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White Christians now a minority in these 19 states


A group of young women bow their heads and pray with bibles.
Justin Skinner via Getty Images
[ http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2015/03/05/white-christians-minority-america_n_6811484.html ]


(Image courtesy of Fady Habib – https://www.flickr.com/photos/untitlism/22800371 )

Jonathan Merritt
Mar 3, 2015

The notion of America as a mostly white, mostly Christian country is rapidly becoming a fact for the history books.

“The U.S. religious landscape is undergoing a dramatic transformation that is fundamentally reshaping American politics and culture,” says Dan Cox, research director for Public Religion Research Institute (PRRI) [ http://publicreligion.org/ ].

Last week, PRRI released the American Values Atlas (AVA) [ http://ava.publicreligion.org/ ], an interactive online tool that compiles data about Americans’ opinions, identities, and values. One of the biggest takeaways of this years’ study was that, for the first time ever, America is not a majority Protestant nation. Part of this shift is due to the growing number of religiously unaffiliated Americans, now at 22 percent nationally and 34 percent of young people.

The study also revealed that in 19 states, “white Christians” are now a minority group. The list of states where this is the case includes a few surprises. Several Southern and “Bible belt” states such as Georgia (#16) made the list, and Texas (#7) had the same population of white Christians as New York (#5). While one might want to blame these shifts on “secularism,” one force at work seems to be America’s increasing ethnic diversity. According to PRRI [ http://publicreligion.org/2015/02/10-things-the-american-values-atlas-teaches-us-about-religion/ ], Hispanic Catholics are a growing proportion of Catholics and evangelical Protestants are becoming less white.

Here is the full ranking of the 19 states with their corresponding percentages of white Christians:

1. Hawaii – 20 percent
2. California – 25 percent
3. New Mexico – 33 percent
4. Nevada – 36 percent
5. New York – 37 percent
6. Alaska – 37 percent
7. Texas – 37 percent
8. Maryland – 38 percent
9. Arizona – 38 percent
10. Washington – 42 percent
11. Florida – 42 percent
12. Oregon – 43 percent
13. New Jersey – 43 percent
14. Colorado – 44 percent
15. Illinois – 46 percent
16. Georgia – 46 percent
17. Vermont – 47 percent
18. Delaware – 48 percent
19. Louisiana – 49 percent

Explore the full American Values Atlas

here [ http://ava.publicreligion.org/ ].

NOTES: PRRI’s definition of “white Christian” includes those evangelical Protestants, mainline Protestants, Catholics, Orthodox Christians, and Mormons who identify as “white, non-Hispanic.” According to PRRI, “The American Values Atlas draws upon 50,000 annual telephone interviews among a random sample of Americans to deliver an unprecedented level of detail about the United States’ cultural and religious landscape.”

© 2015 Religion News LLC

http://jonathanmerritt.religionnews.com/2015/03/03/white-christians-now-minority-19-states/ [with comments] [also at http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2015/03/05/white-christians-minority-america_n_6811484.html (with comments)]


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Minority White Christians’ Religious War On the Constitution



By: Rmuse
Saturday, March, 7th, 2015, 5:32 pm

There is a gross misconception among incredibly ignorant Americans that this nation was founded on the tenets of the Christian bible and is therefore a Christian nation. It is this willful lack of information about the nation’s founding that, in large part, is why Americans are not the smartest people on the planet. Maybe they believe that because white Christians make up the majority of the population, the Founding Fathers were wrong in creating America as a secular nation. However, according to a new study, white Christians who believe they own the right to control politics and culture in America are “losing their majority status” across the country and not just in left-leaning states.

According to data [ http://publicreligion.org/2015/02/10-things-the-american-values-atlas-teaches-us-about-religion/ ] from the American Values Atlas and the Public Religion Research Institute that gathers information on political opinions, values, and religion; white Christians are now a minority in 19 states. Stunningly including “traditionally conservative states.” Still, that has not stopped an avalanche of religious right fanatics serving in legislatures and state courts from pushing theocratic edicts on the people and rejecting the U.S. Constitution as the law of the land and it is getting worse.

The Alabama Supreme Court finally revealed this week what it regards as the supreme law of the land when it put an end to same-sex marriages (again [ http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2015/03/03/alabama-same-sex-marriage_n_6796380.html ]) despite a federal court ruling that the state’s ban was patently unconstitutional. When the Alabama Baptist Citizens Action Program demanded that the Alabama Supreme Court put a halt to same-sex unions in the state, despite a federal court order, the Court duly obeyed. Obviously, the Constitution’s 14th Amendment does not apply in Alabama; especially if it conflicts with a verse in the Old Testament where god says he thinks gays are an abomination; not that they cannot marry, just that they are an abomination.

Like every other religious right fanatic ignorant that the Constitution is the law of the land, Chief Justice Roy Moore said, “I can’t explain why more than 20 other states have bowed down to unlawful federal authority; but Alabama is not one of them. A federal judge has no authority in the face of a state court’s opinion on the same matter.” It was an interesting use of the religious term “bow down,” but put more aptly, 20 other states understand and adhere to the Constitution’s Supremacy Clause as law of the land; not the bible.

In West Virginia this week, religious fanatics voted to override Governor Earl Ray Tomblin’s veto of yet another unconstitutional 20-week abortion ban because something about bible and fetal pain. Fetal pain at 20 weeks is an impossibility according to all known medical and biological science [ http://thinkprogress.org/health/2013/09/17/2633271/scientists-fetal-pain/ ] simply because the nervous system is not present or developed. However, in the religious fanatics’ bible v. science war, the bible prevails. However, in the Christian bible that fundamentalists claim is the supreme law of the land, the immutable word of god [ https://www.biblegateway.com/passage/?search=Genesis+2%3A7&version=NIV ] says there is no living being, or a person, until a fetus breathes air. Both times Governor Tomblin vetoed the legislation, he rightly cited that the legislation “unconstitutionally restrict access to abortion and will not survive a court challenge.” However, like Alabama, West Virginia’s Christian legislature rejects the Constitution and clings to Catholic Humanae Vitae ideology; something that is not in their precious Christian bible.

What is even more telling about the ideological fanaticism of the evangelical legislature’s actions, is that abortion clinics in West Virginia already do not perform [ http://thinkprogress.org/health/2015/02/19/3624248/abortion-procedures-dont-exist/ ] procedures past 20 weeks of pregnancy; the very small number of women who have had to have [ https://secure.ppaction.org/site/Advocacy?cmd=display&page=UserAction&id=18673&s_subsrc=3NALz1507W1N1V&s_src=6Truths_0115_c3_ad_aff_ppwv&WV=true , https://secure.ppaction.org/site/Advocacy?cmd=display&page=UserAction&id=18673 ] abortions after 20 weeks were typically facing emergency life-threatening pregnancy situations in hospitals; not abortion clinics or women’s family planning facilities. The president of the Center for Reproductive Rights, Nancy Northup, said [ http://www.reproductiverights.org/press-room/west-virginia-legislature-casts-aside-womens-health-and-rights-overrides-governor-veto ], “With this action today, the politicians behind this law have revealed how far they are willing to go to advance their ideological agenda at the expense of women’s rights, lives, and safety. They should be ashamed.” They are theocrats and being so means they feel no shame.

Likely, West Virginia residents are ashamed of the theocratic legislature as well. According to polling conducted last year the theocratic legislation was quite unpopular [ http://thinkprogress.org/health/2014/03/03/3355601/west-virginia-voters-abortion-ban/ ] with voters who did not want the evangelical fanatics posing as lawmakers to spend more time focusing on passing more religious abortion restrictions. However, that is the problem with religious fanatics serving as lawmakers; they could not care less what voters want any more than they care about the Constitution as the law of the land; they are soldiers in the war on religion.

In Florida this week, a religious fanatic was apoplectic over a city ordinance requiring his church to adhere to normal safety ordinances protecting church-goers and compared it to the KGB [ http://www.christianexaminer.com/article/florida.city.charged.with.kgb.tactics.for.requiring.business.licenses.for.churches/48465.htm ] waging a war on religion [ http://www.cbs12.com/news/top-stories/stories/vid_23794.shtml ] in the city’s behalf. A code officer found the church and coffee bar lacked a sufficient emergency exit and failed to comply with the federal Americans With Disability Act. The officer said that the church and coffee bar’s landlord, Mission Education International, did have a valid business license for the coffee shop with a tax-exemption as a charitable organization, but the church did not have a freely available use and occupancy certificate.

The preacher took umbrage at the city and promptly cried there was a war on religion saying, “I think it’s very important that people are not afraid to practice their faith.” Naturally, the ‘onward Christian soldiers‘ at the evangelical Liberty Counsel joined the religious war and sent a letter to the city demanding that it immediately stop requiring churches to pay for business licenses because they are doing god’s work and in America they get a free ride. However, according to the city manager, Mike Bornstein, the war must obviously be based on some horrible religious misunderstanding because churches are not ever obligated to pay those fees.

Liberty Counsel naturally went on the offensive and claimed [ http://www.lc.org/index.cfm?PID=14100&PRID=1526 ] the city threatened the landlord with foreclosure and daily $500 fines, but the city’s letter had no mention of those penalties. What the city’s letter did mention was that it was offering any assistance necessary to make sure the certificate would be issued quickly. The letter said [ http://rawstory.com/rs/wp-content/uploads/files/Ltr.CommonGroundCoffeeBar.Accessory%20Use.03.02.2015.pdf ], “The application form is simple to complete as your organization has completed one prior for the coffee bar. We also can schedule an inspection at your earliest convenience and apprise you of any improvements that may be required of the space or limitation on the number of occupants allowed.” All of the assistance is naturally free because it is a church and unlike other businesses does not have to pay a fee for anything.

The Florida city, like all of American cities, states, and federal government, does not require churches to pay a business license tax, property tax, income tax, or sales tax because this is America and religion gets free welfare. They are, however, required to obtain a use and occupancy certificate which officials use to ensure they do not pose public safety hazards or break any local, state, or federal laws. But this is 21st Century America and religious organizations, churches, state supreme courts, and theocratic state legislatures are immune from adhering to any local, state, federal, or constitutional laws and they damn sure have a holy book to prove it.

One might think that with a secular Constitution with no mention of Christianity, Jesus Christ, or bible, religious right extremists in the Republican movement would stop pushing theocracy on the people by government fiat; particularly because they are becoming a minority demographic. However, that may be why they are suddenly on a tear to impose their bastardized form of Christianity on the entire nation as well as why they are becoming a minority. Whether it is because they are ignorant of the Constitution as the law of the land, or intent on emulating the Taliban or ISIS is unimportant. They are engaged in a war on the Constitution, democracy, and freedom from religious tyranny and they are not going away.

© PoliticusUSA 2015 (emphasis in original)

http://www.politicususa.com/2015/03/07/minority-white-christians-religious-war-constitution.html [with comments] [thx arizona1 -- felt it worth including in full in this reply]


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Why People "Fly from Facts"


The truth can be uncomfortable
Credit: Jo Naylor via flickr [ https://www.flickr.com/photos/pandora_6666/4927243431 ]

Research shows the appeal of untestable beliefs, and how it leads to a polarized society

By Troy Campbell and Justin Friesen
March 3, 2015

“There was a scientific study that showed vaccines cause autism.”

“Actually, the researcher in that study lost his medical license, and overwhelming research since then has shown no link [ http://www.cdc.gov/vaccinesafety/concerns/autism/ ] between vaccines and autism.”

“Well, regardless, it’s still my personal right as a parent to make decisions for my child.”

Does that exchange sound familiar: a debate that starts with testable factual statements, but then, when the truth becomes inconvenient, the person takes a flight from facts.

As public debate rages about issues like immunization, Obamacare, and same-sex marriage, many people try to use science to bolster their arguments. And since it’s becoming easier to test and establish facts—whether in physics, psychology, or policy—many have wondered why bias and polarization have not been defeated. When people are confronted with facts, such as the well-established safety of immunization, why do these facts seem to have so little effect?

Our new research ["The Psychological Advantage of Unfalsifiability: The Appeal of Untestable Religious and Political Ideologies", http://psycnet.apa.org/psycinfo/2014-48913-001/ ], recently published in the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, examined a slippery way by which people get away from facts that contradict their beliefs. Of course, sometimes people just dispute the validity of specific facts. But we find that people sometimes go one step further and, as in the opening example, they reframe an issue in untestable ways. This makes potential important facts and science ultimately irrelevant to the issue.

Let’s consider the issue of same-sex marriage. Facts could be relevant to whether it should be legal—for example, if data showed that children raised by same-sex parents are worse off—or just as well-off—as children raised by opposite-sex parents. But what if those facts contradict one’s views?

We presented 174 American participants who supported or opposed same-sex marriage with (supposed) scientific facts that supported or disputed their position. When the facts opposed their views, our participants—on both sides of the issue—were more likely to state that same-sex marriage isn’t actually about facts, it’s more a question of moral opinion. But, when the facts were on their side, they more often stated that their opinions were fact-based and much less about morals. In other words, we observed something beyond the denial of particular facts: We observed a denial of the relevance of facts.

In a similar study using 117 religious participants, we had some read an article critical of religion. Believers who were especially high (but not low) in religiosity were more likely to turn to more untestable “blind faith” arguments as reasons for their beliefs, than arguments based in factual evidence, compared to those who read a neutral article.

These experiments show that when people’s beliefs are threatened, they often take flight to a land where facts do not matter. In scientific terms, their beliefs become less “falsifiable” because they can no longer be tested scientifically for verification or refutation.

For instance, sometimes people dispute government policies based on the argument that they don’t work. Yet, if facts suggest that the policies do work, the same person might stay resolvedly against the argument based on principle. We can see this on both sides of the political spectrum, whether it’s conservatives and Obamacare or liberals and the Iraqi surge of 2007.

One would hope that objective facts could allow people to reach consensus more easily, but American politics are more polarized than ever. Could this polarization [ http://www.pewresearch.org/fact-tank/2014/06/12/7-things-to-know-about-polarization-in-america/ ] be a consequence of feeling free of facts?

While it is difficult to objectively test that idea, we can experimentally assess a fundamental question: When people are made to see their important beliefs as relatively less rather than more testable, does it increase polarization and commitment to desired beliefs? Two experiments we conducted suggest so.

In an experiment with 179 Americans, we reminded roughly half of participants that much of President Obama’s policy performance was empirically testable and did not remind the other half. Then participants rated President Obama’s performance on five domains (e.g., job creation). Comparing opponents and supports of Obama, we found that the reminder of testability reduced the average polarized assessments of President Obama’s performance by about 40%.

To test this further test the hypothesis that people strengthen their desired beliefs, when the beliefs are free of facts, we looked at sample 103 participants that varied from highly to moderate religious. We found that when highly (but not more moderately) religious participants were told that God’s existence will always be untestable, they reported stronger desirable religious beliefs afterwards (e.g. the belief God was looking out for them), relative to when they were told that one day science might be able to investigate God’s existence.

Together these findings show, at least in some cases, when testable facts are less a part of the discussion, people dig deeper into the beliefs they wish to have— such as viewing a politician in a certain way or believing God is constantly there to provide support. These results bear similarities to the many studies [ http://www.wired.com/2009/02/ted-1/ ] that find when facts are fuzzier [ http://www.econ.brown.edu/econ/events/SelfDeception2010.pdf ] people tend to exaggerate desired beliefs.

So after examining the power of untestable beliefs, what have we learned about dealing with human psychology? We’ve learned that bias is a disease and to fight it we need a healthy treatment of facts and education. We find that when facts are injected into the conversation, the symptoms of bias become less severe. But, unfortunately, we’ve also learned that facts can only do so much. To avoid coming to undesirable conclusions, people can fly from the facts and use other tools in their deep belief protecting toolbox [ http://www.newyorker.com/science/maria-konnikova/i-dont-want-to-be-right ].

With the disease of bias, then, societal immunity is better achieved when we encourage people to accept ambiguity, engage in critical thinking, and reject strict ideology. This society is something the new common core education system and at times The Daily Show are at least in theory attempting to help create. We will never eradicate bias—not from others, not from ourselves, and not from society. But we can become a people more free of ideology and less free of facts.

ABOUT THE AUTHORS
Troy Campbell [ http://www.troy-campbell.com/ ] is a Ph.D candidate in the Fuqua School of Business and Center for Advanced Hindsight at Duke University, Durham, NC. He studies how our beliefs and identities centrally affect everyday experiences and thought. Justin Friesen [ http://justinfriesen.ca/ ] is a postdoctoral researcher in the department of psychology at York University, Toronto, Canada. He studies the psychological and motivational factors that perpetuate social and economic inequality.

© 2015 Scientific American, a Division of Nature America, Inc. (emphasis in original)

http://www.scientificamerican.com/article/why-people-fly-from-facts/ [with comments]


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The ‘Shame’ of Conservative Intellectuals



A new book from conservative intellectual Shelby Steele claims to offer new answers to the old problems of polarization, but offers the same critique—blame liberals.

Harvey J. Kaye
03.02.15

Shelby Steele calls his new book Shame [ http://www.amazon.com/Shame-America%C2%92s-Past-Polarized-Country/dp/0465066976 ]. You bet it’s a shame. It’s a shame that as often as conservatives pose valuable questions about America’s past, the state of the nation, and, yes, what makes America exceptional, they continually afford us valueless, if not insidious, answers—answers that suppress the story of the making of American democracy, ignore the accelerating concentration of power and wealth, and deny America’s historic purpose and promise. And sadly, in his new book, the renowned black conservative intellectual Shelby Steele does just that.

A Senior Fellow at the Hoover Institution, a recipient of the National Humanities Medal, and the author of several books, including the award-winning 1990 title, The Content of Our Character: A New Vision of Race in America [ http://www.amazon.com/Content-Our-Character-Vision-America/dp/006097415X ], in which Steele rightly asked, What happened to the promise of the 1960s— the promise of the civil rights movement, the victories for freedom, equality, and democracy registered in the 1964 Civil Rights and 1965 Voting Rights acts, and the initiatives of the Great Society and War on Poverty? He even led me to believe that he had critical and compelling things to say—things that might help us talk together about the pressing crises of the day from Ferguson to New York and D.C.

In the very first chapter of Shame, Steele offers a seemingly heartfelt lament that American public life since the ’60s has turned into a politics of tribalism in which left and right have their own cultural bases, communications media, and award systems, in which liberals have the universities, NPR, The New York Times, and MacArthur grants, and conservatives have think thanks, talk radio, The Wall Street Journal, and the Bradley Prizes (and he might well have added that liberals have the presidency and conservatives, the Congress). As he writes: “since the 1960s, ‘liberal’ and ‘conservative’ have come to function almost like national identities in their own right. To be one or the other is not merely to lean left or right—toward ‘labor’ or ‘business’—within a common national identity; it is to belong to a different vision of America altogether, a vision that seeks to supersede the opposing vision and to establish itself as the nation’s common identity.”

Indeed, I began to imagine that Steele was going to offer a serious historical argument about how we got here, how we might start to transcend what he himself calls “The Great Divide,” and how we might act to renew America’s promise. At the least, I expected he would attend honestly and critically to the developments of the past 50 years—a half-century in which, following world-historic democratic advances at home and abroad, we Americans have suffered not just the return of gross “Gilded Age” class inequalities and racially-based urban riots, but also concerted efforts to constrain workers from organizing, low-income minority citizens from exercising their voting rights, and women from controlling their own bodies. But I was wrong.

Steele is an undeniably good writer. His earlier works, whatever we might think of his intellectual politics, provocatively challenged the prevailing political correctness and sharpened the thinking of all of us. And at places in this new book he does not fail to say interesting, at times moving, and even, at other times, entertaining things. I particularly “enjoyed” the story he uses to open the book—the story of his participation in a weeklong conference on race and politics at the Aspen Institute, the liberal elite’s intellectual playground in Colorado.

Asked, along with his fellow panelists, to prepare a response to the question “What do you want most for America,” Steele apparently upset the assembled folk by saying that he wanted “an end to white guilt.” It’s not that he was absolving present-day whites of racism. Rather, as he goes on to relate, “I then used my allotted few minutes to define white guilt as the terror of being seen as racist—a terror that has caused whites to act guiltily toward minorities even when they feel no actual guilt. My point was that this terror… has spawned a new white paternalism toward minorities since the 1960s that, among other things, has damaged the black family more profoundly than segregation ever did.” In fact, he insisted, this “benevolent paternalism of white guilt had injured the self-esteem, if not the souls, of minorities in ways that the malevolent paternalism of white racism never had.” Finally, he relates how his words incited a young white man to stand forth and implore everyone not to believe what they had just heard: “He wanted to reassure them that blacks were still suffering … that racism, discrimination, and inequality were still alive—still great barriers to black advancement.” As Steele remembers it, his own remarks had “threatened [the Aspen crowd] with a kind of moral disgrace.”

As much as Steele’s provocation of the rich tickled me—though I think they were probably looking to be provoked, for why else would they have invited him, a famous black conservative, to their retreat?—he would soon disappoint me. Instead of trying to break new ground as some conservative intellectuals [ http://ygnetwork.org/roomtogrow/ ] have recently sought, or at least purported, to do, Steele ends up offering a new, no less nasty, rendition of a story we have heard incessantly for more than 50 years from right-wing figures ranging from Ronald Reagan to Rush Limbaugh: that liberalism is responsible for nearly everything that has gone wrong in America since the ’60s. Note that I say “liberalism” and not “liberals,” because Steele himself essentially reifies the politics and ideas of liberalism into a faceless god-like force. Rarely does he cite any politicians or writers or their words. And when he does refer to a liberal or progressive figure, he misrepresents them—as he does with the ideas and labors of Martin Luther King Jr.

Making nothing of 200 years of democratic struggles from the bottom up, Steele reduces the goals of the “civil rights movement of the 1950s and 1960s” to “classical Jeffersonian liberalism—that liberalism which sought freedom for the individual above all else.” Without question that great and forceful founding ideal was fundamental to the cause. But the postwar movement and campaigns for racial justice entailed more than the pursuit of 18th-century liberalism. Steele not only makes no mention of the struggles, advances, and legacies of the New Deal ’30s and World War II fight for the Four Freedoms [ http://www.amazon.com/Fight-Four-Freedoms-Greatest-Generation/dp/1451691432 ] pursued by Americans in all their diversity. Even worse, he utterly ignores the fact that King [ http://www.amazon.com/Civil-Rights-Human-Struggle-Economic/dp/0812220897 ] was a democratic socialist who campaigned both for black and minority civil and political rights, and for economic justice and the rights of working people and the poor of every color. Never forget that the 1963 March on Washington [ http://www.amazon.com/March-Washington-Freedom-Forgotten-History/dp/0393082857 ] organized by socialist black labor leader A. Phillip Randolph, with the active support of UAW leader Walter Reuther, at which King delivered his famous “I Have a Dream” speech, was a “March for Jobs and Freedom.”

Of course, I should have seen it coming. But I had hoped, rather naively, that Steele intended his Aspen Institute tale to introduce something other than one more over-the-top assault on liberalism. After all, he proceeds directly from that story to his lamentation over America’s prevailing political tribalism—a lamentation that seemed to position him to chastise left and right alike: “When we let nationalism shape the form of our liberal or conservative identities—when we practice our ideological leaning as if it were a divine right, an atavism to be defended at all cost—then we put ourselves on a warlike footing.” Reading that allowed me to hope that he was going to treat how the powers that be, both liberal and conservative, were culpable for jeopardizing America’s historic purpose and promise.

But forget it … Taking to the very warpath he seemed to want us to avoid, Steele accuses “liberalism” of creating a political and economic order that not only has failed to fulfill the promise of the ’60s, but, even worse, has subjected minorities to a new, apparently-benevolent but fundamentally evil “white paternalism.” Determined to sustain its political and cultural hold on America, liberalism, he charges—without presenting us with any solid historical evidence—has fostered, in the wake of the transformative ’60s and the shattering of America’s traditional narrative, an ideology of anti-Americanism that portrays the United States as “characterologically evil” (racist, sexist, imperialist), denies American greatness, goodness, and exceptionalism, and inculcates in minority Americans a world view that obscures the changes and opportunities afforded by the victories of the ’60s and burdens and disempowers them by imbuing them with grievances instead of challenges. That damn liberalism: “Superficially it is very ‘caring’ towards blacks, minorities, and the poor,” he writes. “It befriends them, promises them all manner of programs and policies. It makes a show of being deferential toward their woundedness, of bowing before their past victimization as before an irrefutable moral authority. But, of course, all this deference is seduction. The new liberalism does not pursue the actual uplift of minorities and the poor. It pursues dispensation from America’s past sins for whites—the imprimatur of innocence.”

And guess what? Having indicted liberalism for waging a “culture war” that has not only served to divide Americans into political tribes, but also to wed “the formerly oppressed” to a sense of themselves as still very much oppressed, Steele directs our attention to a new “politics of idealism,” “the new counterculture,” which, you got it, is contemporary conservatism: “a faith in free market capitalism, smaller government, higher educational standards, the reinforcement of family.”

Come on: Free market capitalism? Assuming there is such a thing as a free market, haven’t we suffered enough of it these past several years? Smaller government? Who among us wants to give up the hard-won democratic programs of Social Security, Medicare, Medicaid, Obamacare, Environmental Protection, Workplace Safety, Consumer Protection, etc., etc., etc. … And in the face of overwhelming and engrossing corporate power, who really wants to reduce the countervailing power of democratic government?

Enough with the political questions. Let’s consider the history that Steele ignores. For a start, he ignores the fact that American greatness depended not simply on a commitment to Jeffersonian liberalism but also on public action and largesse from the days of the 19th-century Homestead Act to those of the New Deal, with its the CCC, WPA, PWA, REA, and NYA, to the Second World War GI Bill, all of which not only built or rebuilt the nation, but also built or rebuilt generations of working Americans. Hell, the real tragedy of liberalism’s War on Poverty was that it wasn’t big enough and did not do enough. Just think of how successful LBJ’s initiatives might have been had they included a serious effort to create public works and employment for black young people—not to mention, if he had refused to pursue the war in Vietnam, which drained resources from the War on Poverty.

Furthermore, while Steele insists that liberalism has won the culture war and that we are all the worse for it, our minority fellow citizens especially, he makes absolutely no mention of the right and corporate rich’s continuing 40-year-long top-down war on popular democracy—a class war from above that has succeeded in destroying American industries, undermining the nation’s infrastructure, devastating middle-class communities and widening class inequality, and sending millions of Americans into the ranks of the working poor.

But let’s not leave it at that, for while Steele does not do what I hoped he would, he has essentially challenged liberals and leftists to think anew about American exceptionalism. And whether or not we have all denied, disdained, or disparaged the idea as Steele claims, we have clearly allowed conservatives to lay hold of it, tell a story about it, and dictate its meaning. And doing so, they have used it not only to lambaste the left, but also limit American memory and imagination. In short, those of us who want to create a more democratic America must recover and reassert the original radical, indeed revolutionary, meaning of American exceptionalism [ http://billmoyers.com/2014/07/29/a-dangerous-idea-the-progressive-vision-of-american-exceptionalism/ ].

The Founders—not just the likes of Washington, Franklin, Jefferson, Adams, and Hamilton, but all the more Thomas Paine’s people [ http://www.amazon.com/Thomas-Paine-Promise-America-Harvey/dp/0809093448 ], American artisans, farmers, and laborers—projected the United States as a grand experiment in democracy. By their words and actions, they articulated America’s historic purpose and promise. For all of their terrible faults and failings, they envisioned, demanded, and made real the ideals of freedom, equality, and democracy. And when ensuing generations of Americans confronted crises that placed the nation and its historic purpose and promise in jeopardy, they felt that democratic imperative and impulse and found it in themselves—led by Lincoln and FDR [ http://www.huffingtonpost.com/harvey-j-kaye/washington-lincoln-and-fd_b_929461.html ], respectively—to confront and prevail over their enemies not by suspending or abandoning the nation’s finest ideals, but by advancing them.

Steele and his fellow conservatives do not want us to remember that history, that purpose and promise, that exceptionalism. And so far, contrary to Steele’s contentions, they—with the deference, if not collusion, of all too many moderates and liberals—are actually winning not just the class war, but also, in a most critical way, the culture war, as well.

Steele had an opportunity to make a critical difference. But if he truly wants to do that he needs to rethink American history as much as do many of my fellow leftists.

Harvey J. Kaye is Professor of Democracy and Justice Studies at the University of Wisconsin-Green Bay. He is the author of Thomas Paine and the Promise of America [ http://www.amazon.com/Thomas-Paine-Promise-America-Harvey/dp/0809093448 ] (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2005) and The Fight for the Four Freedoms: What Made FDR and the Greatest Generation Truly Great [ http://www.amazon.com/Fight-Four-Freedoms-Greatest-Generation/dp/1451691432 ] (Simon & Schuster, 2014).

© 2015 The Daily Beast Company LLC (emphasis in original)

http://www.thedailybeast.com/articles/2015/03/02/the-shame-of-conservative-intellectuals.html [with comments]


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A Deadly Assault on Academic Freedom

By Geoffrey R. Stone [ http://www.huffingtonpost.com/geoffrey-r-stone/ ]
Edward H. Levi Distinguished Service Professor of Law, University of Chicago
Posted: 02/28/2015 5:17 pm EST Updated: 02/28/2015 5:59 pm EST

Recent events in the state of North Carolina pose a serious threat to academic freedom in our nation. America's universities are, by any measure, the best in the world. What has made that possible is our deep commitment to academic freedom. The recent decision [ http://www.nytimes.com/2015/02/28/us/university-of-north-carolina-board-closes-3-academic-centers.html ] of the Board of Governors of the University of North Carolina to close the University of North Carolina Law School's Center on Poverty, Work and Opportunity [ http://www.law.unc.edu/centers/poverty/ ] is a blatant and dangerous instance of political interference with academic freedom.

Although the Center on Poverty, Work and Opportunity has accomplished a great deal in recent years, its mission and its director, Gene Nichol, a distinguished scholar and academic administrator who has served as dean of the University of Colorado Law School and as president of College of William and Mary, have clearly alienated the Koch brother-backed legislators who now control both the state legislature and the University's Board of Governors.

In the guise of trimming the university's budget, the Board has decided to shutter three of the 240 boards, centers, and institutes that operate within the state university system. By coincidence, they decided to close the Center on Poverty, Work and Opportunity with the patently false explanation that the Center was unproductive. Anyone who has examined the work of the Center knows that this claim is bogus. The plain and simple fact is that both the Center and its director advocate positions that the Tea Party powers-that-be in North Carolina do not like.

This blatant intrusion of politics and political ideology into the operations of a university is hardly unprecedented in American history, but it is an evil that we as a nation have fought tirelessly to extinguish. It is a travesty to see it reemerge again today.

Although the struggle for academic freedom can be traced at least as far back as Socrates' eloquent defense of himself against the charge that he corrupted the youth of Athens, the modern history of this struggle, as it has played out in the university context, begins in the nineteenth century.

The most important moral problem in America in the first half of the 19th century was, of course, slavery. By the 1830s, the mind of the South had closed on this issue. When it became known, for example, that a professor at the University of North Carolina was sympathetic to the 1856 Republican presidential candidate, he was discharged by the board of trustees.

The situation in the North was not much better. The president of Franklin College was dismissed because he was not an abolitionist, and Judge Edward Loring was dismissed from a lectureship at the Harvard Law School because, in his capacity as a federal judge, he had enforced the fugitive slave law.

Between 1870 and 1900, there was a genuine revolution in American higher education. Critical to this revolution was the impact of Darwinism. In the 1870s, determined efforts were made exclude proponents of Darwinism whenever possible. The disputes were often quite bitter. The great debate over Darwinism represented a profound clash between conflicting cultures, intellectual styles, and academic values.

A new approach to education and to intellectual discourse grew out of the Darwinian debate. To the evolutionists, all beliefs were tentative and verifiable only through a continuous process of inquiry. The evolutionists held that every claim to truth must submit to open verification; that the process of verification must follow certain rules; and that this process is best understood by those who qualify as experts.

By the end of the nineteenth century, it was increasingly accepted that a commitment to academic freedom defined the true university. As William Rainey Harper, the first president of the University of Chicago, observed in 1892: "When for any reason the administration of a university attempts to dislodge a professor because of his political . . . sentiments, at that moment the institution has ceased to be a university."

This commitment to academic freedom was tested severely in the closing years of the 19th century, when businessmen who had accumulated vast industrial wealth began to support universities on an unprecedented scale. For at the same time that trusteeship in a prestigious university was increasingly becoming an important symbol of business prominence, a growing concern among scholars about the excesses of commerce and industry generated new forms of research, particularly in the social sciences, that were often sharply critical of the means by which these trustee-philanthropists had amassed their wealth.

The moguls and the scholars thus came into direct conflict. A professor was dismissed from Cornell, for example, for a pro-labor speech that annoyed a powerful benefactor, and a prominent scholar at Stanford was dismissed because he annoyed donors with his views on the silver and immigration issues.

This tension continued until the beginning of World War I, when it was dwarfed by an even larger conflict.

During the Great War, patriotic zealots persecuted and even prosecuted those who questioned the war or the draft. Universities faced the almost total collapse of the institutional safeguards that had evolved up to that point to protect academic freedom, for nothing in their prior experience had prepared them to deal with the issue of loyalty at a time of national emergency.

At the University of Nebraska, for example, three professors were discharged because they had "assumed an attitude calculated to encourage . . . a spirit of [indifference] towards [the] war." At the University of Virginia, a professor was discharged because he had made a speech predicting that the war would not make the world safe for democracy. And at Columbia, the Board of Trustees launched a general campaign of investigation to determine whether doctrines that tended to encourage a spirit of disloyalty were being taught at the university.

Similar issues arose again, with a vengeance, during the age of McCarthy. In the late 1940s and 1950s, many if not most universities excluded those accused of Communist sympathies from participation in university life. The University of Washington fired three tenured professors, the University of California dismissed thirty-one professors who refused to sign an anti-Communist oath, and Yale president Charles Seymour boasted that "there will be no witch hunts at Yale, because there will be no witches. We will not hire Communists."

What we are seeing now in North Carolina is an ugly resurgence of an attempt by political elements outside the university to censor, discipline, and punish those inside the university who take positions that annoy, offend, or disturb them. This is unconscionable. The Board of Governors of the University of North Carolina must reverse its decision now and it must acknowledge that its action, however tempting, betrayed the Board's most fundamental responsibility to protect the core values of what used to be one of our nation's greatest public universities.

Copyright ©2015 TheHuffingtonPost.com, Inc.

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/geoffrey-r-stone/a-deadly-assault-on-academic-freedom_b_6776322.html [with comments]


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Complex societies evolved without belief in all-powerful deity


Native Hawaiians evolved a politically complex polytheistic society (pictured: Ki'i gods), but without belief in a supreme deity.
Greg Vaughn/Design Pics/Corbis

Emergence of politically sophisticated societies may be assisted by faith in supernatural spirits, but does not need "big God" religion.

Philip Ball
04 March 2015

All human societies have been shaped by religion, leading psychologists to wonder how it arose, and whether particular forms of belief have affected other aspects of evolved social structure. According to one recent view, for example, belief in a "big God" — an all-powerful, punitive deity who sits in moral judgement on our actions — has been instrumental in bringing about social and political complexity in human cultures.

But a new analysis of religious systems in Austronesia — the network of small and island states stretching from Madagascar to Easter Island — challenges that theory. In these states, a more general belief in supernatural punishment did tend to precede political complexity, the research finds, but belief in supreme deities emerged after complex cultures have already formed ["Broad supernatural punishment but not moralizing high gods precede the evolution of political complexity in Austronesia", http://rspb.royalsocietypublishing.org/content/282/1804/20142556 ].

Joseph Watts, a specialist in cultural evolution at the University of Auckland in New Zealand, who worked on the study, wanted evidence to examine the idea that "big Gods" drive and sustain the evolution of big societies. Psychologist Ara Norenzayan at the University of British Columbia in Vancouver, Canada, has suggested that belief in moralizing high gods (MHGs) enabled societies to outgrow their limited ability to police moral conduct, by threatening freeloaders with retribution even if no-one else noticed their transgressions ["Big Gods: How Religion Transformed Cooperation and Conflict", http://www.amazon.com/Big-Gods-Religion-Transformed-Cooperation/dp/0691151210 ; "The Origin and Evolution of Religious Prosociality", http://www.sciencemag.org/content/322/5898/58 ].

The most common examples of religions with MHGs — Christianity and Islam, the dominant representatives of so-called Abrahamic religions — are relatively recent and obviously postdated the appearance of complex societies. But the question is whether earlier MHGs, for example in Bronze Age civilisations, catalysed sociopolitical complexity or resulted from it.

Rather than searching for statistical associations between social complexity and religious beliefs, researchers need ways to untangle cause and effect, Watts says. “Austronesian cultures offer an ideal sample to test theories about the evolution of religions in pre-modern societies, because they were mostly isolated from modern world religions, and their indigenous supernatural beliefs and practices were well documented," he says.

Wide variety

Watts and his colleagues pruned the 400 or so known Austronesian cultures down to 96 with detailed ethnographic records, excluding any in which contact with Abrahamic religions might have had a distorting outside influence. They range from native Hawaiians, who hold polytheistic beliefs, to the Merina people in Madagascar, who believe in a supreme God.

The team considered two classes of religion: MHGs and a broader belief in systems of supernatural punishment (or 'BSP') for social transgressions, such as those enacted through ancestral spirits or inanimate forces such as karma. Although both schemes see religious or supernatural agents as imposing codes of moral conduct, BSP does not assume a single supreme deity who oversees that process.

Six of the cultures had MHGs, 37 had BSP belief systems and 22 were politically complex, the researchers concluded. They used trees of evolutionary connections between cultures, deduced from earlier studies of linguistic relationships, to explore how the societies were inter-related and exchanged ideas. That in turn allowed them to test different hypotheses about MHGs and BSPs — for example, whether belief in MHGs precedes (and presumably then stabilizes) the emergence of political complexity.

“Although beliefs in MHGs do coevolve with political complexity, [the] beliefs follow rather than drive political complexity,” the researchers say. For BSPs, however, the beliefs seem to help political complexity to emerge, although by no means guarantee it.

“I think the ordering of events these authors prefer is what one expects from first principles,” says evolutionary biologist Mark Pagel of the University of Reading, UK. He says that societies became more politically complex as networks of trade and reputation emerged, and that the key to this process was language, not religion.

So what are MHGs for? “They are tools of control used by purveyors of religion to cement their grip on power,” says Pagel. “As soon as you have a large society generating lots of goods and services, this wealth can be put to use by someone who can grab the reins of power. The most immediate way to do this is to align yourself with a supreme deity and then make lists of things people can and cannot do, and these become ‘morals’ when applied to our social behaviour.”

Anthropologist Hervey Peoples at the University of Cambridge, UK, says that there is good evidence that, even if MHGs do not drive political and social complexity, they can affect and stabilize it. “This study is impressive and innovative, but may be hard to generalize,” she adds.

Norenzayan agrees. "In Austronesia, social and political complexity has been limited", he says. "There have been cases of chiefdoms but there has not been a single state-level society. So it's not all that surprising that big moralizing gods don't play a central role." He argues that such gods did co-evolve with the very large, state-level societies typically found in Eurasia. The "big Gods" idea was never supposed to hold true everywhere, he says.

Related stories and links

From nature.com

Societies evolve in steps
13 October 2010
http://www.nature.com/news/2010/101013/full/news.2010.537.html

Morals don't come from God
08 February 2010
http://www.nature.com/news/2010/100208/full/news.2010.55.html

Religious concepts promote cooperation
25 July 2007
http://www.nature.com/news/2007/070723/full/news070723-6.html

From elsewhere

Joseph Watts’ home page
http://www.josephwatts.org/

© 2015 Nature Publishing Group, a division of Macmillan Publishers Limited

http://www.nature.com/news/complex-societies-evolved-without-belief-in-all-powerful-deity-1.17040 [no comments yet] [also at http://www.scientificamerican.com/article/complex-societies-evolved-without-belief-in-all-powerful-deity1/ (with comments)]


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Ben Carson: Being Gay Is a Choice and Prison Proves It


If Ben Carson thinks being gay is a choice, he should prove it by choosing to be gay himself.
Christopher Halloran/Shutterstock

by Dan Savage
Mar 4, 2015 at 12:24 pm

Metro Weekly [ http://www.metroweekly.com/2015/03/ben-carson-prisons-prove-being-gay-is-a-choice/ , http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PwVSQ5kGXMA (as embedded; with comments))]:

During an interview with CNN that aired Wednesday, [Ben] Carson dismissed comparisons between the civil rights movement and gay rights movement, stating that people have no control over their race. Asked by CNN’s Chris Cuomo whether he believes being gay is a choice, Carson responded, “Absolutely.”

“Because a lot of people who go into prison go into prison straight and when they come out, they’re gay. So, did something happen while they were in there? Ask yourself that question,” Carson said. “If that is in fact the case, then it obviously thwarts” the notion that being gay is not a choice, he continued, despite a majority of the medical community in agreement that gay people have no control over their sexual orientation.

Religious conservatives argue that being gay is a choice—a choice that people can control—and therefore gay people are not entitled to civil rights protections, aren't covered by the 14th Amendment, shouldn't be allowed to marry or adopt, etc. Because being gay is choice and therefore no one has to be gay. Don't like being discriminated against? Want to legally marry? Want to adopt? You shouldn't change the law, you shouldn't argue for equal rights, you should just chose to be straight. And it's easy! Because, you see, gayness isn't an immutable characteristic. It' not like race. People can't change their race, right?

Religious conservatives go on TV to make this anti-gay argument while religious conservatives knock on doors, distribute pamphlets, proselytize, and evangelize all over the country in an effort to get people to do what? To change their religions. To choose a different faith. So faith—religious belief—is not an immutable characteristic. You can change your faith. And yet religious belief is covered by civil rights laws and anti-discrimination statutes. Two other examples of mutable characteristics covered by civil rights statutes: military service and marital status. But no one has to serve in the military and no one has to get married—people have control over whether they marry or enlist, right? And yet, like religious belief, both are covered by civil rights statutes and people like Ben Carson don't object. The only time you hear that a trait has to be immutable in order to qualify for civil rights protections is when they talk about the gay.

Lying liars, etc. Anyway, here's a link for Dr. Carson and a challenge:

Situational homosexuality [ http://medical-dictionary.thefreedictionary.com/Situational+homosexuality ]:

Sexual contact between members of the same sex due to absence of the opposite sex (e.g., military, prison) rather than desire or predisposition.

Like truthers (9/11 was an inside job), birthers (Barack Obama was born in Kenya), and deathers (Osama bin Laden is alive and well and living in West Hollywood), choicers are another group deranged conspiracy theorists who can't be dissuaded by science or evidence or facts [ http://www.amazon.com/Gay-Straight-Reason-Why-Orientation/dp/0199737673 ]. They insist that being gay is a conscious choice that a person makes. I've challenged choicers in the past to prove it—to put up or shut up [ http://slog.thestranger.com/slog/archives/2011/10/20/herman-cain-choicer ]—and I'm going to issue that challenge again:

Dear Dr. Carson,

If being gay is a choice, prove it. Choose it. Choose to be gay yourself. Show America how that's done, Ben, show us how a man can choose to be gay. Suck my dick. Name the time and the place and I'll bring my dick and a camera crew and you can suck me off and win the argument.

Very sincerely yours,

Dan Savage

© 2015 Index Newspapers LLC

http://www.thestranger.com/blogs/slog/2015/03/04/21827375/republican-idiot-being-gay-is-a-choice-and-prison-proves-it [with comments]


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Founding Mother Of The Conservative Movement: LGBT Rights Not Inevitable

By Michelangelo Signorile [ http://www.huffingtonpost.com/michelangelo-signorile/ ]
Posted: 03/02/2015 10:30 am EST Updated: 03/02/2015 11:59 am EST

Amid battles that have erupted over states banning local anti-discrimination ordinances [ http://www.msnbc.com/jose-diaz-balart/watch/arkansas-anti-gay-bill-moves-ahead-401372739575 ] and moving forward on “religious liberties” laws targeting lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender (LGBT) people -- seemingly catching [ http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/govbeat/wp/2015/02/23/that-anti-gay-bill-in-arkansas-actually-became-law-today-why-couldnt-activists-stop-it/ ] some LGBT activists off-guard -- Phyllis Schlafly has a message for the LGBT community: Don't believe for a minute that the Supreme Court’s decision in June on marriage equality, no matter how positive, will diminish the crusade against LGBT equality. In fact, she says, it will only serve to reinvigorate the anti-gay movement.

The Eagle Forum founder and leader, often referred to as the founding mother of the Christian conservative movement [ http://www.washingtontimes.com/news/2015/feb/24/phyllis-schlafly-a-founding-mother-of-the-conserva/ ], speaks from experience. As an anti-feminist crusader, she is often credited with almost single-handedly stopping the Equal Rights Amendment [ http://www.ushistory.org/us/57c.asp ] (ERA), which initially had enormous momentum in the states in the '70s, all but guaranteeing full equality for women in the Constitution. Opponents, however, used the backlash among conservatives to the Supreme Court’s 1973 Roe v. Wade decision, especially in southern states, to successfully kill the ERA dead in its tracks by the early '80s. The backlash has now been used to not only restrict abortion rights but to prevent laws to end income disparity and to positively affect many other issues for women.



“The gays have their argument about inevitability,” the 90-year-old author of 25 books told me in an interview for SiriusXM Progress [ http://www.siriusxm.com/siriusxmprogress ] at this year's Conservative Political Action Conference [ http://www.huffingtonpost.com/news/cpac/ ] in National Harbor, Maryland, over the weekend, during a book-signing including her new book, “Who Killed the American Family?”

"I don’t think that’s so,” Schlafly continued with a smile, rejecting the “inevitability” argument. “I’m extremely disappointed that the Republican Party, the conservative movement, even the Democratic Party and the churches, have been saying, ‘Well soon the court will decide, and that will be it.’ Well, a lot of people thought that about Roe v. Wade, and we’ve seen the whole abortion movement turned around in the last ten years.”

Schlafly has sloughed off the fact that even her own son is gay. (John Schlafly was revealed to be gay in the gay press back in the early '90s and confirmed the reports, but defended his mother and continued working for her [ http://articles.orlandosentinel.com/2004-09-08/news/0409070294_1_phyllis-schlafly-gay-marriage-plank ].) She’d explained that her son "supports me in everything I do," including fighting what she views as the dangers of "the gay agenda." Schlafly believes the fight is critical now more than ever, saying that she’d been warning conservatives about the “kingmakers” (her word for establishment Republicans), the “supremacists” (judges whom she believes are liberal activists) and the “threat” to “religious liberty” for years. But she is heartened by the renewed energy around “religious liberties” laws and other laws targeting gays, and sees them as among many strategies for anti-gay conservatives to pursue moving forward.

“We should develop all kinds of strategies -- legal strategies, legislative strategies and public opinion strategies, in order to reject the rules of, in many cases, a single judge or just a simply majority of judges,” she said. “I do believe the grass roots can take back the Republican Party... These kingmakers... they're the people who really want us to be bipartisan and get along with everybody. But that's not the American way. Americans believe in the adversarial concept."

Listen to a clip of the interview:

[audio ( https://soundcloud.com/siriusxm-news-issues/sig-schlafly-inevitable ) embedded]

Copyright ©2015 TheHuffingtonPost.com, Inc.

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2015/03/02/phyllis-schlafly-gay-agenda_n_6778696.html [with comments]


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