Look, I'm not even the world's biggest fan of political conventions, because they make me feel like I'm trapped in a cubicle with a car salesman. What's to believe about an event where they hire a consultant to do the balloon drop?
But with these two conventions freshly behind us, I don't think it will kill us to talk. Please let me share my few and simple thoughts. Then you.
This is what I thought I could see for sure. The Republican convention looked white. Sorry. I stared at the screen. It just looked white. Kind of a white-out.
I'm not talking about up on the stage where everything was art-directed. I'm talking about crowd shots, scenes in corridors, all of the peripherals just outside the control of the media strategists. Haven't seen that many mature white people in one place since the last time I watched a late-night Perry Mason episode.
The Democratic convention, on the other hand, looked diverse. In fact when they panned the rank and file out in the gallery, the cameras couldn't have avoided nonwhite faces had they tried. There were too many of them. And I saw plenty of people who looked out-gay, old hippie, union-proud, handicapped -- the full monte of what we expect Democrats to be.
So Democrats look like Democrats, and Republicans look like Republicans. Did I really have to watch two conventions to come to that brilliant deduction?
No, but it's what they did with it. The Democrats talked about shared sacrifice and we're all in this together. And just for clarity, who all is in this together? All kinds of people. The optics said it's every one of us.
The Republicans harped on "We built it." Again for clarity, we who? Who built America? The optics said it's we old white people. The message was that old white people built this country.
Old, white and an unreal, undead product of the imagination: Meet the GOP mascot.
That message actually hit home for me, though not in a good way, because I'm old white people. I get it. I know exactly what "We built it" is all about. It's about old white people wanting to turn back the clock a half century to the America we grew up in.
I must admit, it was one slick deal for white people. America after World War II all the way through the 1960s was a fancy banquet set for white heteros with command of all four limbs. The table was laid, man. If we ever even glimpsed any of those other types, they were standing against the wall with towels over their arms awaiting our finger-snapped wishes.
We were first-hired, last-fired. Many of us benefited from free college educations, which even Republicans back then were more than happy to pay for with tax money.
It was a white Christmas all year long. Hey, I know exactly why some white people my age yearn to return to it. Compared with today, it was so damned easy.
I also believe that particular yearning is an irrational obscenity set against truth and time. It defines white people as something we are not -- superior and entitled, not to mention flimsy and afraid of fair competition on a level playing field. That dream, if realized, would condemn me to return to a narrow, stultifying world of Jell-O casserole and Dean Martin jokes. Please, please, don't drag me back there. My appetite has grown since then.
And here is the second piece from the conventions. With Bill Clinton as their wonk-in-chief, the Democrats laid out all the pieces of their agenda, along with the arithmetic. They said exactly what they want to do in Washington.
The Republicans, on the other hand, held their cards beneath the table. At the podium they were all platitudes and attitudes.
Why would that be? Especially with Mitt Romney and Paul Ryan vowing a steady diet of tough-love honesty, why was there such an absence of it in their speeches? They came across instead all wide-eyed and smarmy, like scandal-tossed televangelists trying to make nice with the dues-payers.
The logical explanation is that they can't afford for the rest of the country outside their base to see the second part, the necessary corollary of "We built this."
"Screw the rest of you."
Their absence of candor about the loophole cuts and program spending cuts is the real tell. My guess is that they won't talk about the pain because all the pain is going to be aimed at everybody who isn't an old white person.
Old and white? Don't worry. You'll keep your Social Security and Medicare and the Medicaid that pays for Grandma's nursing home. That will all be paid for out of the wages and salaries of the new much blacker and browner and more immigrant, gay and handicapped workforce.
But as soon as you're gone, we're cutting it off. That way they won't get any. Suckers!
My fear of that worldview is based some on politics, some on morality but more on the fact that it's basically crazy. The world simply is not going to go backwards a half century. Worlds don't do that. No way, no matter what. The world is getting smaller. Our definition of humanity is expanding. Those processes are not optional.
The picture in Tampa that I saw on my TV screen wasn't just of all white people. It was of a whole bunch of white people who seemed crazy to me. I mean crazy. They look up at the sky and tell you they don't know where the president of the United States came from. So what's their best guess? Pluto?
History and the globe today both tell us that societies can be taken over by nutcase ideologies and heretical religions. It happens. It could happen here. It won't endure. Truth shall out eventually. But things would sure be bad while it lasted.
The Texas senator hadn't yet announced his candidacy for the presidency, wouldn't announce it until it was too late as it turned out, but there he was, privately campaigning, secretly moving to assure key journalists that he was not the scourge of civil rights they thought he was. As Senate Majority Leader, he had helped pass the 1957 Civil Rights Act, had he not? Breaking through nearly a century of Southern intransigence on civil rights, he had herded the "old bulls" of the Senate, some of them unabashed racists, into passing a federal law that made it easier for blacks to vote.
So there he was, in April 1960, already playing catch up to the aggressive Kennedy machine, on an airplane with a journalist named Howard B. Woods, the editor of a black newspaper called the St. Louis Argus. And Johnson was in full throat. Here's how Robert Caro, in Passage of Power, his masterful new installment [ http://www.nytimes.com/2012/05/06/books/review/the-passage-of-power-robert-caros-new-lbj-book.html?pagewanted=all ] of his colossal biographical series on the life and times of Johnson, recounts what happened next:
The Senator, tie-less and in shirtsleeves, was eating cookies and drinking a tall, and stiff, Scotch, but when Woods ask him about the civil rights bill "which seems to please no one," saying, "Senator, the bill, as it was finally passed, was admittedly watered down," Johnson forgot about the cookies and the Scotch, and leaned forward across the table, looking Woods "straight in the eye" in a way the editor found quite memorable.
"When we say every man has a right to vote, that is not watered down," Lyndon Johnson said." The important thing in this country is whether or not a man can participate in the management of his government. When this is possible, he can decide that I'm no good." George Reedy slipped into the seat next to Woods, but Johnson didn't need Reedy now. "Civil rights are a matter of human dignity," he said.
"It's outrageous that all people do not have the dignity to which they are entitled. But we can't legislate human dignity -- we can legislative to give a man a vote and a voice in in his own government. Then with his vote and his voice he is equipped with a very potent weapon to guarantee his own dignity." [Emphasis added.]
Just four years later, Johnson, successor to a martyred president, astonished the country and the world by using his preternatural political skills to push passage of the Civil Rights Act of 1964. The next year, he used the same combination of bluff and bluster, of carrot and stick, to push passage of the Voting Rights Act of 1965. The old Senate bulls were done, finished. Those two pieces of federal legislation brought the vote to millions of Americans who had been effectively disenfranchised because of their race. American politics has never been the same since.
Today, the trumpet calls again on civil rights and voting rights. In the past few weeks, I've written a great deal about the topic, joining the ranks of journalists like Ari Berman [ http://www.thenation.com/authors/ari-berman ] and Rachel Maddow [ http://video.msnbc.msn.com/the-rachel-maddow-show/48808597 ] and Ryan Reilly [ http://talkingpointsmemo.com/ryan_j_reilly.php ] in trying to chronicle and make sense of Republican efforts all over the country to suppress the ballots of millions of registered voters. I have done so because I believe that these laws -- photo identification requirements, bans against early voting -- are similar in their discriminatory nature and effect to some of the most odious Jim Crow laws the nation endured during the first half of the last century.
Last week, as one federal judge after another struck down these new measures, as one court after another called out Republican lawmakers for the lack of evidence supporting the push to stop "voter fraud," it dawned on me that this national debate suffers, as so many do these days, from a lack of a common starting point. There is so much fear. There is so much ignorance. There is so much exaggeration. Here are six of the most frequent comments I get when I write about voting rights followed by my attempts at a few answers that perhaps can get us talking about this in a more productive way.
MYTHS AND MACHINATIONS
1. We need these new voter ID laws to stop voter fraud. This is a logical starting point because no one is for voting fraud. But no state lawmaker, attorney general, or election law expert has yet come into court this year and established that in-person voting fraud is actually happening. For example, in Washington last week, in the federal trial over South Carolina's voter identification law, the Associated Press reported [ http://www.miamiherald.com/2012/08/27/2970625/trial-opens-challenging-south.html ] that State Sen. George "Chip" Campsen III "testified that he could not find cases of voter impersonation in South Carolina, but added that the state lacks the tools to root them out."
2. We need these new voter ID laws to stop illegal immigrants from voting. This is the uglier version of the sentiment identified above, a complaint that links the myth of widespread voter fraud with the growing realization [ http://abcnews.go.com/US/militias-hate-groups-grow-response-minority-population-boom/story?id=16370136 ] that America is slowly but surely losing its white majority. The question of illegal immigration, and how America ought to deal with it, is a legitimate policy question our political leaders need to resolve. But there is even less evidence that illegal immigrants are voting in our elections than there is evidence that in-person voting fraud is a legitimate problem among American voters.
What often is lost in the political debate over these new restrictive laws -- what's lost in the faux outrage over voting integrity -- is the central fact that registered voters in these states (and everywhere) don't just walk up today to the ballot box and cast their votes. Even without the restrictive new laws, registered voters have to prove who they are, either by providing identification or by matching their signatures on voting cards or by other means. These new laws are all about rejecting these forms of identification in favor of new ones that require, in some cases, a great deal of effort to obtain.
3. The new voter laws do not create substantial burdens on registered voters. This is the most common response to challenges to the new breed of voting laws. If someone can't find the time to get a new ID, then why should they be able to vote? If I have to show identification to buy a bottle of whiskey (or Sudafed [ http://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2012/08/why-south-carolinas-most-sacred-right-is-in-jeopardy/261704/ ]) why shouldn't someone have to show a photo identification to cast a ballot? If I can get a photo ID to drive a car why can't someone get one to vote? Here we see clear evidence of the great financial divide in American life -- the widening gap between the haves and the have-nots.
There are some registered voters for whom the new requirements probably aren't an unreasonable burden. But there are many more for whom it is. In Texas, for example, there was testimony at the voter ID trial in July that some residents -- registered voters, who have voted accurately without incident for years -- would have to travel 200 or 250 miles [ http://electionlawblog.org/wp-content/uploads/texas-voter-id.pdf ] to get the new form of identification. In the South Carolina case, there was testimony last week that some registered voters would have to make a 70-mile, round-trip journey to get the new forms of identification. Are these not unconstitutional burdens?
4. The new Republican voter laws are the results of reasonable compromises between and among state legislators. This is false. In South Carolina, for example, we learned just last week [ http://www.theatlantic.com/national/archive/2012/08/in-south-carolina-shockingly-candid-talk-about-voter-discrimination/261760/ ] that a compromise voter ID law, which had bipartisan and biracial support, was rejected by conservative radicals in favor of the current law that is about to be struck down by another panel of federal judges. The same thing occurred in Texas, where state lawmakers refused to keep state offices open longer to accommodate the working-class people who couldn't get their new IDs between 9 and 5.
The same is true, incidentally, in the fight over early voting laws. Early voting hours are a national success -- allowing voters who have to work regular hours on the first Tuesday in November to cast their ballots at a more convenient time. Yet in Ohio and in Florida [ http://www.miamiherald.com/2012/08/17/2956305/federal-court-rejects-florida.html ], Republican officials sought to restrict those hours without offering a legitimate reason to do so. In Ohio, the official reason offered by the Republican Secretary of State -- that his election officials couldn't manage the extra work -- was immediately challenged by nonpartisan election officials there who said that they could, in fact, "make it work [ http://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2012/08/americas-new-war-over-civil-rights/261301/ ]."
5. There are many restrictions upon the right to vote -- what's so vital about another such restriction? It's true, the Supreme Court has said repeatedly that states may impose reasonable burdens upon voters. No one disputes that this is so. Like any other right, the right to vote is not absolute. On the other hand, as Lyndon Johnson said 50 years ago, and as mainstream politicians today recognize, the right to vote is the foundation for the exercise of virtually all other civil rights because it helps enable those rights; it helps turn them into remedies.
If there were proof of widespread in-person voting fraud, or if were were proof that such fraud is on its way, the Republican officials pushing their restrictive new laws would have a legitimate argument to make. They could argue, for example, that it's reasonable to protect against 1,000 fraudulent votes by burdening 100,000 voters. The specific matrix isn't the point. The point, as Garrett Epps made last month here [ http://www.theatlantic.com/national/archive/2012/08/why-pennsylvanias-voter-id-law-is-unconstitutional/261218/ ] at The Atlantic, is that there has to be some factual basis for the imposition of the burdens contemplated by these laws. So far, those facts have been absent from courtrooms all across the country.
6. Burdening the rights of voters to cast their ballots is not the same as disenfranchising voters. The right to vote is useless if the right cannot be exercised. That's the lesson that Rep. John Lewis, the civil rights icon, has been trying to teach as he speaks out [ http://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2012/08/rep-john-lewis-make-some-noise-on-new-voting-restrictions/261549/ ] about the similarities between the civil rights movement of the 1950s and the voting rights movement today. That's what's so cynical and self-defeating about these new disenfranchising measures -- like their predecessors during Jim Crow they purport to be racially neutral when it fact they are discriminatory in both their intent and their effect.
These new laws require people who are poor to pay for the cost of new identification cards -- even though those people have voted fairly and accurately for decades. The new laws require people without cars to travel hundreds of miles to get their new ID cards. They require people who are old or frail or sick to present themselves for inspection at state offices. And they do so by rejecting more reasonable alternatives -- like the new voting identification law in Virginia [ http://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2012/08/why-south-carolinas-most-sacred-right-is-in-jeopardy/261704/ ], for example, which passed Justice Department scrutiny under the Voting Rights Act.
POSTSCRIPT
On voting rights in America, the arc of the universe has indeed been long, centuries long, from the three-fifths compromise in the Constitution to the poll tax to the literacy test. But it has always bent toward justice. These new laws seek to bend the arc backward again, to take away from people their effective right to vote because of their financial position, or because of their immobility, or because of their age or illness. And to do so despite the fact that these people, all these people, have been voting for years, for decades, by proving at the ballot box that they are who they say they are.
"Asking for an ID to verify who you are is not racist," an angry commentator wrote to me on Monday afternoon, "it's just common sense." Indeed, it is. And, indeed, such ballot verification happens all the time in every state in every election prior to the passage of all these restrictive new laws. There are ways to make America's elections more accurate. There are ways to do so that do not threaten to disenfranchise millions of Americans. There are ways to do so in a bipartisan, biracial fashion. That was Lyndon Johnson's challenge a generation ago and it is the challenge today for elected officials everywhere.
SUPPRESSING the black vote is a very old story in America, and it has never been just a Southern thing.
In 1840, and again in 1841, the former Frederick Bailey, now Frederick Douglass, walked a few blocks from his rented apartment on Ray Street in New Bedford, Mass., to the town hall, where he paid a local tax of $1.50 to register to vote. Born a slave on Maryland’s Eastern Shore in 1818, Douglass escaped in an epic journey on trains and ferry boats, first to New York City, and then to the whaling port of New Bedford in 1838.
By the mid-1840s, he had emerged as one of the greatest orators and writers in American history. But legally, Douglass began his public life by committing what today we would consider voter fraud, using an assumed name.
It was a necessary step: when he registered to vote under his new identity, “Douglass [ http://memory.loc.gov/ammem/doughtml/tl1.html ],” a name he took from Sir Walter Scott’s 1810 epic poem “Lady of the Lake,” this fugitive slave was effectively an illegal immigrant in Massachusetts. He was still the legal “property” of Thomas Auld, his owner in St. Michaels, Md., and susceptible, under the federal fugitive slave law, to capture and return to slavery at any time.
It was a risky move. If required, the only identification Douglass could give the registrar may have been his address in the town directory. He possessed two pieces of paper, which would only have endangered him more. One was a fraudulent “Seaman’s Protection Paper,” which he had borrowed in Baltimore from a retired free black sailor named Stanley, who was willing to support the young man’s escape.
The second was a brief three-line certification of his marriage to Anna Murray, his free black fiancée, who joined him in New York just after his escape. A black minister, James Pennington, himself a former fugitive slave, married them, but on the document he called them Mr. and Mrs. “Johnson.” Douglass was at least the fourth name Frederick had used to distract the authorities on his quest for freedom. He once remarked that a fugitive slave had to adopt various names to survive because “among honest men an honest man may well be content with one name ... but toward fugitives, Americans are not honest.”
Should this fugitive, who had committed the crime of stealing his own freedom and living under false identities, have been allowed to vote? Voting reforms in recent decades had broadened the franchise to include men who did not hold property but certainly not to anyone who was property.
Blacks in many other states weren’t so lucky. Aside from Maine, every state that entered the Union after 1819 excluded them from voting. Four Northern states — New York, Ohio, Indiana and Wisconsin — had reaffirmed earlier black voter exclusion laws by the early 1850s. A few blacks actually voted in New York, but only if they could pass a stiff property qualification. The sheer depth of racism at the base of this story is remarkable, since in no Northern state at the time, except New Jersey, did blacks constitute more than 2 percent of the population.
We do not know when Douglass cast his first vote. It might have been in 1840, in the famous “log cabin and hard cider” campaign mounted by the Whig Party for its candidate, Gen. William Henry Harrison. If so, he likely supported the Liberty Party’s James G. Birney [ http://www.ohiohistorycentral.org/entry.php?rec=37 ], who represented the first genuinely antislavery party, however small, in American history; it achieved some strength in the Bay State.
In 1848 he spoke at the national convention of the newly formed Freesoil Party, and after 1854, haltingly at first and later wholeheartedly, he joined and worked for the new antislavery coalition known as the Republican Party, which ran and elected Abraham Lincoln in 1860. To this day, that “Grand Old Party” still calls itself the “party of Lincoln” and still claims Frederick Douglass as one of its black founders.
And indeed Douglass saw himself as a founder of that party, but only many years after a group of English antislavery friends purchased his freedom in 1846 for £150 ($711 at the time in American dollars). Douglass was in the midst of a triumphal two-year speaking tour of Ireland, Scotland and England; when he returned to America in 1847, he moved to New York in possession of his official “manumission papers.” He was free and legal, eventually owned property and could vote. Valued and purchased as a commodity, he could now claim to be a citizen.
In Douglass’s greatest speech, the Fourth of July oration [ http://www.lib.rochester.edu/index.cfm?page=2945 ] in 1852, he argued that often the only way to describe American hypocrisy about race was with “scorching irony,” “biting ridicule” and “withering sarcasm.” Today’s Republican Party seems deeply concerned with rooting out voter fraud of the kind Douglass practiced. So, with Douglass’s story as background, I have a modest proposal for it. In the 23 states where Republicans have either enacted voter-ID laws or shortened early voting hours in urban districts, and consistent with their current reigning ideology, they should adopt a simpler strategy of voter suppression.
To those potentially millions of young, elderly, brown and black registered voters who, despite no evidence of voter fraud, they now insist must obtain government ID, why not merely offer money? Pay them not to vote. Give each a check for $711 in honor of Frederick Douglass. Buy their “freedom,” and the election. Call it the “Frederick Douglass Voter Voucher.”
Give people a choice: take the money and just not vote, or travel miles without easy transportation to obtain a driver’s license they do not need. It’s their “liberty”; let them decide how best to use it. Perhaps they will forget their history as much as the Republican Party seems to wish the nation would.
Such an offer would be only a marginal expense for a “super PAC” — plus a bit more to cover the lawyers needed to prove it legal under federal election law — and no one would have to know who paid for this generous effort to stop fraud. Once and for all, the right can honestly declare what the Supreme Court has allowed it to practice: that voters are commodities, not citizens.
And, if the Republican Party wins the election in November, this plan will give it a splendid backdrop for next year’s commemoration of the 150th anniversary of its great founder’s Emancipation Proclamation.
If you’ve only got 30 seconds to make your case in the debate over photo ID laws — which require voters to show up at the polls with a government-issued photo ID — it’s much easier to argue in favor of the laws.
“You need a photo ID to get on an airplane or rent a movie from Blockbuster. Get over it!”
While investigating voting in America for the documentary film “Electoral Dysfunction [ http://www.electoraldysfunction.org/ ],” I heard versions of this line over and over from the laws’ backers. The message is clear: “If you’re too lazy to get a government-issued photo ID, then you probably don’t deserve to vote. And please, let’s not forget 9/11.” (The airplane reference is a handy conversation-stopper.)
But voting rights are worth at least 60 seconds of our attention. So here’s why these laws hurt more than they help:
The only crime these laws address is voter impersonation — someone showing up at the polls and claiming to be someone else in order to cast a fraudulent vote. (I know, sounds almost delightfully madcap.)
There are so many problems with the way we run elections in this country. Voter impersonation is not one of them. Indiana, one of the first states to pass a strict photo ID law, has never convicted anyone for it. Ditto Pennsylvania, which passed an even stricter law.
It’s an extremely rare crime — 10 cases nationwide over a 12-year period during which hundreds of millions of votes were cast — and for good reason. The penalty is severe — up to five years in prison and a $10,000 fine — and the perpetrator nets only one vote. If you’re going to steal an election, there are far better options. (Hire a 16-year-old to hack into the computer touch-screen voting system — the one without a paper trail — in use in about a third of American states [ http://www.countingvotes.org/ ].)
These laws are a solution in search of a problem. Why not a law criminalizing child abduction by space aliens? Well, can you prove it isn’t happening?
But even if these laws prevent only a tiny number of fraudulent votes, aren’t they worthwhile? No.
There are a lot of people who don’t have current government-issued photo ID — for example, more than 5 percent of registered voters in Texas. (Until now a bank statement or utility bill [ http://www.ncsl.org/legislatures-elections/elections/voter-id.aspx ] has sufficed.) The federal court that last week invalidated the new Texas photo ID law pointed out that more than one-quarter of the state’s counties lack an operational D.M.V. office, meaning some Texans would need to take a 250-mile round trip to get ID. Many prospective voters would have to pay $22 for the cheapest set of documents needed to obtain one (and that’s with Texas waiving the charge for the ID itself). The law imposes, the court wrote, “strict, unforgiving burdens on the poor.” These are the people who will be turned away from the polls (or thrown a sop in the form of a provisional ballot, which has about as much chance of being counted as a Ron Paul delegate at the Republican National Convention).
What’s more, there is no “right” to fly on an airplane. Comparing airplane travel to voting rights is like comparing having cable TV to the right of a trial by jury. (Actually, there is no constitutionally guaranteed right to vote [ http://www.nytimes.com/2012/08/29/opinion/the-right-to-vote.html ], which is partly why these laws have passed judicial muster. Now that’s a real problem.)
Oh, and Blockbuster? We’re living in the Netflix age. And they don’t require a photo ID.
Mo Rocca is a correspondent for “CBS Sunday Morning” and the host of “Electoral Dysfunction,” a feature-length documentary airing on PBS in October, from which this Op-Doc — the second in a series of four — is adapted.
A Legitimate President or a New American Apartheid?
By Glenn W. Smith and James Moore Posted: 09/03/2012 9:56 am
Both sides don't do it.
And when journalists shrug their shoulders and say the democratic process is little more than the two main parties throwing around distortions and untruths, they are failing to do their jobs and helping to take our country to a dangerous place. Candidates must be confronted for their blatant falsehoods. Lies cannot be allowed to stand unchallenged because it enables the election of the dangerously unprincipled and puts the nation at great risk.
We end up with an illegitimate president.
But the current problem in this election is about more than simple lies. The Romney campaign is using tactics that are clearly designed to complement the outright lying and distortions of the president's record, which are serving to encourage bigoted resentment among white voters in swing states. An even more cynical tactic being utilized is to disenfranchise poor and minority voters to keep them away from the polls on Election Day. Because the Citizens United Supreme Court ruling unleashed corporate money, the Romney campaign and its associated super PACs are able to spend hundreds of millions of dollars from secret donors in pursuit of this strategy.
As unlikely as a Romney victory may seem after the campaign's clunky and sometimes embarrassing national convention, his strategy forces us to consider a question that we avoided in 2000. What, exactly, constitutes a legitimate presidency? If the candidate is carried into office floating on a raft of lies that has deceived the voters, do we recognize his power? The candidate has spent unknown tens of millions to foment unrest with a lie that the president eliminated Welfare to Work provisions of federal assistance laws with an executive order, which is patently and demonstrably untrue. (Point of clarification: the president made it easier, at the request of numerous governors, for state's to design their own welfare to work programs as long as they adhered to federal requirements and moved more people into work.)
Romney's running mate seems to lie almost pathologically and exaggerates his performance time in a marathon by more than an hour. He is either too insecure to serve beside a president or he has trouble discerning reality from what he wants to be true, which serves as an explanation for why he thinks his budget plan won't decimate American institutions and infrastructure.
The country should be prepared for an election-day nightmare if the Pants on Fire Pair win by a margin smaller than the number of demonstrably disenfranchised voters in Cleveland or Philadelphia or Miami.
The question we ask is not an alarmist one. Rather, it is as important to our democracy as it is to a family stocking up on flashlights, food, and drinking water before a storm makes landfall. If victory comes through callous lying, cynical voter suppression and the kind of dog whistle race-baiting that gives confidence to an attendee of the GOP convention to throw peanuts at a black journalist and call her an animal, are there are any circumstances under which Americans would judge an election outcome illegitimate? Because if that line hasn't been crossed by the Romney campaign we may be in more trouble as a country than we've yet been able to realize.
There may be a second election that comes in the days after the vote. In 2000, Karl Rove led the Bush campaign down to Florida to challenge the outcome of the vote and launched an immediate psychological war on network news shows. What the cable reporters never showed were corporate jets from companies like Enron flying in with hundreds of young Republicans in Brooks Brothers suits. They eventually showed up on TV yelling and creating chaos outside of recount centers as if there were a spontaneous outburst. America succumbed to national anxiety and the term constitutional crisis became currency on talk shows. Al Gore was backing away from exacerbating the crisis even before the Supreme Court ruled Bush had won. This time, democrats, on behalf of the integrity of American democracy, need to be ready to defeat any attempt to steal the election.
The high court's ruling certainly did not make case law but it sent the unmistakable message that the need to maintain the illusion of electoral legitimacy trumped all questions about the actual integrity of the voting process. In other words, no matter the circumstances, it is more important to maintain an illusion of democracy than to actually have a democracy. Shrugging acceptance of the Romney strategy would guarantee the same ending. No matter how illegitimate or unconstitutional the election process, anyone challenging that legitimacy would be accused of causing yet another constitutional crisis.
The facts of 2012, however, are that Romney is causing such a crisis by building a campaign around voter disenfranchisement and fundamentally dishonest and racist campaign themes, and all of it funded with blank checks from secret donors.
We have to consider the possibility that Romney's strategy is taking us in the direction of a de facto political apartheid. The lies represent only one stretch of fence being constructed. Suppression of voters through impossible to meet registration laws are attempts to disenfranchise poor and minorities that are decidedly more likely to vote for Mr. Obama. Fortunately, progressives won huge victories recently in Ohio, in the Texas redistricting and Voter I.D. cases and in Florida, where Republicans had placed requirements on voter registration groups that had virtually shutdown voter registration efforts for progressive organizations. Legal avenues for challenging those sane and protective court rulings, however, have not yet been exhausted. The American legal system, if it eventually upholds these discriminating regulations placed on voters in conservative state legislatures will have approved a key element of a new apartheid.
Waiting to ask a question about a legitimate election and president until after the results are being reported is almost irresponsible. The question will be the focus of blame for prompting a constitutional crisis when the actual cause will be Romney's political practices. During inaugurals, Americans consistently take pride in the peaceful transition of power but can that be considered an absolute virtue under any circumstances? And what is the alternative to passive acceptance when the facts require the rejection of an election outcome as illegitimate?
We think the question needs to be raised. We are in an extreme circumstance in which one candidate's strategy includes the manipulation of voting procedures to disenfranchise a significant segment of qualified American voters. We raise the question rhetorically. We are trying to start a conversation. The fundamental question: Are there any circumstances under which an American election outcome would be considered illegitimate? If so, what would we then do about it?
We are not challenging Romney's personal legitimacy as a candidate for president, which is the tactic the GOP has used on the president with birtherism insinuations and campaign phraseology like "We are the real America." Instead, we are simply asking if America must accept the illusion of a fair and open democracy after it is made abundantly clear that the election system is anything but fair and open.
How A Republican Appeals Court Just Made Citizens United Even Worse
By Ian Millhiser on Sep 6, 2012 at 11:20 am
One of the few silver linings on the Supreme Court’s election-buying decision in Citizens United was its holding that — although corporations are now free to spend as much money as they want to elect their preferred candidates — such spending could still be subject to disclosure laws [ http://www.law.cornell.edu/supct/html/08-205.ZO.html ] so long as those laws bear a “substantial relation” to “‘providing the electorate with information’ about the sources of election-related spending.” The most Republican federal court of appeals in the country [ http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_Court_of_Appeals_for_the_Eighth_Circuit ] just wiped away much of this silver lining, however, striking down a Minnesota law requiring corporations seeking to buy elections to register their political fund and make regular public disclosures of its activities.
In an opinion joined by six of the court’s Republican appointees [ http://www.ca8.uscourts.gov/opndir/12/09/103126P.pdf ], the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Eighth Circuit effectively reduced the Supreme Court’s endorsement of disclosure laws into a ban on disclosure rules that corporations might find inconvenient:
Perhaps most onerous is the ongoing reporting requirement. Once initiated, the requirement is potentially perpetual regardless of whether the association ever again makes an independent expenditure. The reporting requirements apparently end only if the association dissolves the political fund. To dissolve the political fund, the association must first settle the political fund’s debts, dispose of its assets valued in excess of $100—including physical assets and credit balances—and file a termination report with the Board. Of course, the association’s constitutional right to speak through independent expenditures dissolves with the political fund. To speak again, the association must initiate the bureaucratic process again.
Under Minnesota’s regulatory regime, an association is compelled to decide whether exercising its constitutional right is worth the time and expense of entering a long-term morass of regulatory red tape.
Karl Rove's Donor Plan Could Run Afoul Of IRS, Congressional Report Suggests
By Dan Froomkin Posted: 08/31/2012 6:10 pm Updated: 09/01/2012 10:20 am
WASHINGTON -- A new report [ http://big.assets.huffingtonpost.com/PoliticalAdsIssueAdvocacyorCampaign.pdf ] from Congress' nonpartisan research arm suggests that the Internal Revenue Service won't have much patience with the argument from groups like Karl Rove's Crossroads GPS that the ads it buys shouldn't be counted as political campaign activity.
The claim that ads attacking candidates aren't political -- as long as they avoid words like "vote" or "elect" -- is key to the empire of shadowy non-disclosing political groups [ http://www.opensecrets.org/outsidespending/summ.php?cycle=2012&chrt=V&disp=O&type=U ] that Rove, the Koch Brothers and other major political players have created.
By insisting that most of their budget goes toward "issue advocacy," rather than influencing elections, these groups exploit a loophole that allows certain non-political groups to keep their donors secret.
The Aug. 30 report from the Congressional Research Service [ http://big.assets.huffingtonpost.com/PoliticalAdsIssueAdvocacyorCampaign.pdf ] (CRS), first reported by Diane Freda for Bloomberg BNA, reviews IRS rulings on what qualifies as issue advocacy, and strongly indicates that the Rove-style ads wouldn't be a tough call for the agency -- which could revoke an organization's tax-exempt status.
For instance, a recent $4.2 million Crossroads GPS ad buy [ http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2012/08/23/crossroads-gps-obamacare-stimulus_n_1824444.html ] attacked four Democratic Senate candidates, using the figleaf of calling on them to do such things as repeal health care or "cut the debt" -- as if there was imminent action about to be taken on the Hill.
The CRS report notes, however, that "when there is no pending legislative vote or other non-electoral activity, the IRS rulings suggest it can be difficult for an ad to avoid being classified as campaign activity."
But the IRS has not yet approved its status. Should the IRS conclude that the group is primarily political in nature, the results could be politically explosive. Tax experts tell The Huffington Post [ http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2011/05/25/irs-karl-rove-crossroads-tax-law-donor-disclosure_n_866428.html ] that political groups that don't disclose their donations and expenditures to the IRS are subject to a 35 percent penalty on all donations that should have been disclosed but weren't and another 35 percent for the expenditure of that donation.
So a reclassified group could be on the hook for a 70 percent tax bill -- and might have to disclose its donors, to boot.
Campaign finance reform groups, including Democracy 21, argue that 501(c)(4) status should be denied to any group -- Republican or Democratic -- that is trying to disguise its political nature in order to avoid disclosure.
“We have long believed that groups like Karl Rove’s Crossroads GPS, Priorities USA and American Action Network are abusing the tax laws and are not entitled to tax-exempt status as 501(c)(4) 'social welfare' organizations," Democracy 21 President Fred Wertheimer told HuffPost on Friday. "That’s why we have sent a series of complaints [ http://www.democracy21.org/index.asp?Type=B_PR&SEC=%7B91FCB139-CC82-4DDD-AE4E-3A81E6427C7F%7D&DE=%7B995AF969-530F-4377-B56F-D593F766BB1C%7D ] to the IRS asking for these groups to be investigated and for the IRS to take appropriate action against them.”
Jonathan Collegio, a spokesman for Crossroads GPS, could not be reached for comment Friday.
The groups do have one thing going for them: IRS decisions in this area are based on individual determinations, rather than "bright line" rules. For instance, even when an ad refers to candidates or to voting in an upcoming election, the IRS states that "the communication must still be considered in context before arriving at any conclusions.”
Nevertheless, the factors the IRS takes into account appear to be commonsense -- and therefore inauspicious as far as Rove and others are concerned.
The reports notes among the key factors in determining that an ad has crossed the line into campaign intervention:
• whether it identifies a candidate for a given public office by name or other means
• whether it expresses approval or disapproval for any candidate’s positions or actions
• whether it is delivered close in time to an election
• whether the issue it addresses has been raised as one distinguishing the candidates
• whether it is part of an ongoing series by the group on the same issue and not timed to an election
• whether the communication is targeted at voters in a particular election
The ruling, in a suit brought by Rep. Chris Van Hollen (D-Md.), partly closes the c4 loophole by requiring disclosure of the donors paying for any ad that mentions federal candidates -- without expressly advocating for their defeat or victory -- within 30 days of a primary or convention, or 60 days of a general election.
Oddly enough, the loophole remains open for ads that expressly advocate for or against the candidates. So groups like Rove's quickly adjusted -- either by stopping their ads in the presidential race, which had already entered that time frame -- or by abandoning issue advocacy.
That solved the problem for now, but in the long run, will only make it harder for them to prove to the IRS that they are not primarily intervening in elections.
In reference to how Romney would deal with those with preexisting conditions and young adults who want to remain on their parents’ plans, a Romney aide responded that there had been no change in Romney’s position and that “in a competitive environment, the marketplace will make available plans that include coverage for what there is demand for. He was not proposing a federal mandate to require insurance plans to offer those particular features.”
F6 - your "Chuck Norris' dire warning for America - 2012" .. 3" down .. led me to wonder about his '30 million Christian evangelists stayed home' in 2008' .. ok, it looks like there were some 2 million+ evangelists in the USA in 2008 .. http://religions.pewforum.org/reports/detailed_tables .. i had the one below before grabbing that one .. hope hasn't been posted before ..
An extensive new survey by the Pew Forum on Religion & Public Life details statistics on religion in America and explores the shifts taking place in the U.S. religious landscape. Based on interviews with more than 35,000 Americans age 18 and older, the U.S. Religious Landscape Survey finds that religious affiliation in the U.S. is both very diverse and extremely fluid.
Key Findings and Statistics on Religion in America
More than one-quarter of American adults (28%) have left the faith in which they were raised in favor of another religion - or no religion at all. If change in affiliation from one type of Protestantism to another is included, 44% of adults have either switched religious affiliation, moved from being unaffiliated with any religion to being affiliated with a particular faith, or dropped any connection to a specific religious tradition altogether. ............... Insert: 1 in 5 Americans Admit to Choosing No Religion http://investorshub.advfn.com/boards/read_msg.aspx?message_id=77839499 ...............
The survey finds that the number of people who say they are unaffiliated with any particular faith today (16.1%) is more than double the number who say they were not affiliated with any particular religion as children. Among Americans ages 18-29, one-in-four say they are not currently affiliated with any particular religion.
The Landscape Survey confirms that the United States is on the verge of becoming a minority Protestant country; the number of Americans who report that they are members of Protestant denominations now stands at barely 51%. Moreover, the Protestant population is characterized by significant internal diversity and fragmentation, encompassing hundreds of different denominations loosely grouped around three fairly distinct religious traditions - evangelical Protestant churches (26.3% of the overall adult population), mainline Protestant churches (18.1%) and historically black Protestant churches (6.9%).
While those Americans who are unaffiliated with any particular religion have seen the greatest growth in numbers as a result of changes in affiliation, Catholicism has experienced the greatest net losses as a result of affiliation changes. While nearly one-in-three Americans (31%) were raised in the Catholic faith, today fewer than one-in-four (24%) describe themselves as Catholic. These losses would have been even more pronounced were it not for the offsetting impact of immigration. The Landscape Survey finds that among the foreign-born adult population, Catholics outnumber Protestants by nearly a two-to-one margin (46% Catholic vs. 24% Protestant); among native-born Americans, on the other hand, the statistics show that Protestants outnumber Catholics by an even larger margin (55% Protestant vs. 21% Catholic). Immigrants are also disproportionately represented among several world religions in the U.S., including Islam, Hinduism and Buddhism.
Although there are about half as many Catholics in the U.S. as Protestants, the number of Catholics nearly rivals the number of members of evangelical Protestant churches and far exceeds the number of members of both mainline Protestant churches and historically black Protestant churches. The U.S. also includes a significant number of members of the third major branch of global Christianity - Orthodoxy - whose adherents now account for 0.6% of the U.S. adult population. American Christianity also includes sizeable numbers of Mormons (1.7% of the adult population), Jehovah's Witnesses (0.7%) and other Christian groups (0.3%).
Like the other major groups, people who are unaffiliated with any particular religion (16.1%) also exhibit remarkable internal diversity. Although one-quarter of this group consists of those who describe themselves as either atheist or agnostic (1.6% and 2.4% of the adult population overall, respectively), the majority of the unaffiliated population (12.1% of the adult population overall) is made up of people who simply describe their religion as "nothing in particular." This group, in turn, is fairly evenly divided between the "secular unaffiliated," that is, those who say that religion is not important in their lives (6.3% of the adult population), and the "religious unaffiliated," that is, those who say that religion is either somewhat important or very important in their lives (5.8% of the overall adult population).
Even smaller religions in the U.S. reflect considerable internal diversity. For instance, most Jews (1.7% of the overall adult population) identify with one of three major groups: Reform, Conservative or Orthodox Judaism. Similarly, more than half of Buddhists (0.7% of the overall adult population) belong to one of three major groups within Buddhism: Zen, Theravada or Tibetan Buddhism. Muslims (0.6% of the overall adult population) divide primarily into two major groups: Sunni and Shia.
A Very Competitive Religious Marketplace
The survey finds that constant movement characterizes the American religious marketplace, as every major religious group is simultaneously gaining and losing adherents. Those that are growing as a result of religious change are simply gaining new members at a faster rate than they are losing members. Conversely, those that are declining in number because of religious change simply are not attracting enough new members to offset the number of adherents who are leaving those particular faiths.
To illustrate this point, one need only look at the biggest gainer in this religious competition - the unaffiliated group. People moving into the unaffiliated category outnumber those moving out of the unaffiliated group by more than a three-to-one margin. At the same time, however, a substantial number of people (nearly 4% of the overall adult population) say that as children they were unaffiliated with any particular religion but have since come to identify with a religious group. This means that more than half of people who were unaffiliated with any particular religion as a child now say that they are associated with a religious group. In short, the Landscape Survey shows that the unaffiliated population has grown despite having one of the lowest retention rates of all "religious" groups.
Another example of the dynamism of the American religious scene is the experience of the Catholic Church. Other surveys - such as the General Social Surveys, conducted by the National Opinion Research Center at the University of Chicago since 1972 - find that the Catholic share of the U.S. adult population has held fairly steady in recent decades at around 25%. What this apparent stability obscures, however, is the large number of people who have left the Catholic Church. Approximately one-third of the survey respondents who say they were raised Catholic no longer describe themselves as Catholic. This means that roughly 10% of all Americans are former Catholics. These losses, however, have been partly offset by the number of people who have changed their affiliation to Catholicism (2.6% of the adult population) but more importantly by the disproportionately high number of Catholics among immigrants to the U.S. The result is that the overall percentage of the population that identifies as Catholic has remained fairly stable.
In addition to detailing the current religious makeup of the U.S. and describing the dynamic changes in religious affiliation, the findings from the Landscape Survey also provide important clues about the future direction of religious affiliation in the U.S. By detailing the age distribution of different religious groups, for instance, the study's statistics on religion show that more than six-in-ten Americans age 70 and older (62%) are Protestant but that this number is only about four-in-ten (43%) among Americans ages 18-29. Conversely, young adults ages 18-29 are much more likely than those age 70 and older to say that they are not affiliated with any particular religion (25% vs. 8%). If these generational patterns persist, recent declines in the number of Protestants and growth in the size of the unaffiliated population may continue.
Major changes in the makeup of American Catholicism also loom on the horizon. Latinos, who already account for roughly one-in-three adult Catholics overall, may account for an even larger share of U.S. Catholics in the future. For while Latinos represent roughly one-in-eight U.S. Catholics age 70 and older (12%), they account for nearly half of all Catholics ages 18-29 (45%).
Finally, the Landscape Survey documents how immigration is adding even more diversity to the American religious quilt. For example, Muslims, roughly two-thirds of whom are immigrants, now account for roughly 0.6% of the U.S. adult population; and Hindus, more than eight-in-ten of whom are foreign born, now account for approximately 0.4% of the population.
Other Survey Highlights
Other highlights in the report include
* Men are significantly more likely than women to claim no religious affiliation. Nearly one-in-five men say they have no formal religious affiliation, compared with roughly 13% of women.
* Among people who are married, nearly four-in-ten (37%) are married to a spouse with a different religious affiliation. (This figure includes Protestants who are married to another Protestant from a different denominational family, such as a Baptist who is married to a Methodist.) Hindus and Mormons are the most likely to be married (78% and 71%, respectively) and to be married to someone of the same religion (90% and 83%, respectively).
* Mormons and Muslims are the groups with the largest families; more than one-in-five Mormon adults and 15% of Muslim adults in the U.S. have three or more children living at home.
* The Midwest most closely resembles the religious makeup of the overall population. The South, by a wide margin, has the heaviest concentration of members of evangelical Protestant churches. The Northeast has the greatest concentration of Catholics, and the West has the largest proportion of unaffiliated people, including the largest proportion of atheists and agnostics.
* Of all the major racial and ethnic groups in the United States, black Americans are the most likely to report a formal religious affiliation. Even among those blacks who are unaffiliated, three-in-four belong to the "religious unaffiliated" category (that is, they say that religion is either somewhat or very important in their lives), compared with slightly more than one-third of the unaffiliated population overall.
* Nearly half of Hindus in the U.S., one-third of Jews and a quarter of Buddhists have obtained post-graduate education, compared with only about one-in-ten of the adult population overall. Hindus and Jews are also much more likely than other groups to report high income levels.
* People not affiliated with any particular religion stand out for their relative youth compared with other religious traditions. Among the unaffiliated, 31% are under age 30 and 71% are under age 50. Comparable numbers for the overall adult population are 20% and 59%, respectively.
* By contrast, members of mainline Protestant churches and Jews are older, on average, than members of other groups. Roughly half of Jews and members of mainline churches are age 50 and older, compared with approximately four-in-ten American adults overall.
* In sharp contrast to Islam and Hinduism, Buddhism in the U.S. is primarily made up of native-born adherents, whites and converts. Only one-in-three American Buddhists describe their race as Asian, while nearly three-in-four Buddhists say they are converts to Buddhism.
* Jehovah's Witnesses have the lowest retention rate of any religious tradition. Only 37% of all those who say they were raised as Jehovah's Witnesses still identify themselves as Jehovah's Witnesses.
* Members of Baptist churches account for one-third of all Protestants and close to one-fifth of the total U.S. adult population. Baptists also account for nearly two-thirds of members of historically black Protestant churches.
About the Survey
These are some of the key findings of the Pew Forum's U.S. Religious Landscape Survey, which draws primarily on a new nationwide survey conducted from May 8 to Aug. 13, 2007, among a representative sample of more than 35,000 adults in the U.S., with additional over-samples of Eastern Orthodox Christians, Buddhists and Hindus. The study also takes advantage of the 2007 survey of American Muslims ("Muslim Americans: Middle Class and Mostly Mainstream"), which was conducted by the Forum in partnership with its sister projects, the Pew Research Center for the People & the Press, the Pew Hispanic Center and the Pew Global Attitudes Project. In total, these surveys included interviews with more than 36,000 Americans.
Detailed data tables .. http://religions.pewforum.org/reports/detailed_tables .. provide extensive demographic information on the 14 largest religious traditions, 12 large Protestant denominational families and 25 individual Protestant denominations in the United States.
Evangelism has played an integral part in spreading the “Good News” throughout the history of religion in America. From colonial times to the present, evangelists have used such methods as the printing press to the Internet. Rooted in Fundamentalism, the Evangelical movement split off from its roots in the late 1800s, owing to differences in opinion about interpreting the Bible and other factors.
Spread of Evangelism
Spreading the Good News during colonial times was accomplished through books borne across the Atlantic on ships carrying colonists, or printed by Puritans on a press they brought to Boston in 1638. During the Great Awakening of the 1740s, white Protestant evangelists proselytized to black Americans. The Methodists were most successful, owing to their belief in a “near” rather than “distant” god, self help, liberation from sin through conversion, and their lively preaching and singing worship methods during evangelical revivals.
Led by John Wesley’s denunciations of the evils of slavery, blacks joined the ranks of Methodists throughout the middle and northern colonies. Evangelical revivals empowered the lower classes, including slaves, to publicly pray and preach. By the 1770s, black preachers were ordained and many led their own Baptist or Methodist congregations. During the War of Independence, large groups of blacks joined congregations in Philadelphia, Baltimore, New York City, and Charleston, South Carolina. Tensions began to develop as disagreements mounted between whites and blacks over the issue of slavery.
In November 1787, white elders attempted to relegate black parishioners to a newly built gallery in St. George’s Methodist Church of Philadelphia. Charismatic lay minister Richard Allen, the Reverend John Witherspoon, the only minister to sign the Declaration of Independence; and several others, refused to comply. Thus, they began to pray at the altar railings, to the consternation of white trustees.
As a result, Allen and others established Bethel church, which became the mother church of the African Methodist Episcopal Church (A.M.E.) in 1816, the first independent, black-supervised Protestant denomination. Membership in the denomination grew in the mid-Atlantic and Midwest regions.
Following the Civil War, A.M.E.'s numbers increased throughout the South. Since the church acted as a forum for addressing the social, political and religious needs of blacks, many leading black activists in the abolition movement were ministers. The first National Negro Convention was organized in 1830. The gathering met at Bethel A.M.E. Church in Philadelphia, with Richard Allen presiding.
Although black church membership was predominately female, only black males could be members of the clergy, since women were barred from ordination until the 20th century. Even so, women led home prayer meetings and served on auxiliary, missionary, and Sunday school boards. They were permitted to become traveling evangelists by the A.M.E. church, but women could not head congregations.
Following Reconstruction, some blacks joined the ranks of those seeking election to Congress and other political institutions. When violence and disenfranchisement drove them out of political offices, blacks cultivated their leadership abilities in the churches. Those strong leaders laid the foundation for the political and social contributions later made by such leaders as Martin Luther King Jr. and Jesse Jackson.
By the end of the 19th century, black church membership stood at 2.7 out of 8.3 million evangelical Americans, with Baptists constituting the majority of its population. Other denominations, such as the Holiness and Pentecostal churches, sprang up with the emphasis on doctrines of sanctification and speaking in tongues. In 1906, at the Azusa Street Revival in Los Angeles, black preacher William J. Seymour sparked the Pentecostal movement that swept the country.
During the 1960s and 1970s, in the midst of social and political unrest, such black militants as Malcolm X were attracted by the Nation of Islam organization's separatist ideals. In response, black Christian clergy formulated a new central message as one of liberation from oppression.
Holiness movement
During the Holiness movement of the mid-19th century, Methodists held Holiness camp meetings in the frontier states. Methodist Evangelist Phoebe Smith, one of the founders of the Holiness Movement, wrote the doctrine of Christian perfection. Also during that time, Asbury College was established in 1890, along with numerous other similar colleges and universities.
Evangelism in the 20th century
Evangelism turned to elaborate crusades in the 20th century. Such preachers as Billy Sunday attempted to convince nonbelievers that they should jump ship from their ancestral Christian denominations, and that religion was to be set apart from secular daily life. Tent revivals occurred in which dynamic, charismatic preachers captured the attention of thousands of peoples concerned about the afterlife, and staged "altar calls" to baptize many of them.
With the advent of radio, evangelists took to the airwaves to preach their message. The first radio church messages were broadcast from Calvary Episcopal Church on January 2, 1921, in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. Such revivalist preachers as Billy Sunday, Dwight L. Moody, and Aimee Semple McPherson capitalized on the power of radio. By 1927, there were an estimated 60 religious groups operating their own radio stations.
In addition to radio during the 1940s and television in the '50s, Norman Vincent Peale and Billy Graham conveyed their message via the printed word on the largest scale in printing history. Early “self-help” books incorporated a Christian message and served as guides for living and thinking about life’s problems. Christian newspapers and magazines gained in circulation. Evangelical messages of salvation were found on the pages of the Christian Times and Mary Baker Eddy’s Christian Science Monitor. Even Christian romance novels hit the shelves when the “Christianization” of popular media began in the 1970s.
Few managed to make the leap from radio to television proselytizing, owing to its expense and demands. Nevertheless, beginning in the 1950s, Evangelism added to its Bible-based message a personality-based culture in what was called the “electronic church.” Billy Graham, a dynamic and charismatic public speaker, was the most accomplished at making the transition. His first nationally telecast crusade generated 1.5 million letters to the TV station. After the new form began to reach potential converts all over the world, other evangelists joined the ranks in the highly successful and profitable medium.
The new “televangelists” — Rex Humbard, Jerry Falwell,Oral Roberts, and others — captured millions of viewers and dollars as they established personality cults. People sent checks from their armchairs to fund everything from far-flung missionary facilities to amusement parks, before the roof caved in on the likes of Jim Bakker, Jimmy Swaggart, Pat Robertson, and Oral Roberts. In varying degrees, their credibility was compromised when personal and financial scandals were exposed, beginning in 1988.
As distrust of televangelists grew, a period of self-correction began, aided by the National Religious Broadcasters. They established an Ethics and Financial Integrity Commission that set standards for its members. A gradual shift occurred, from personality-driven evangelism toward the development of Christian entertainment programming with such television shows as Christie, Seventh Heaven, and Touched by an Angel that filled the national broadcast network rosters. Meanwhile, televangelists moved over to satellite and cable networks.
Israel, family values, and the Christian Right
By 1979, the young country of Israel played a key role in the Biblical prophecy of the End Days, a central concern of Bible-based conservatives. Support of the Jewish state became important in the fulfillment of the Evagelicals' and Fundamentalists' vision of Armageddon, the scriptural venue where an apocalyptic battle will be waged between good and evil. That backing of Israel has run in tandem with the traditional support given by political conservatives.
Since the 1980s, the Republican Party has espoused "family values" as a way to capture conservative votes. The term became widespread following Vice-President Dan Quayle's speech in 1992, when he stated that it was the breakdown of family values that caused the Los Angeles race riots. The term played a significant role in the re-election of President George W. Bush, who won the support of most Evangelicals in 2004.
Typically, family values are described as virtues that promote the nuclear family with traditional roles for men and women. The Christian Right takes issue with same-sex marriages, abortion, contraception, and single-parent households. Such organizations as the Christian Coalition, Dr. James Dobson's Focus on the Family (FOTF), American Decency Association, Parents Television Council, and the United States Conference of Catholic Bishops' Office for Film and Broadcasting, espouse family values. Efforts are being made to severely restrict or eliminate television programming that does not support those values. Dobson's FOTF radio broadcasts, websites, and child-rearing methods in Dare to Discipline books have done much to popularize family values.
Evangelism goes high tech
Evangelistic websites slowly cropped up on the Internet in the early 1990s. The first provided informational websites for real-world evangelists, but were later seen as missionary fields not previously harvested. Thanks to the anonymous nature of that interactive communication tool, people feel more comfortable about sharing their personal beliefs and faith with a large audience, or with one unknown person.
Recently, sophisticated websites have offered multi-media presentations that incorporate sound, written words, movie, and video technologies. Those sites also offer online courses and mentoring.
Conclusion
Although the methods and players have changed, the Evangelical movement has remained constant in the flow of America’s religious history. Spreading the Good News will be guaranteed as long as the Constitution’s First Amendment continues to be upheld by the U.S. Supreme Court. As stated, “Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof... .” With the most recent form of proselytizing on the worldwide web, the effects of that First Amendment guarantee will continue to be felt by those living in the United States as well as around the world.
Book Review: From Bible Belt to Sunbelt: Plain-Folk Religion, Grassroots Politics, and the Rise of Evangelical Conservatism Published December 27, 2011
From Bible Belt to Sunbelt: Plain-Folk Religion, Grassroots Politics, and the Rise of Evangelical Conservatism. By Darren Dochuk. W.W. Norton, 2010. 520 pages. $35.00.
[ .. another good read .. ]
The dominant narrative of evangelical politicization goes something like this: After decades of exile from public life following a series of embarrassing and highly publicized defeats in the 1920s, Bible-carrying Christians entered politics in the 1970s. Led by preachers-cum-pundits like Jerry Falwell and Pat Robertson, an entire generation of Christian conservatives mobilized in response to issues like racial integration, abortion, and gay rights. Almost overnight, this army of holy warriors, marching under the banner of the Moral Majority, descended upon the nation’s capitol with a goal of resurrecting the mythical “Christian America” of yore.
As with all generalizations, this narrative contains nuggets of truth. But, as Purdue University professor Darren Dochuk argues in From Bible Belt to Sunbelt: Plain-Folk Religion, Grassroots Politics, and the Rise of Evangelical Conservatism, the traditional account obscures a fascinating regional and political tale. This tale, Dochuk claims, begins with the migration of hundreds of thousands of white evangelical Christians from the “western South”—states like Arkansas, Texas, Oklahoma, Kansas—to the West Coast. And it ends with the political ascendancy of Ronald Reagan, who claimed the presidency in 1980 thanks largely to the efforts of a unified evangelical electorate. Building on the work of scholars like Lisa McGirr and Steven P. Miller, From Bible Belt to Sunbelt virtually re-directs the discourse on evangelicals and politics. “Rather than an invention of Falwell and Robertson’s Religious Right,” Dochuk concludes, “evangelicalism’s politicization was a product of an earlier time made possible by an earlier generation, a generation that came of age on the West Coast during Roosevelt’s time, not Reagan’s” (xxiii).
Dochuk divides his book into four sections. The first, “Southern Errand,” describes the Arkies, Okies, and Texans who migrated to the Golden State in the 1930s and 1940s in hopes of finding well-paying jobs. These Dust Bowl migrants carried with them their deeply held religious faith, as reified in the numerous Baptist, Pentecostal, and Churches of Christ congregations that cropped up all along the West Coast in these years. Soon, these evangelicals discovered that their native Californian neighbors were not always sympathetic to their Southern ways; often, these Christians felt that their beliefs were at odds with the dominant liberal viewpoints and progressive thinking that dominated California culture. Nevertheless, these Bible-believers were determined to “proclaim the gospel,” even in the face of certain adversity. These “Christian citizens living west of the Mississippi,” Dochuk writes, “believed that their true calling was to advance the Christian heritage passed down to them . . . not simply to preserve it” (13). To hear them describe it, these sojourning evangelicals were on an “errand” to Christianize California.
At least initially, Dochuk claims, southern evangelicals pursued their “errand” while simultaneously supporting populist politics, a proclivity they carried with them from the South. Although many came to the West Coast as Social Democrats supporting some moderate New Deal programs for economic stimulus, southern evangelicals soon split over the best party to endorse. Dochuk describes this political paradigm shift in Section 2, “Southern Problems.” Those who defected to the Republican Party often felt that they had betrayed their southern heritage and a political vision that rightly provided for the poor and dispossessed. Those who stayed true to the party of their youth were increasingly alarmed by California Democrats’ visions of a racially egalitarian, politically progressive New Deal society—a vision that challenged evangelicals’ notions of white privilege, self-determinism, and economic security.
In a few short years, political shifts within both parties finally forced evangelical Democratic stalwarts to the realization that a change was necessary. That change came in the form of an alliance between evangelicals and big business—an alliance that linked disenfranchised plain folk Democrats with pro-capitalist conservative businessmen and intellectuals, both Christian and non-Christian alike. Partially an effort to prevent permanent New Deal reforms from taking hold, and partially an effort to create a united conservative coalition that could challenge an encroaching liberalism at the state and federal levels, this alliance ultimately succeeded in bringing evangelicals out of the economic and cultural margins and into the mainstream. More importantly, this alliance worked to unite the politically fragmented segments of evangelicalism, enabling these Christians “to continue their errand for Christian Americanism together” (137).
And continue they did, though now with ever-increasing amounts of social and economic capital. Dochuk explores these demographic changes—and the resultant religious and political transformations—in his third section, “Southern Solutions.” In the postwar years, many of Southern California’s white evangelicals ascended into the burgeoning upper-middle class and secured lucrative jobs in the region’s expanding industrial and professional economy. Now secure in their newfound wealth, evangelicals replaced Depression-era economic concerns with fear of communist infiltration and “one-world-order schemes” (as they often described the United Nations). Southern-born celebrity preachers like Billy Graham drew on these fears to stir national repentance and global revival.
Meanwhile, evangelical entrepreneurs formed alliances with suburban housewives and right-wing politicos to create a subcultural network of evangelical schools and colleges. These institutions, they hoped, would produce students dedicated to Protestant nationalism and free-market values—the kinds of students who could pursue (and perhaps complete) the errand their southern forefathers had begun.
Evangelicals’ twin desires to protect their schools and their wealth now merged with more mainstream conservative aspirations—national defense, individual autonomy from the state, racial privilege—to spur political activism. In turn, their southern errand became more tied to conservative politics. Evangelicals increasingly believed that their goal of a Christian America would come not just through evangelization but also through legislation. Thus, in the early 1960s, California’s southern evangelicals joined forces with other conservatives, Christian and non-Christian alike, in throwing their considerable resources behind the presidential campaign of Barry Goldwater. Inspired by his conservative conscience, “California evangelicals enlisted their churches, schools, associations, and ministries” on behalf of the Republican contender (229).
When this campaigning failed to see the senator ascend to the White House, liberal commentators declared the death of conservatism and almost giddily dismissed evangelical activism “as a final, fruitless attempt to thwart modernity” (255). Their conclusions were woefully short-sighted, as Dochuk reveals in Section 4, “Southern Strategies.” Instead of fracturing, Southern California’s conservative coalition gained momentum after 1964—and evangelicals remained at the movement’s vanguard. Goldwater’s defeat, though momentarily disheartening, in fact set the stage for the ascendancy of conservatism’s golden boy: a former movie star named Ronald Reagan.
Here was a candidate that all evangelicals could rally behind. They had looked askance at Richard Nixon, suspicious of his sympathies toward silk-stocking Republicans like Nelson Rockefeller; they had supported Goldwater despite his Jewish heritage and nominal Episcopalian faith. Now, in Reagan, they had found a candidate who claimed their same born-again faith and who articulated a compelling political vision, as well. Evangelicals—comfortably ensconced in upper-middle-class respectability and pristine suburban enclaves by the late 1960s and early 1970s—praised Reagan as the symbol of a new, reputable conservatism. He would run on a Republican agenda “drained of the fundamentalist poisons of the past and in command of the political center” (266), proclaiming a “color-blind conservatism” that placated evangelicals’ desire to address “the race issue” without resorting to liberal schemes like civil rights activism or big-government intrusions like social programs (274-276).
Like no previous political candidate, Reagan galvanized the evangelical electorate, uniting them as a consolidated and influential voting bloc. Beginning in Southern California, evangelicals heralded The Gipper’s political ascendancy—first to Sacramento in 1966, and then to the White House in 1980.
Reagan’s presidency represents not only the success of California’s conservative coalition, but the maturation of southern evangelicalism. Once provincial and divided, these Bible-toting Christians now constituted one of the most powerful and visible movements in American society. They had cultivated more than a modicum of intellectual respectability and had achieved middle-class mobility. The success of their Sunbelt alliance—a informal network linking Los Angeles to Oklahoma City, St. Louis to Miami—could not be disputed. Evangelicals, in other words, had arrived.
Dochuk reaches this conclusion having done his homework. He rightly centralizes high-profile players like Graham, Reagan, George Pepperdine, Pat Boone, and “Fighting Bob” Shuler. He draws on primary source materials from a variety of archival repositories. (Indeed, how many scholars of twentieth-century American evangelicalism can claim to have researched at both the Pat Boone Headquarters and the Strom Thurmond Center?) And, wisely, he chooses to anchor his narrative with the voices of “plain folk” evangelicals. Drawn from a catalog of self-collected oral histories and sprinkled effectively throughout the text, the voices of these relatively unknown figures illuminate the lived realities of evangelical politicization. This hybrid approach—fusing traditional political history with a modified version of the “lived religion” methodology popularized by a generation of religious scholars—elevates Dochuk’s book above other recent studies of the Religious Right.
Further recommending From Bible Belt to Sunbelt is Dochuk’s attention to white evangelicals’ racial attitudes, a subject unfortunately overlooked by a great many scholars who examine this community’s politicization. Most take evangelicals’ feelings of white racial privilege as a given. Dochuk, while recognizing that racial privilege indeed motivated evangelicals at the ballot box as early as the 1930s and 1940s, is more even-handed. For instance, he locates Billy Graham’s decision to desegregate his southern revival campaigns as a turning point for this religious subculture, marking a shift away from Jim Crow-era attitudes while paving the way for their embrace of Reagan’s “color-blind conservatism” of the 1970s and 1980s. Dochuk’s treatment of Southern California evangelicals’ responses to the 1965 riots in Los Angeles’ Watts neighborhood (276-281, 294ff.) is particularly fascinating. More should be written on the racialization of these southern transplants—and of white American evangelicals in general—but Dochuk’s study takes a bold step in the right direction.
Nevertheless, the book is not without flaws, the most obvious being the author’s failure to succinctly define his term “evangelical.” Given the elasticity of this appellation even within the scholarly literature, it deserves clear definition; Dochuk’s oversight in this regard, therefore, is a significant one. Although it becomes clear even within the book’s first 80 pages that Dochuk’s evangelicalism includes segments of fundamentalism and even some theologically distinctive conservative Protestant denominations like the Churches of Christ, the absence of a singular, declarative definition of the term at the study’s outset left this reviewer feeling unmoored during the early chapters.
This, however, is but one critique of an otherwise stellar monograph—a monograph with a provocative argument far more nuanced than this reviewer has replicated here. Thoroughly researched and engagingly written, From Bible Belt to Sunbelt marks a major advance in the growing body of scholarship examining the roots of evangelical political activism.
In addition to the "dowry," Chao has also pledged to help the successful suitor launch his own business. He called the prize money "an inducement to attract someone who has the talent, but not the capital, to start his own business," according to CTV News [id.].
No news about whether or not prospective suitors have come forward, but it seems unlikely Gigi would be interested. The 33-year-old, who graduated from the University of Manchester and now works as a director at her father's company, was in a seven-year-long relationship with her new wife before they tied the knot in France.
The BBC reports [ http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-asia-19733003 ] that Gigi called her father's plan "entertaining," and has said she won't worry about it until a suitor has been found.
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