To ensure life: All citizens must have a basic livable income, sufficient to provide shelter and sustenance.
• To ensure liberty:  All people in the United States must be treated equally, irrespective of any status by birth or inheritance: religion, race, gender, orientation, sex, size, or differences in ability.
• To ensure liberty: All citizens must have a freedom of privacy in their personal affairs.
• To ensure liberty: All people must have the freedom to practice their religion inasmuch as it does not impinge on the rights of the others to practice their religion.
• To ensure the pursuit of happiness: Gun ownership should be permitted but controlled to ensure the public safety: (including distinctions on the type of weapons, regular training and mental health checks, storage rules, and strict limitations on non-hunting or self-defense weapons.

Those are just a start. I’m sure you could think of more, including many of our current limits on the Government imposing its religion or a pre-set morality.

 

 

A few days ago, prompted by a post from an Evangelical Conservative friend of mine that mass murders were only committed by Islamic Terrorists or the Radical Liberals, and the Vegas Shooter had to be one or the other, I said:

There are times my very Conservative friends make posts that infuriate me, and make me start typing a comment … which I promptly delete because I know it is like teaching pigs to sing (and I’m not calling them pigs, only using the expression): I’ll only get frustrated by the response, which won’t change anything. Thus, I don’t bother with those discussions. It makes me appreciate other friends at different parts of the Conservative spectrum, with whom we can have an intelligent discussion, learn from each other, and often find some middle ground.

In response to this, we’ve had a very good discussion over on Facebook on both the differences and similarities between left and right, and including agreement with my sentiment above from people who I consider to be on the both far ends of the political spectrum. Then, this morning, while reading my RSS feeds, NPR pops up an interesting article about now nothing divides Americans more sharply than politics. It noted the following in it’s leed:

Pew has been measuring attitudes on policy issues and political values dating back to 1994, and its latest check-in finds — perhaps unsurprisingly — that Americans are more divided than ever.

“The fact that Republicans and Democrats differ on these fundamental issues is probably not a surprise, but the magnitude of the difference is striking, and particularly how the differences have grown in recent years and where they’ve grown,” Carroll Doherty, Pew’s director of political research and one of the authors of the study, told NPR.

We are divided, and we’ve gotten so entrenched in our bubbles and our labels that we not only fail to recognize people as individuals with individual views, not party positions, but we fail to listen. We engage in discussions not to listen and learn from the other side, but to convince them that is why THEY are wrong and WE are right. That’s wrong.  There are very few issues that are simple binary — most are complicated with nuances, and multiple mitigations to address areas of concern.

Then, while reading another burst of my RSS feeds, there was an interesting opinion piece in the Jewish Journal: “Toward a Radical Middle“. In it, the author talks about how in the Facebook era, there were things on the Left that you were not allowed to criticize; similarly, for those on the Right, there were things you couldn’t criticize. Polarized much? One reformer noted in the article coined the term “regressive left” to describe the illiberal takeover of the left, the slow chipping away of every liberal value.

What I really liked was the article’s conclusion:

How do we get out of this mess? For one, we need to return to real — classical — liberalism. But what does that mean?

The easiest way to describe real liberalism is that there are certain principles — freedom of speech; freedom of religion; a dedication to liberty, justice and individuality — that are nonnegotiable.

But — and here’s a very big but: Liberalism allows for policy differences. You and I don’t have to agree on immigration, tax reform, even abortion — but our arguments must be rooted in liberal principles. Freedom of speech, for instance, involves defending the right of others to express their opinions, even if we disagree with them.

But No. 2: Politics need not color our culture or our lives. You can watch a movie or see an art show and — get this — just enjoy them, even if they have no connection whatsoever to social concerns.

Finally, But No. 3: Along with rights come responsibilities. There is a set of values attached to liberalism, what Martin Luther King Jr. called “the content of your character.”

Because of how skewed the political spectrum is, classical liberalism now sits in the center. That’s OK. It is precisely this ideology that can create common ground between the right and the left and nurture a saner society.

Call it the rebellion of the radical middle.

I, for one, look forward to that saner society, vs. the dysfunctional one we have today.