From the Front Lines of the Culture Wars

In the August 3rd Wall Street Journal (WSJ), Jay Richards and James Robison joined the latest skirmish in the culture wars. They argued that the reaction against Chick-fil-A constitutes an “ominous attack on religious freedom,” worse even than the threat posed by Obamacare (no details here, presumably they refer to the mandate for health insurers to provide free contraceptives). 

Richards and Robison are co-authors of “Indivisible: Restoring Faith, Family, and Freedom Before It’s Too Late.” The title subtly hints, I think, at the authors’ position on the cultural issues of the day.

The back story is important here. If you’re familiar with it, skip the next few paragraphs.

Chick-fil-A is by all accounts a highly successful fast food restaurant chain. As you probably already know, its specialty is chicken. There’s a Walmartian feel to the restaurants. The last time I dined at one, grandmotherly women were busing the tables (which, I gotta say, was a little weird).



Dan Cathy, President and COO
of Chick-fil-A

 Chick-fil-A is owned by the Cathy family, which espouses a fundamentalist Southern Baptist Christianity. The family’s religious beliefs underpin its decision to close their restaurants on Sundays. I think it’s fair to say the family intentionally wraps its religion around the Chick-fil-A brand name. Through its nonprofit, the Winshape Foundation, the family has contributed to Exodus International and Focus on the Family, both of which see homosexuality as sinful and attempt to re-orient gay persons away from a gay lifestyle (I won’t attempt to discuss their methods). Most gay people see these groups as inherently anti-gay.

The chain of events that made Dan Cathy, Chick-fil-A’s president, a lightning rod for the same-sex marriage debate is a bit mysterious, suggesting perhaps a slow week for news. On July 16^th the Baptist Press re-posted a story about Dan Cathy that was originally published in the Biblical Recorder newspaper. Somehow it was picked up by the national media, including CNN, and then spread quickly through social media. Here are the lines from the Biblical Recorder story that caused the disturbance in the Force:

"Well, guilty as charged" said Cathy when asked about the company's position.

"We are very much supportive of the family -- the biblical definition of the family unit. We are a family-owned business, a family-led business, and we are married to our first wives. We give God thanks for that.”

 

Granted there are a few code words here, for instance, “biblical definition of the family unit,” but generally this is pretty tame stuff.

Then someone uncovered a June 16^th phone interview with Dan Cathy on The Ken Coleman Show, a syndicated radio show. On this date the show’s theme was Father’s Day. Dan Cathy started with some standard stuff on fatherhood, offered up a few nuggets of homespun wisdom, such as, single-parent families are “emotionally handicapped,” then culminated with this warning:

“…we’re inviting God’s judgment on our nation when we shake our fist at him and say we know better than you as to what constitutes a marriage. And I pray God’s mercy on our generation that has such a prideful, arrogant attitude that thinks we have the audacity to redefine what marriage is all about.”

OK, that’s more like it. Any time you bring in the wrath of God, you’re likely to ruffle a few feathers. Again, no explicit mention of same-sex marriage, but everyone understands what he was talking about.

The next thing you know several northern mayors and the odd alderman are making bombastic threats to impede Chick-fil-A’s expansion into their cities, former Governor Huckabee organizes a “Chick-fil-A Appreciation Day,” and various gay-lesbian groups attempt a national boycott of Chick-fil-A.  And, oh, a lot of same-sex couples post photos of public displays of affection with Chick-fil-A signs in the background.

Back to Richards and Robison’s WSJ editorial…their beef in this latest skirmish of the culture wars is that supporters of same-sex marriage have conspired to intimidate Dan Cathy, and by doing so infringe his freedom of speech and freedom of religion. Richards and Robison specifically call it an attack on religious speech, implying religious speech is a special and protected class of speech.  

For the record Dan Cathy is very clear that while Chick-fil-A is operated according to “biblical principles,” it is a private business, not a religious organization; so the operation of the business cannot be construed as a religious activity.

There’s not much question that the threat of the big-city mayors to deny future licenses or permits to Chick-fil-A would, if acted upon, pose a true free speech issue. As a practical matter few people seemed to take the mayors’ threats very seriously. To be generous I assume they were pandering to their political base.

Religious speech is speech, pure and simple. The Constitution does not distinguish religious speech from political speech. The 1^st Amendment specifically prohibits the government from “abridging the freedom of speech.” What the 1^st Amendment does not do is protect an individual from the commercial or social repercussions of freely speaking; thus Dan Cathy’s public statements that God may punish the nation if it legalizes same-sex marriage and that proponents of same-sex marriage are prideful and arrogant is bound to lose Chick-fil-A customers. These same customers are under no obligation to differentiate Dan Cathy's personal opinions from Chick-fil-A’s corporate culture.

The exercise of free speech is not always free. Those of us who work directly with the public understand this. We generally temper what we say to avoid alienating the people whose goodwill our livelihood depends on. I’m a real estate agent. I cannot recall the last time I saw a fellow agent with a political bumper sticker on his car. We understand that no matter whose sticker we display, we’re likely to alienate half the people we meet. That’s not a good business plan.

The Susan G. Komen Foundation for the Cure, famous for its pink ribbon logo, learned much the same lesson earlier this year. It is (or was, I'm not sure) the largest charity dedicated to fighting women's breast cancer. In January it announced that it would no longer use Planned Parenthood clinics to provide breast cancer screening for poor and uninsured women (granted, Komen's actions were more than speech, but you get my point). Many Komen contibutors felt that defunding Planned Parenthood compromised Komen's mission in order to support the pro-life movement, which has made eradication of Planned Parenthood its priority.  Four days after it defunded Planned Parenthood, it reversed its decision. But the damage was done: Komen was no longer an unsullied champion of women's health, it was just another belligerent in the culture wars. Komen is still trying to repair the damage to both its reputation and pocket book.

Internally Chick-fil-A may have come to the conclusion that it should remain neutral in the gay marriage debate. I note that it issued the following press release on July 19^th, just as things were heating up in the media: "going forward, our intent is to leave the policy debate over same-sex marriage to the government and political arena."

Who is the Leftist of Them All?

On May 2nd Newt Gingrich finally—finally!—curtailed his presidential campaign.  It took about twenty-three minutes to say everything he wanted to say. His nth wife, Callista, stood mutely by his side.

He refused (or delayed) endorsing Mitt Romney. Instead, he asked rhetorically whether Mitt Romney was conservative enough to earn his endorsement, then attempted an answer saying it didn’t really matter because Barack Obama was “the most radical, leftist president in American history.”



Yea, I know...adolescent humor



So much for closing ranks. Don’t expect the Romney campaign to extend an olive branch to Gingrich. One month on, there is a sense that Newt’s star has permanently dipped below the horizon.

Rick Santorum was marginally more gracious in defeat than Gingrich. On May 7th he sent a late-night email to his supporters that it was now OK to sport Romney 2012 bumper stickers.


Rick Santorum, the man who put
 the "cool" back in the sweater vest

This conjures an image of Santorum at his desk at 1:30 AM, throwing back an oversized Scotch, muttering “fuck it,” and hitting send.

But back to Gingrich’s comments regarding Obama’s politics. I have been hearing the Obama is a radical-leftist-socialist from conservative sources since the last election. Still, I wonder, in a technical sense, is Gingrich correct? Is Obama, in fact, the most liberal president in history?

Rating a politician on the liberal-conservative scale is tricky business. Numerous interest groups, such as the American Civil Liberties Union and the American Conservative Union, publish their own ratings. These groups have dog in the fight, so one may reasonably question how unbiased their ratings are.

 National Journals's 2007
 "Most Liberal" Senator of the Year

The National Journal (NJ), which enjoys a reputation for neutrality, has rated Congress since 1981. NJ’s methodology involves cherry picking the key roll-call votes during a calendar year that demonstrate political ideology (and obviously introduces its own bias in the process). It stepped into a political maelstrom during the last presidential election cycle, when it rated then-Senator Obama the most liberal senator in 2007 five days before the Super Tuesday primaries. Senator John McCain jumped on this tidbit, declaiming "It's hard to reach across the aisle from that far to the left."

Closer inspection reveals a more nuanced story. Obama had missed 33 of the 99 roll-call votes NJ used in its ratings system. Meanwhile McCain had missed too many votes to be rated in 2007. Obama only voted differently than Senator Hilary Clinton twice, yet she was rated the 16th most liberal while he was the 1st most liberal, a distinction without much difference. In 2005 and 2006 NJ rated Obama, respectively, the 16th and 10th most liberal senator.

Political science professors Keith Poole and Howard Rosenthal partnered in the 1980s to develop a sophisticated political mapping method which today goes by the acronym DW-NOMINATE (Dynamic Weighted Nominal Three-Step Estimation). Their methodology is not for the statistically faint-of-heart. I refer those curious for background to Keith Poole’s blog Voteview. Suffice it to say that DW-NOMINATE is today’s gold standard for rating politicians.

Using DW NOMINATE Poole and Rosenthal analyzed roll-call votes from the 1st Congress onward on a 2-dimensional scale, where the x-axis represents the traditional left-right position on economic issues, and the y-axis is the position on important regional and social issues (e.g., slavery, civil rights). Poole and Rosenthal infer the position of presidents and presidential candidates from the votes of Senators and Congressman with whom they were clearly aligned.

To get a sense of the party dynamics within the U.S. Congress, watch Voteview's video The History of American Politics in Two Minutes. Note that in the past thirty years the overlap between Republican and Democratic members of Congress has disappeared. The parties have grown further apart and more cohesive. The just-published 2012 values survey by the Pew Research Center reports the same widening gap between registered Republican and Democatic voters.


The smoothed histogram below illustrates the distribution of Senators and Congressmen along the traditional left-right economic scale in 2007. By the way the DW-NOMINATE score represents a poltician's cumulative voting record. Senators Clinton and Obama effectively fell on top of each other. Their score of -0.43 puts them slightly to the left of the typical Democrat. Senator McCain with a score of +0.33 was slightly to the left of a typical Republican. Nonetheless, in the year these three Senators ran for president, each represented the political mainstream for his/her respective party. On the other hand President George W. Bush's score of +0.76 put him on the far-right of the Republican Party.



DW-NOMINATE scores for 2007 Congress on the
 traditional liberal-conservative economic scale

 With the success of Tea Party candidates in 2010, the Republican Party has undoubtedly shifted towards Bush, which makes it all the more curious that the current Republican Party largely repudiates its last and most conservative president.


Poole and Rosenthal used the DW-NOMINATE method to score the political position of presidents from World War II forward (shown below). The remarkable observation here is that Obama's presidency so far has proved to be the least liberal of any Democratic president since and including Harry Truman. He is still liberal, but as the chief executive he has governed more moderately than he previously legislated as a senator. Meanwhile the Republican presidents starting with Eisenhower have moved steadily to the right.




DW-NOMINATE scores for presidents from 1945 to present
 (based on roll-call votes on which a president clearly articulated his position)

 There's an old saw that if you repeat something often enough, it must be true. This seems to apply to Republican claims regarding Obama's politics. As a political tactic, it has a long and disreputable history. But undoubtedly it can be effective. For historical perspective here's Lyndon Johnson's infamous "Daisy" attack ad from 1964. It was part of a concerted effort to convince voters that the conservative Senator Barry Goldwater could not be trusted with nuclear weapons.

There is considerable irony in this whole Obama-leftist-socialist thing: the Republican Party moves away from the political center, then complains that the Democratic president is too far from the political center, and, thus, not truly American. Ah, such is poilitcs. This is why we need the occasional reality check.

Whatever you think about President Obama's leadership quaities, he is clearly not the closet socialist his opponents would have us believe. He continues the moderate liberal tradition of Democratic presidents going back to Harry Truman.

Does America Need A DREAM Act?

Lady Liberty

What is this land America, so many travel there.
I'm going now while I'm still young, my darling meet me there.
Wish me luck my lovely, I'll send for you when I can;
And we'll make our home in the American land

American Land, Verse 1 by Bruce Springsteen

DREAM Act = Development, Relief and Education for Alien Minors Act

If the DREAM Act has a poster child, Staff Sergeant Luis Lopez is probably it. The Wall Street Journal published his story in February 2011. In brief, his parents brought him to the U.S. as an eight year old in 1990. They overstayed their tourist visa. He grew up in Los Angeles. After high school he used fake documents to enlist in the U.S. Army, eventually serving ten years, including deployments to Iraq and Afghanistan. By all accounts he was a brave and competent soldier. In December 2010 Sergeant Lopez told his army superiors that he was an illegal alien and was applying for U.S. citizenship. When an army official referenced his fake enlistment documents as evidence that he had not served honorably, it put his citizenship application in jeopardy.  Fortunately for Sergeant Lopez, his commanding officer went to bat for him, and he was eventually granted citizenship.


Sergeant Luis Lopez

Sergeant Lopez’s story is far from unique. Out of an illegal immigrant population of 11 million, there are about 765,000 who came to the U.S. before the age of sixteen and effectively grew up “American.” Approximately 65,000 young adults in this category graduate from high school each year. They inhabit a kind of legal-cultural limbo: they identify as American, yet they cannot legally work in the U.S. Furthermore, current immigration policy makes it almost impossible for them to ever live and work legally in the U.S.


[Note: Posted population estimates for illegal immigrants vary considerably, so these statistics are a bit fuzzy, but adequate for this discussion]


It was to help people like Sergeant Lopez that the DREAM Act was first proposed in 2001. It provides a path to U.S. citizenship for this subgroup of illegal immigrants. There are conditions. They must have entered the U.S. before age sixteen, lived continuously in the U.S. for five years, graduate from high school, possess good moral character, and either serve in the military or attend a four-year college for two years. Do all this and they earn six years of conditional legal residency; successfully complete their degree program or military service, and they may apply for permanent legal status. Bottom line: the DREAM Act is not an easy road to citizenship.


The original DREAM Act did not pass in 2001. An amended version passed the House during the lame duck session of Congress in 2010, however, it could not muster sixty Senate votes necessary to overcome a filibuster. While the bill’s sponsors tried to narrow the scope of the DREAM Act, and so keep it apart from the larger questions regarding immigration and border policy, it seems the two cannot be easily separated.


Polling data suggests the country is split on immigration policy. According to Pew Research Center, 29% of Americans think the highest priority is better border security, 24% think it is a path to citizenship, and 48% think border security and a path to citizenship are equal priorities. 

 

Senator John McCain (R-Arizona),
former presidential candidate
 and well-known maverick


Originally the DREAM Act had sponsors on both sides of the political aisle. Today support for the act closely follows party line, with Republicans, especially those associated with the Tea Party, opposing the act, and Democrats supporting it. It is noteworthy that such Republican stalwarts as Senators McCain (R-AZ), Kyl (R-AZ), and Graham (R-SC) recently changed their position on the DREAM Act, most likely in response to pressure from the Tea Party wing. John McCain had co-sponsored the DREAM Act in 2007.

Fundamentally the DREAM Act is about American values. It forces us to ask What do we think about immigrants? and Do illegal immigrants who entered the U.S. as children merit special consideration for citizenship?

Senator Jeff Sessions (R-Alabama),
leading opponent of the DREAM Act

Senator Jeff Sessions (R-AL) lead the Senate opposition against the DREAM Act, declaiming in late 2010, “This bill is a law that at its fundamental core is a reward for illegal activity.” It is noteworthy that Session’s home state, Alabama, recently passed the most draconian anti-immigrant legislation. Prior to the last vote on the DREAM Act, he circulated a memo outlining reasons to oppose the act. He argued that the act would encourage more illegal immigration, lead to mass chain immigration, and saddle taxpayers with more federal debt. In his worldview illegal immigrants enter the U.S. to pursue criminal activity, such as running guns or drugs, and to suck on the public teat. Session’s unspoken goal, and the goal of the recent Alabama legislation, is to create conditions so noxious and restrictive that illegal immigrants will self deport, a term that recently surfaced in Mitt Romney's  presidential primary campaign.

Missing entirely from Senator Session’s calculus is the long term economic value of immigrants and the moral question posed by people like Sergeant Lopez. The famous line inscribed on the Statue of Liberty,

“Give me your tired, your poor, your huddled masses yearning to breathe free…,”

The 1920's revival of the KKK
migrated north and introduced
the quaint tradition of crossburning

carries no significance or weight. And whether a child raised in the U.S. has the language skills, cultural understanding, and social network to survive in his/her country of origin is a question apparently not worthy of consideration. Context is important, so it should not be forgotten that the drug war in Mexico has claimed more than 50,000 lives, and being deported to that country is not like being deported to Sweden.

For the student of history the current anti-immigration fever is reminiscent of the nativist movement of the early 20^th century, which culminated in the Emergency Quota Act of 1921. It capped immigration of what many Americans then thought of as less-than-desirable Catholics and Jews from eastern and southern Europe. It was closely associated with the 1920s revival of the Ku Klux Klan.

I docked at Ellis Island in the city of light and spire.
I wandered to the valley of red-hot steel and fire.
We made the steel that built the cities with the sweat of our two hands.
We made our home in the American land.

American Land, Verse 4 by Bruce Springsteen

President Ronald Reagan believed
immigrants represent an essential
American value

What is perhaps most ironic in all this is that a political generation ago President Reagan, the conservative’s conservative, championed a path to citizenship through the 1986 Immigration Reform and Control Act.  Speaking in a 1984 debate, President Reagan said “I believe in the idea of amnesty for those who have put down roots and lived here, even though sometime back they may have entered illegally.” He appreciated that people who immigrate to the U.S. overwhelmingly seek personal liberty and economic opportunity. He understood that the passion and energy of new immigrants helps grow the economy. He also saw the large illegal immigrant population as rife for exploitation, which greatly troubled him.



Many of those who knew and worked with Reagan have expressed their belief that Reagan would strongly endorse today’s DREAM Act. For him it would embody the American values represented by the Statue of Liberty. It would provide the most worthy subgroup of illegal immigrants with an opportunity to share the American dream. It would chip away at the population of easily exploited illegal immigrants. Finally, he would see the future contributions of DREAM Act children as both strengthening our economy and reinforcing traditional American values.

So, yes America, we need a DREAM Act.

The McNicholas, the Posalskis, the Smiths, Zerillis too*,
The Blacks, the Irish, Italians, the Germans and the Jews,
They come across the water a thousand miles from home
With nothing in their bellies but the fire down below.

They died building the railroads, they worked to bones and skin;
They died in the fields and factories, names scattered in the wind; They died to get here a hundred years ago, they're still dying now;
Their hands that built the country we're always trying to keep out.

American Land, Verses 4 and 5 by Bruce Springsteen


* Bruce Springsteen's mother's maiden name was Zerilli.


Here's Springsteen and the E Street Band playing a footstomping, kickass rendition of American Land.