Not anymore. [...]]]> Welcome to the United States of Scam-erica. Or Griftopia, as Matt Taibbi calls it in his book on the Wall Street meltdown. “There are really two Americas,” Taibbi writes. For the grifter class, government is “a tool for making  money,” while “in everybody-else land, the government is something to be avoided.”

Not anymore. Here is the lesson Americans gleaned from the financial meltdown on and bailout of Wall Street: If the feds won’t prosecute ‘em, join ‘em. Corruption has trickled down.

Now the government haters have their hands out, too. One Georgia Christian school, for example, instructs parents in how to use a state scholarship program to launder their taxable income and turn it into tax-free tuition money. Georgia’s private school scholarship program launched in 2010 diverts about $50 million a year from state school budgets by giving “dollar-for-dollar tax credits” of up to $2,500 a couple for donations to nonprofit scholarship organizations that help needy students access private schools. As the New York Times reports:

That was the idea, at least. But parents meeting at Gwinnett Christian Academy got a completely different story last year … A handout circulated at the meeting instructed families to donate, qualify for a tax credit and then apply for a scholarship for their own children, many of whom were already attending the school.

Once the scholarship bill passed, the Times continues, “parents of children in private schools began flooding public school offices to officially ‘enroll’ their children.” To enroll, but not to attend. Rep. David Casas, one of the bill’s sponsors, explained why in a YouTube video (the video has been taken down; transcript by the Southern Education Foundation):

“Some people felt a little bit weird about that; felt it was a little dishonest that they would take their child, enroll them in a public school and not have them actually attend, but all of a sudden they actually qualify for a scholarship. I’m telling you, we deliberately put the wording in there for that.”

Georgia House Bill 325 is a reverse Robin Hood, a legal document worthy of the pay-day loan industry. Even Casas’ audience for the video worried that his scheme was a scam, but the Georgia Department of Education accepts his interpretation. Nevertheless, Johnathan Arnold, headmaster of Covenant Christian Academy in Cumming, Ga. views using the program to discount tuition for existing private school students “unethical.”

Similar back door voucher programs like Georgia’s are already in place in eight states, and recently approved in Virginia. Of course, these bills owe their parentage to the American Legislative Council (ALEC), and draw heavily on its model bill, The Family Education Tax Credit Program Act. Most of the private schools are religious, according to the Times, receiving what public school officials consider “poorly disguised state subsidies.” Because Georgia’s student scholarship organizations (SSOs) have been slow to award scholarships, money has piled up to be rolled over to future years. The Southern Educational Foundation found that instead of saving the state money in the short term, “the state government incurred an additional cost of $7,510 in financing a partial scholarship in a private school above and beyond what it would have paid in 2009 for the education of the same student in a public school.” That is, assuming all students who receive SSO scholarships had actually moved from struggling public schools to private ones (presumably better, but often not).

The Southern Education Foundation found that the low-income students are not the ones being helped by Georgia’s SSO scholarships. The highest growth in Georgia’s private school enrollment is in the 1/3 of schools located in rural areas. SEF concludes that “most of the private schools currently working with SSOs to receive tax funds to finance student scholarships are in the five counties that also have Georgia’s higher performing public high schools.” The report further suggests that most of the students receiving scholarship money to attend private schools had followed Casas’ strategy and had not actually transferred from public schools. Between 2007, the year before enactment, to 2009, the first full year of implementation, “private school enrollment increased only by about 1/3 of one percent in the Georgia metro counties where more than two out of every three private schools affiliated with an SSO are located.” And because they were already in private schools, these students are costing the state money it was not spending on them before.

North Carolina is preparing to join Georgia, Arizona, Florida, Indiana, Iowa, Oklahoma, Pennsylvania, Virginia and Rhode Island. The Asheville Citizen-Times reports this week that North Carolina House Majority Leader Paul Stam, R-Wake introduced a bill that would give state corporations a tax credit worth up to “their entire yearly state tax debt” in exchange for contributions to funds run by nonprofit scholarship-funding organizations. Scholarships of up to $4,000 per year are allowed for pupils attending private schools. If passed, the law would allow the tax credit to be spread out over five years. Up to $40 million in credits are allowed starting in 2013, potentially increasing by 35 percent following each year in which donors claim 90 percent of the previous year’s credits. If successful, the program in theory could expand by 35 percent per year until consuming North Carolina’s entire state revenue stream for funding K-12 education. That makes State Board of Education Chairman Bill Harrison’s description of the bill as “the latest effort to dismantle public education” a modest understatement.

WRAL Raleigh observed that the U.S. Supreme Court “validated that middle-man approach” to funding vouchers in a ruling last year “against an Arizona lawsuit claiming violation of constitutional church-state separation requirements.” Scholarship funds avoid church-state separation issues by having donations collected and disbursed by the nonprofit groups. The money never passes through state hands.

At a rally organized to support the bill, Stam told several hundred people, “It is a beginning and it will be funded by corporations that believe in educational access for everyone.”

There’s the money quote. If you believe corporations contribute because they believe in “educational access,” watch how many turn up as investors in for-profit private schools, charters and virtual schools — partaking of both the middle-man profits and the corporate tax breaks. Now that’s the kind of government reform conservatives can get behind.

In confirmation, the Times recounts how over the past three years, working through the Bridge Educational Foundation, XTO Energy donated $650,000 in Pennsylvania — “as much as 90 percent” underwritten by taxpayers — to ingratiate itself with Pennsylvanians concerned about its hydraulic fracking operations and with politicians that regulate them. In Pennsylvania, Georgia and Arizona, it is industry lobbyists, politicians and staffers, not educators, running the largest scholarship funds. Because it is not about education reform, it is about the money.

Reagan taught that government is the problem. In post-financial meltdown America and in the absence of Wall Street prosecutions, with presidential candidates and major corporations hiding profits offshore to avoid taxes, with tech billionaires renouncing their U.S. citizenship rather than pay theirs (and being hailed as heroes in the financial press for doing it), scamming the taxpayers to subsidize your child’s private education seems like pretty acceptable behavior, even for churches. But it is not arising from dogmatic anti-governmentism. Small-time players have simply discovered what the big-time grifters already knew — that government is the enemy only so long as public tax dollars are going into someone else’s pockets. Thus, conservatives, fundamentalists and others have gotten behind the movement to “reform” public education by diverting public tax dollars into their own pockets in the name of providing more choices for the underprivileged.

Rep. Paul Stam, too, is selling his proposal as a way to help children from low-income families. Yet, one of his supporters at the rally, Michael Pratt, principal of Victory Christian Center School in Charlotte reports that his operation is suffering from low income of its own. The vaunted free market? Not so forgiving. Enrollment is off by 17 percent and contributions towards tuition are down in this recession. So as in other states with similar scholarship programs, North Carolina private schools with and without affiliated churches are looking to dip Scotch-taped fingers into the public collection plate, fishing for tens and twenties.

(Cross-posted from Scrutiny Hooligans.)

President Richard Nixon once observed, “Flexibility is the first principle of politics.” But that brings up [...]]]>

No man can serve two masters: for either he will hate the one, and love the other; or else he will hold to the one, and despise the other. Ye cannot serve God and mammon. – Matthew 6:24

President Richard Nixon once observed, “Flexibility is the first principle of politics.” But that brings up something I notice about some right-wing antagonists: how lithe they are in debate.

It is behavior progressive talk show hosts know well, particularly when it comes to hot-button social issues. Right-wing callers dial in hoping to score a few on-air points against the liberal. If one tack isn’t working, they quickly pivot and launch into another argument they hope will get more traction – the first was disposable. And then another, almost as if they are getting paid by the talking point. These exercises are not about the truth, or even about being right. This is about winning.

There is something else that enhances their flexibility: the unholy marriage of Christianity, libertarianism and Austrian economics. What the latter two have to do with Jesus is beyond me, but the order of argument depends on the particular bent of the person doing the arguing. It goes something like this:

When it is convenient to argue from Christian morality, they argue morality. If that isn’t scoring points, they change the subject and argue personal freedom. And if that isn’t getting traction, they switch to free-market economics. And if that isn’t working, it is back to morality, or else cry socialism. This is the rock-paper-scissors of right-wing rhetoric.

I got into an online debate with a tea party supporter over the proposed Arizona law allowing employers with moral objections to opt out of offering employee insurance plans that include contraception coverage. I asked, as an employer, how it is any of my business how employees spend the compensation they’ve earned and, in a contractual arrangement, I agreed to pay? Well, first it was about freedom, then it was about morality (and hair-splitting about whether employer or employee buys coverage with the employee’s earnings), then it was about how the government offering employer tax benefits distorts the free market.

For all the moral posturing, why is it that economics dominates right-wing debates about values?

As a businessman, I am also free today not to have any employees or to offer any benefits besides cash if my morality is that big an issue. Just because there is a tax advantage doesn’t mean the government is holding a gun to my head to take it. If I have moral qualms and will lose sleep over it, I am free to drop the health benefit altogether – and if I am a free market supplicant, let the free market have its ever-lovin’ undistorted way with me. But by my choices people will know which I value more, my morals or my money.

That sort of world exists, you know. The Amish eschew electricity and automobiles out of their sense of morality. They freely choose to limit interactions with the rest of society and with the government, and that’s just fine by them. And they freely accept the consequences for their lifestyle and their bottom line. They don’t need to spout off about their values on TV and talk radio because they are too busy living them and letting the “English” live theirs. They refuse to compromise their beliefs to improve their social status, or to gain political power, or to impose their views on others, or to build their portfolios and boost the bottom line. Because their beliefs are their bottom line.

So, you want a society as free as possible from government interference – a real one, not a fictional one? (And with less anarchy than Somalia?) Where families are stable, where everybody looks like you and shares your Christian faith, where peer pressure, not law, keeps people in line, and where the government pretty much stays out of your business? Well, there it is, not in some Randian fantasy, but in Lancaster County, PA and Holmes County, Ohio.

Go for it. Show us all what you really value.

And that’s my sermon.

(Cross-posted from Scrutiny Hooligans.)

More there than [...]]]> Primary voters just gave former Speaker Newt Gingrich the win in the Republican presidential primary in South Carolina, “America’s most conservative state.” Reddest of the red. Buckle of the Bible Belt. CNN welcomed viewers to the Charleston debate this week with “Welcome to the South,” a place “where values matter.”

More there than anywhere else? What values mattered most to South Carolinians who gave Gingrich his win?

Not trust. Why should they trust Newt Gingrich? His three wives can’t.

Not “family values.” Gingrich is on his third marriage and committed adultery with his last two wives. In the soft-focused 1950s of conservative nostalgia, South Carolina Republicans would have dismissed Gingrich as a serial philanderer, and his third wife as a loose woman running for First Homewrecker. But not today. For the modern conservative, values compress to suit the flawed candidate most likely to win (with apologies to Cyril Northcote Parkinson).

Not humility. Mr. “Stand aside everyone! ‘I think grandiose thoughts.’” has compared himself to Ronald Reagan, Margaret Thatcher, Charles de Gaulle, the Wright Brothers, the Duke of Wellington, Robert the Bruce, Pericles and Moses. Why shouldn’t Newt want to share that greatness with as many women as want him? As he once said of himself, “I found a way to immerse my insecurities in a cause large enough to justify whatever I wanted it to.”

Fox and Friends  and conservative talk radio would spend weeks flaying any Democratic candidate who said that as a self-centered elitist. Mitt Romney’s not wearing a flag pin in Charleston failed to elicit the patented conservative hissy fit about a lack of patriotism. So what values do matter to South Carolina Republicans?

“[W]e need someone who’s mean,” said Harold Wade from a Charleston suburb. The Washington Post  quotes Debbie Peterson of Piedmont: “I have a little bit of a problem with the divorces, but I need somebody to beat Obama. I like Romney, he is decent and moral, but I just don’t see him beating Obama.”

Maybe what CNN really meant was that the South is the place where values matter … far less than the self-righteousness suggests. As with Gingrich, don’t listen to what they say. Watch what they do. For all the bluster, conservative voters value winners more than virtues, and prefer someone they think will stick it to their ideological foes to someone who is all Bible and no bite.

Presumptive Democratic candidate, President Barack Obama, has high likeability numbers, isn’t known as a philanderer, has one wife, two beautiful children, and one stable family life. Yet if Newt Gingrich wins his party’s nomination, self-described values voters nonetheless will support him this fall, treat Obama as the antichrist, and tie themselves in knots rationalizing why it is consonant with their values to support a man whose baggage has baggage.

Just in time, this case in point, “Newt Gingrich’s three marriages mean he might make a strong president — really,” written by Fox News contributor and Glenn Beck collaborator, psychiatrist Dr. Keith Ablow:

1) Three women have met Mr. Gingrich and been so moved by his emotional energy and intellect that they decided they wanted to spend the rest of their lives with him.

2) Two of these women felt this way even though Mr. Gingrich was already married.

3 ) One of them felt this way even though Mr. Gingrich was already married for the second time, was not exactly her equal in the looks department and had a wife (Marianne) who wanted to make his life without her as painful as possible.

Conclusion: When three women want to sign on for life with a man who is now running for president, I worry more about whether we’ll be clamoring for a third Gingrich term, not whether we’ll want to let him go after one.

“It’s not that I’m a good debater,” Gingrich said in his victory speech on Saturday, “it’s that I articulate the deepest felt values of the American people.” He just doesn’t see any need to live them. In September 2010, ex wife No. 2 (Marianne) told John Richardson of Esquire  that Gingrich told her, “It doesn’t matter what I do. People need to hear what I have to say. There’s no one else who can say what I can say. It doesn’t matter what I live.” Richardson this week added a postscript to the Marianne Gingrich interview, insisting that the focus on Gingrich’s infidelity misses the real problem: “the ferocious and manic drive that … collapsed in a breakdown so severe his own Republican peers had to force him out of power.” That, and her conclusion about his financial ethics and heavy lobbying since leaving Congress — that he chose corruption.

In the end, none of that mattered in the place where “values matter.” In a state where 65 percent of Republican primary voters self-identify as evangelicals or born-again Christians, voters abandoned their standard bearer, Rick Santorum, and overwhelmingly chose to dance with the devil who speaks in dulcet tones — because he looks more like a winner.

(Cross-posted from Scrutiny Hooligans.)

The Norway bombing in all of its dimensions — the initial false assumption and reporting that it was Islamic terrorism; media [...]]]> I am coming late to the reporting and analysis of the Norway bombing, but allow me to connect current events with some of the themes I have been writing about in recent years.

The Norway bombing in all of its dimensions — the initial false assumption and reporting that it was Islamic terrorism; media reliance on experts with an anti-Islamic bias; the specifics and complexities of the ideology; the evolution of terms we have already used to describe the episode and the suspect — and how the assumptions that the terms we choose reflect on us, have surfaced rapidly since the bombing and mass murders in Norway.  

How we understand violence and underlying issues of ideology can be particularly fraught, particularly in heated political environments in which name calling and dubious forms of political “messaging” tend to predominate over well informed analysis and more considered uses of terms.

What follows is a brief, revised discussion of terms and issues related to religiously motivated violence, from last year.

Many challenges face those who think about, analyze and report on the Religious Right (let alone those who want to take appropriate political action.)  One problem is acquiring some foundational knowledge.  Another is finding generally agreed upon terms and definitions of those terms. These matters are running themes at Talk to Action — where we have taken the view from the beginning, that labeling, demonization and epithets are poor and often counterproductive substitutes for terms that allow for actual discussion and help us all to better understand the Religious Right in its many, and ever evolving, factions, leaders, ideologies and so on.

Chip Berlet and I posted essays at Religion Dispatches that delved into some of the questions of terminology raised by the 2010 arrest and indictment of the Michigan-based Hutaree Militia.

Our essays were titled, respectively, ‘Christian Warriors’:  Who Are The Hutaree Militia And Where Did They Come From?, and The Faith-Based Militia:  When is Terrorism `Christian’?

Here are excerpts:

Clarkson:

The arrest of the Michigan-based Hutaree Militia has drawn worldwide attention and in so doing, surfaced one of the knottiest issues we face as a culture to which religious freedom and free speech are so central: How do we think about and describe religiously motivated violence?

The Hutaree’s plans to murder a police officer and use IEDs to attack the funeral procession in order to catalyze an uprising against the federal government was shocking and made headlines around the world. Their action plan, while preposterous on its face, is not terribly surprising, and is in many respects a logical outgrowth of the eschatology of a wide swath of the Christian Right. But what has been most striking to me is the media’s high profile use of the term “Christian militia.” This suggests to me that a tectonic shift may be underway in our underlying culture and politics as we continue to struggle with how to acknowledge the realities of actual and threatened religiously-motivated violence in the U.S.

Until now, of course, the elephant in the room has been our double standard, at least since 9/11. We’ve had little difficulty acknowledging religious motivations when Muslims are involved, but it’s been rare to find the word “Christian” modifying terms like “militia” and “terrorism” in mainstream discourse.

In the 90s other terms were used to describe what we might now call Christian militias. The most famous militia group at the time, the Michigan Militia, had views similar to those of the Hutaree. It was founded and led by a Baptist minister named Norm Olsen and a deacon of his church and they’d made an indoctrination video of its chaplain addressing new recruits explaining that abortion necessitated the founding of the militia. Nevertheless, it was typically described as “anti-government.” And while that was certainly fair, (as it would be to describe the Hutaree militia as anti-government), it also tended to obscure the indisputable religious motivations of this and many other militia groups large and small. Reporting on these groups at the time also tended to downplay their religious eschatology.

The shorthand descriptions of such groups and individuals sometimes depends on the context. Some fall under the category of “hate groups,” and their acts as “hate crimes.” While these terms can be useful, they too can obscure religious motivations. For example, the once infamous Aryan Nations group referred to itself as the Church of Jesus Christ, Christian, and its leader was Rev. Richard Butler, a minister in one of the sects generally referred to as Christian Identity.

The uneven evolution of our thinking about these things, and the language we use to describe them, casts fresh light on how we use other shorthand terms in this complex and fraught dimension of public life. The term “faith-based,” for example, we use more or less synonymously with “religious” and as substitutes for such terms as “ecumenical” and “interfaith.” It has become a warm and fuzzy term used for glossing over religious differences, both for reasons of inclusiveness and to conceal exclusion. But we would never describe the Aryan Nations as a “faith-based” hate group or the Hutaree as a faith-based militia, or Clayton Waagner as a “faith-based terrorist.”

The rise of the term “faith-based” is probably closely related to our difficulty in ascribing religious motivations to hate and violence, unless of course it is the religion of foreigners with whom we are at odds or at war. Such characterizations can be taken as highly inflammatory. Terms like “Christian militia” or “Islamic terrorism” can suggest that terrorism and militias are more characteristic of these enormous and highly varied religious traditions than is the case. And there are certainly those who do not hesitate to exploit such opportunities. At the same time, the current use of the term “Christian militia” suggests to me at once a certain inevitability (since the Hutaree feature their religious identity on their web site) and a certain maturity in our collective ability to acknowledge the reality of the situation without hyperbole or inappropriate defensiveness with regard to the use of the term–Christianity–that fairly describes the majority of religious believers in the U.S., for all of their extraordinary diversity.

Finally, what terms we use depends on the occasion. While the media term of choice for the Hutaree was “Christian militia,” federal prosecutors have carefully avoided religious references. Assistant U.S. Attorney Ronald Waterstreet who summarized the case in court insisted that the charges “aren’t about a religion or the militia. It’s a group of like minded people who decided to oppose the authority of the United States by using weapons and force.” Similarly in the indictment he described the Hutaree as “an anti-government extremist organization” whose members wear a patch on their uniform that includes a cross and the initials CCR. The indictment did not explain that the name Hutaree meant “Christian warrior” and that CCR stands for “Colonial Christian Republic.”

“The Hutaree’s enemies,” the indictment continues, “include state and local law enforcement authorities deemed to be “foot soldiers” of… the new World Order.” Of course, foot soldiers for the New world Order does not help anyone understand that the Christian warriors of the Hutaree saw themselves as fighting an end times battle with the agents of the anti-Christ. For their purposes, they may not need to. But even as the feds sought to elide references to religion, they certainly opened the door to draw on the full palette of possibilities in their vision of end times religious war, since the indictment also said that the Hutaree’s enemies list includes “anyone who does not share their beliefs.”

Berlet:

The government has a legitimate law enforcement role in stopping domestic terrorism, though most dissidents on the political right and left are not breaking any laws and are protected by the First Amendment. The current and volatile right-wing populist movement spans from reform-oriented conservative black Republicans to recruiters for insurgent white supremacist groups, with the Tea Party activists and members of citizens militias falling somewhere between these ideological and methodological poles. It would be sloppy to lump all of these folks into one undifferentiated mass of potential terrorists.

The word “extremism,” which is tossed back and forth by both Republicans and Democrats, is a delegitimizing buzz word used by to demonize dissidents across the political spectrum. It was used in the 1960s, for example, to imply that the white segregationists and the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. were two sides of the same problem of “extremism.” King addressed being framed in this way in his “Letter from Birmingham Jail.” Today the government uses the tem “extremism” to suggest dissident ideas on the right or left place people on a slippery slope toward terrorism. It’s time to stop using the term altogether.

The dynamic of widespread political demonization and scapegoating is not a problem for the police to solve. Religious, political, business, and labor leaders have to find a backbone and demand an end to the demonization of political opponents as traitors out to destroy America. Republicans need to distance themselves from conspiracist demagoguery and accept some moral responsibility for the nasty polarization in our society while Democrats must stop dismissing the angry right-wing populists in the Tea Party movement as ignorant and crazy. All of us need to stand up and call for a vigorous, thoughtful, and even raucous national debate over public policy while opposing all forms of demonization and scapegoating as toxic to democracy.

Moore, the disgraced former Chief Judge of the Alabama [...]]]> To read most of the media most of the time — mainstream, alternative, or even the political blogosphere, it is hard to find much mention of Roy Moore. This is somewhat odd, since the announcement of his exploratory committee made national news.

Moore, the disgraced former Chief Judge of the Alabama Supreme Court is very publicly considering running for the GOP nomination for president. On his testing the waters tour, he has spent a lot of time in Iowa. He is now in the early primary state, South Carolina. He says his strategy is to focus on the early states. And while it is hard to know how seriously to take his campaign, I think the best approach is with a certain willing suspension of disbelief.

What news coverage Moore gets tends to be in the places he visits on his testing the waters tour. The Spartanburg Herald-Journal reports, for example:

The possible presidential contender will continue his four-day tour of the Carolinas with stops in Charleston, Cheraw, Aiken, Myrtle Beach and Lincolnton, N.C.

Moore spoke at a Greenville Tea Party rally before the country’s first 2012 presidential debate earlier this month, but did not meet eligibility criteria to participate in the debate.

Campaign spokesman Zachery Michael said Moore is focusing his attention on states with early presidential nominating contests, and has spent a significant amount of time in Iowa.

This old fashioned retail politics (his new media is pretty far behind) probably takes effective advantage of his popularity on the Tea Party circuit. And while he remains a hero to many on the Religious Right for his effort to put a monument to the Ten Commandments on permanent display in the Alabama state court house, we can’t say with any certainty that Moore will ever be much of a factor in the campaign. At the same time, we can’t rule him out either. Consider for example that unlike much of the possible GOP field so far, he has actually won statewide office. Mitt Romney, Tim Pawlenty, Sarah Palin and Rick Santorum, have, while Herman Cain, Newt Gingrich, Ron Paul and Michele Bachmann have not.

There are obviously many factors that make for a successful candidate but the evidence of history tells us that that kind of experience is no small thing. Not since Dwight Eisenhower has a nominee of either of the two major parties not previously served as Governor or U.S. Senator. The sole exception was George H.W. Bush who was the two-term incumbent vice president before running for president on his own. (But the former U.S. Representative, diplomat, and CIA Director first lost to former Governor Ronald Reagan for the GOP nomination for president in 1980 before Reagan selected Bush as his running mate.)

Again, this is not to say that Moore has any chance of getting the GOP nomination. Rather, as candidates toy with the nomination before demurring (Barbour, Huckabee, Trump, Daniels), eventually the field will become clear. And when it does, it is likely that Moore will still be in it. If so, Moore’s brand of theocratic politics will be featured on the national stage in ways that would have been unthinkable a few decades ago.

[Crossposted from Talk to Action]

Okay, that’s not precisely true. There has been a bit of comment and analysis. But so far, no controversy. No homophobic ranting, no athletes stepping up to say that Jesus doesn’t approve, [...]]]> A few days ago, Phoenix Suns president Rick Welts revealed that he is gay. And the whole sporting world exploded yawned.

Okay, that’s not precisely true. There has been a bit of comment and analysis. But so far, no controversy. No homophobic ranting, no athletes stepping up to say that Jesus doesn’t approve, none of that. This is a wonderful thing. That the public response so far has amount to a collective shoulder shrug is evidence that America is finally getting over the idea that sports just isn’t ready for gays in the locker room.

That’s what sports talker Jim Rome said back in 2007, when former NBA player John Amaechi came out, and at the time I sort of agreed with him. Subsequent dumbassery from Tim Hardaway and LeBron James lent credibility to Rome’s argument, although perhaps we were underestimating locker room culture because it is by no means clear that Hardaway and The Decision represented a majority viewpoint even at that time.

In any case, we may now be on the verge of a tipping point regarding gay athletes. As today’s Washington Post column from Mike Wise notes: “sports has undergone a very gay spring.”

First the Lakers’ Kobe Bryant was hit with a $100,000 fine for uttering a gay slur at a referee, an incident Bryant later called a “teaching moment” as he and the club partnered with a gay-rights group to educate others.

Then, there was the New York Rangers’ Sean Avery’s endorsement ad for the Human Rights Campaign’s “New Yorkers for Marriage Equality Campaign,” an instigator in the most testosterone-laden of sports, no less.

Over the weekend, Grant Hill and Jared Dudley, coincidentally two Phoenix Suns players, participated in an NBA public service announcement that denounced the use of the term “gay” as acceptable trash talk on the playground.

It was also revealed that former Villanova player Will Sheridan came out to teammates during his career with the Wildcats, with no ramifications whatsoever.

There’s more. Just announced yesterday: “The San Francisco Giants will become the first professional sports team to jump into the burgeoning anti-homophobia campaign with an upbeat ‘It Gets Better’ video designed to bring hope to gay, lesbian, bisexual and transgender young people.” And while Atlanta Braves pitching coach Roger McDowell unleashed a homophobic tirade against some Giants fans, which is bad, his actions earned him a two-week unpaid vacation to reflect on how he might be a better citizen in the future. That the institutions of the sports world are implementing zero-tolerance policies is a welcome development, to say the least.

Wise interviewed NBA Hall of Fame player and popular TNT analyst Charles Barkley for that story, and Chuck’s thoughts should go a long way toward dispelling the myth that jocks cannot and will not abide an openly gay teammate. Barkley, who just a few days ago praised Sean Avery’s support for gay marriage rights, doesn’t mince words in explaining the salient points:

• On two of the three teams he played for he had teammates he knew were gay.
• It was no big deal.
• They were professionals who contributed to the betterment of the team.
• Talent matters more than sexual orientation.

“I’d rather have a gay guy who can play than a straight guy who can’t play.”

So, how many gays are there in America’s pro locker rooms, anyway? In the 2007 post I link above, I ran some numbers.

Estimates for how many gays there are in the US vary wildly, but it looks like the most reliable number for men is in the 2.8% range. So let’s take that as our working estimate.

There are 32 NFL teams, and each carries around 60 players. So that’s 1920.

30 NBA teams, 12-man rosters: 360 players.

There are 30 Major League Baseball franchises (if you count the Colorado Rockies) and they have 25-man rosters for the bulk of the season. So that’s 750.

NHL teams dress a 20-man rosters for each game, and there are 30 teams, so that’s another 600.

Note: I’m being conservative here. If you factor in practice squads, injury lists, minor league call-ups and the like these numbers get significantly larger. But for the sake of discussion, let’s just stick with active roster numbers and see what happens.

By my math, this means we can expect the following to be about right:

• NFL: 54 gay players
• NBA: 10 gay players
• MLB: 21 gay players
• NHL: 17 gay players
• Total in “Big 4″ American sports leagues: 102 active gay players

I don’t know that Sir Charles has done the math, but he clearly understands the reality:

“Any professional athlete who gets on TV or radio and says he never played with a gay guy is a stone-freakin’ idiot,” Barkley said. “I would even say the same thing in college. Every college player, every pro player in any sport has probably played with a gay person.”

Perhaps the two most refreshing insights of the interview came when Barkley linked discrimination against gays to other forms of discrimination and then fingered those responsible.

“First of all, society discriminates against gay people,” Barkley said. “They always try to make it like jocks discriminate against gay people. I’ve been a big proponent of gay marriage for a long time, because as a black person, I can’t be in for any form of discrimination at all.”

…

“The first people who whine and complain is them Bible-thumpers, who are supposed to be non-judgmental, who rail against them. [emphasis added]

As I said back in December, it’s only a matter of time before a major star comes out of the closet. Thanks to the courage of people like John Amaeche, Dave Kopay, Roy Simmons, Esera Tuaolo, Glenn Burke, Billy Bean, Dave Pallone, Rick Welts and dozens of others, I expect the furor to last about five minutes – and that will be due to the “major star,” not the “gay.”

Meanwhile, thank the gods for smart, no-BS media personalities like Charles Barkley, huh? I don’t know that he ever set out to establish himself as a progressive cultural icon, but he always does his best to tell the truth. And, as they say, the truth shall set you free.

_____

Also, if you have a minute, read Frank DeFord’s comments today on gay athletes coming out at NPR.

Two items in the news underscore the situation. A special issue of Conscience  magazine questions whether the Obama administration’s [...]]]> One of the consequences of the creeping Religious Rightism in the Democratic Party has been the steady erosion of reproductive rights and access to reproductive health care for women, especially abortion care.  

Two items in the news underscore the situation. A special issue of Conscience  magazine questions whether the Obama administration’s policies can be considered prochoice.  And an article in the Los Angeles Times, outlining the current “torrent” of draconian antiabortion legislation being proposed, and sometimes enacted in the states.  The latter is, of course, but an indicator of the still-cresting wave of state level anti-abortion public policy work in the generation since the Casey decision of the Supreme Court, which allowed considerable, medically unnecessary, state regulation of access to abortion care.

Journalist Jodie Jacobson, writing in Conscience, reviews the highlights of Obama’s prochoice 2008 campaign stances and his record so far as president and concludes,

“The president has presided over the greatest erosion to women’s reproductive health and rights in the past 30 years, and a continuing degradation of our rights at the state level.”

None of this will surprise those who have been following Democratic Party’s dubious “faith outreach” schemes — which have sought to attract antiabortion Catholics and evangelicals,  while mostly ignoring, and marginalizing the prochoice religious community. In terms of policy, this has also led to what could be generously described as inattention to the steady decline in access to abortion services in most of the country.

Towards this end, we have seen a down playing of the so-called “culture wars” to the point of claiming, despite all evidence to the contrary, that the Religious Right is dead or dying, and that the culture wars themselves are over or just about.  This has been accompanied by calls by political consultants for eliding the phrase separation of church and state from the vocabulary of Democratic candidates for federal office because it is not in the Constitution; and even unsupported claims by some faith leaders and even candidate Obama that “secularists” are driving religious people from public life.  

All this is part of the context of the way the antiabortion term and elements of the agenda of “abortion reduction” have emerged in the Democratic Party.  In 2006, for example, a Party faith outreach consultant Eric Sapp, declared at an event sponsored by the Pew Forum on Religion and Public Life:  

On abortion you are seeing a shift within the Democratic Party in the way they’re talking about the issue. Talking about abortion reduction is a very effective political step, but it also moves the discussion forward; it wasn’t just talk. In the House two different legislative packages were proposed that would have truly targeted many of the core causes of abortion. It would not completely end abortion, but it would do a whole lot better than we’re doing right now.

More recently, a staffer at the liberal Washington, DC think tank Faith in Public Life claimed that the Democratic Party platform and candidate Barack Obama in his 2008 Party convention speech specifically supported “abortion reduction,” when in fact, neither was the case. The candidate and the Party promised something much different.  

Nevertheless, it has come to pass that the ostensibly prochoice Democratic Party and its prochoice Democratic president has failed to lead on abortion, while seeking to find common ground with a movement that was not interested. This should surprise no one, since the very public, public policy agenda of the antiabortion movement has been to erode access to the procedure under the rubric of abortion reduction primarily via state laws and regulations, but obviously in tandem with aggressive street level protests; harassment of patients and staff; and all in the context of violence and threats of violence.

Melanie Zurek, executive director of the Abortion Access Project told me in 2009, that while there were many proposals in play at the time regarding federal health care reform, none of them included expanding access to abortion services, which are actually unavailable in most counties in the U.S.  I wrote that the common ground agenda being promoted by elements of the Democratic Party at the time

“… required turning a blind eye to the reality that access to abortion care in the U.S. is receding, and that their approach mainstreams a fundamental concept of anti-abortion strategy and related terminology. They did this by recasting contraception and sex education as if their primary purpose was to achieve the goal of reducing the number of abortions.”

Little has changed since then, except that it is now crystal clear that the antiabortion forces, (with a very few exceptions), never bought the idea that sexuality education and contraception were legitimate ways to reduce the need for abortion.  And that is one of the core problems with the common ground initiative.  There was little common ground to actually be found, as a quarter century of previous common ground discussions had shown.

Rev. Debra Haffner of the Religious Institute wrote at the Huffington Post in 2009,  

“Abortion reduction” is promoted by those who support restricting abortion access, through such measures as parental notification, waiting periods and mandatory sonogram laws, or by making it illegal outright. No true progressive would advocate any strategy to make abortion services more difficult to obtain. For progressives, reducing the need for abortion means comprehensive sexuality education, family planning and contraceptive services to reduce the rate of unintended pregnancy. Yet conservatives insist on abstinence-only-until-marriage programs and argue that many common means of contraception are abortifacients.

… I have fought for sexual justice my entire life. It is a progressive value I hold dear. So I say to my colleagues across the religious spectrum: Join me in supporting sexual justice, or stop calling yourself progressive.

Since then, the erosion of access has continued and the abortion reduction advocates have continued to call themselves progressive.

This week, The Los Angeles Times, reported on state level antiabortion legislation:

Few initiatives are aimed at expanding access to reproductive health services, the institute said.) Fifteen of the bills introduced this year have been enacted into law, and more than 120 others have been approved by at least one legislative chamber.

We are always monitoring a huge number of anti-choice laws,” said Nancy Northup, president of the Center for Reproductive Rights, which challenges antiabortion laws. “But what we are seeing this year is some of the most extreme restrictions, and they are passing at a rather sharp clip.”

That is probably because of several factors, including the prominence of the abortion issue in last year’s health care debate, as well as gains by Republicans, both at the state and national level, in November’s election, advocates on both sides say.

For her part, Jodi Jacobson highlights Obama’s failure as president to lead on reproductive rights and details for example, how candidate Obama was against the Hyde Amendment before he embraced it as president — and even signed an executive order to underscore the banning of all federal funds from providing abortion care, as part of the deal to get his health care bill passed.  If this were not enough, Jacobson adds:  

“… his administration then went a step further.  In May of last year, abortion restrictions were applied to high risk insurance pools, the very sources of health insurance for women most likely to need coverage for abortion care due to chronic or terminal illness.

Rather than including contraception as part of the original package of preventive care required to be covered under health reform, the administration punted leaving this issue a panel that won’t deliver its decision until August.  This action effectively raises questions about whether or not contraception is preventive care, gives time to the U.S. Catholic Conference of Bishops to frame the debate in misleading terms and, finally, leaves the issue to be decided during the heat of the 2012 election campaign.”

Indeed, in recent months we have seen an escalating effort to prevent family planning grants and contracts at all levels of government from going to Planned Parenthood; even though  Planned Parenthood affiliates all are already barred from spending federal funds on abortion, and many affiliates do not even provide abortions.

This underscores something that often gets lost in the back and forth about politics and policy: This is not now, nor has it ever been only about abortion and contraception. The Religious Right is determined to degrade Planned Parenthood’s institutional capacity and abuse its excellent public image because it is the institutional symbol of women’s reproductive freedom.  The prevailing reduction narrative about abortion policy tends to obscure this while nothing at all is said, let alone done, about access.

Last year, Chip Berlet published an excellent essay on the state of the political realignment in the Party that has led to this situation. But let’s make no mistake, the adoption of elements of Religious Right thought in the Democratic Party is leading to elements of Religious Right outcomes.

[Crossposted from Talk to Action]