Boy Scout alternative, Tail Life USA, launches ‘premier’ Christian group for boys
By Cheryl Wetzstein - The Washington Times Saturday, September 7, 2013
Leaders of newly announced Tail Life USA said they expect it to become a “premier” Christian organization for boys and young men when it starts fully running in the new year.
Some 1,200 people attended the group’s national inaugural convention in Nashville, Tenn., which ended Saturday with a prayerful call for volunteers and donations.
Tail Life USA’s goal is to counter the “moral free fall” of the nation, and “raise a generation of faithful husbands, fathers, citizens and leaders,” organizers said. Its other mission is to provide a robust, Christ-centered alternative to the Boy Scouts of America.
At the opening session, John Stemberger, chairman of the board of Tail Life USA, teased the crowd that he would not be surprised if there were “spies” from Grapevine, Texas — BSA’s home base — in the audience.
That would make sense, since everyone from supporters to the curious want to know what’s being planned, he said, adding that Tail Life USA will not be “anti-BSA.” The conference’s theme was “Honoring the Legacy, Raising the Standard.”
Tail Life USA’s name, drawn from more than 300 options, was carefully vetted and is intended not to be political or controversial, organizers said.
“Tail” refers to a pathway and being outdoors, but also symbolizes the passage of life, where there are moral choices, and right and wrong paths, said Mr. Stemberger.
“Our whole life is about the tail, both in the outdoors and in the journey of life as believers,” he said. “So Tail Life is a way of life that is centered on following Christ in the outdoors.”
Organizers also unveiled the new Tail Life USA logo: It features a circle with a sun, mountaintops with a path, and a male figure with a hand extended over his head, beckoning others to follow.
Watchwords of the new organization are “adventure, character and leadership,” and “walk worthy.”
The genesis of the new group was the BSA leadership’s closely watched decision in May to change its membership policy and admit youth regardless of their sexual orientation or sexual preference.
In contrast, Tail Life USA will be inclusive of boys, regardless of religion, race, national origin or socioeconomic status, and accept boys who are experiencing same-sex attractions or gender confusion.
However, it will not admit youth who are open or avowed about their homosexuality, and it will not admit boys who are not “biologically male” or boys who wish to dress and act like girls.
Adult leaders of Tail Life USA will be Christians who sign a statement of faith and submit to background checks. Both boys and adults will be required to adhere to a code of conduct.
On Saturday, the attendees — many of whom have or had a connection to the BSA — hammered out details about the new organization. They ended the conference by presenting their organization’s sign — a right hand held up — and oath to do one’s duty to God and country and serve and love others.
The goal is to “become the premier organization that honors God and builds some great young men,” said Mark Hancock, one of the board members. People from 44 states, including Hawaii and Alaska, attended the convention, he added.
LOS ANGELES - A civil case that involves documents detailing two decades of sexual abuse claims within the Boy Scouts of America isn't expected to return to court until next year, an attorney said Thursday.
A hearing seeking dismissal of the lawsuit has been set for January. If a Santa Barbara County judge rejects the motion by the scouting organization, a trial date will likely be set, said attorney Timothy Hale, who represents a former Scout who claims a leader sexually assaulted him at a Christmas tree fundraiser in 2007.
Earlier this year, the judge ruled that roughly 120,000 pages of internal files detailing sexual abuse allegations dating back to 1991 could be entered as evidence in the case. The judge ordered the removal of alleged victims' names
The state Supreme Court later rejected an appeal seeking to prevent the disclosure of the documents, which have not yet been made public because of a protective order.
The lawsuit contends the files will expose a "culture of hidden sexual abuse."
Known as "ineligible volunteer files," the documents have been maintained since the 1920s and are intended to keep suspected molesters and others accused of misconduct out of Scouting.
Scouts officials have resisted releasing them and won't discuss their contents, citing the privacy rights of victims and the fact that many files are based on unproven allegations.
The Boy Scouts have been forced in another case to turn over such files dating from 1960 to 1991. The material made public in court detailed numerous cases in which claims were made and Boy Scout officials never alerted authorities and sometimes actively sought to protect people who were accused.
In its dismissal motion in the ongoing California case, the Boy Scouts said troop leaders are not employees of the youth organization and it was not responsible for supervising them. The agency said it's up to the school, church or service club that sponsors the troop to choose leaders and oversee what they do.
Hale, however, contended the youth organization does have control over the selection of troop leaders.
"The idea that there is separation between the national and local level is a mirage," Hale said.
The Boy Scouts also argued that it had no knowledge or warning that the leader, Al Stein, posed a threat to children.
Although there was some questionable behavior by Stein, incidents were never reported to the local council or the Boy Scouts, according to the motion.
The ex-Scout whose family filed the lawsuit was 13 when he said he was sexually assaulted by Stein, who was later convicted of felony child endangerment.
Alternative Boy Scouts of America focused on ‘sexual purity’ talks business in Nashville this weekend
About 30 members of the Boy Scouts of America protested in Los Angeles on Friday, May 17, 2013, because they do not want the BSA to lift a ban and let gays into the private organization. (Courtesy photo from Monika Cardinale)
By Zen Vuong Posted: 09/06/13, 1:30 PM PDT
An alternative — but still nameless — Boy Scouts of America is holding its inaugural national leadership convention this weekend in Nashville, Tenn.
Its membership policy will focus on “sexual purity rather than sexual orientation,” said John Stemberger, founder of OnMyHonor.Net, in a press release. That means its youth members will abstain from having sex until marriage, a “lifelong commitment before God between a man and a woman,” its provisional “Statement of Faith and Values” states.
“Our vision is to be the premier national character development organization for young men which produces Godly and responsible husbands, fathers and citizens,” Stemberger said. “The new program will be an exciting and motivating outdoor-based program focused on leadership and character development for boys and founded on principles and values that reflect a Christian worldview.”
The “New Youth Adventure Program” is a reaction to a May 23 Boy Scouts of America decision to allow openly gay boys under the age of 18 into the private organization. Its organizers plan to launch the boys group on Jan.??1, 2014, when the new BSA policy comes into effect.
Today, the Nashville convention will reveal the organization’s name, logo and branding information. Mike Huckabee, a former governor of Arkansas and FOX News Channel host, will be the keynote speaker at “Honoring the Legacy??... Raising the Standard.”
More than 700 people have registered to attend the convention, which will include more than 35 breakout sessions and workshops to brief attendees on the new program and get feedback, according to an Aug.??15 press release on the wall of On My Honor BSA’s Facebook fan page.
Aaron Saenz, president of San Gabriel Valley Pride, said he didn’t think the New Youth Adventure Program was a step in the wrong direction.
“That’s one of the reasons we live in America. If you want to start a group, you have the right to do so,” Saenz said. “(The Boy Scouts of America) is a private organization, and they could choose whomever they want to let in or not let in. The same goes with this group. The problem with them is finding funding.”
And, it could be a problem. Senate Bill??323, authored by state Sen. Ricardo Lara, D-Long Beach, would prevent discriminatory youth organizations from getting California tax exemptions. It is working its way through the Legislature.
“The true cost is on these vulnerable LGBT youth that are already suffering from bullying and trying to fit into a community,” Lara said.
Doug Boyd, who has belonged to the BSA for more than 50 years, said he will not attend the alternative BSA convention. But he receives its emails and is staying tuned. Boyd, 60, said he’s unsure he will leave the BSA even though he’s disappointed it chose to allow openly gay youth, not adults, into its ranks.
“I think (the Boy Scouts of America) put themselves in an untenable position, especially since they moved themselves in that halfway fashion,” said Boyd, an attorney from Glendora. “I’m very disappointed that the Boy Scouts lowered their standards. I think they opened themselves up to decades of lawsuits now that they have moved themselves out from under the Supreme Court’s decision that the Boy Scouts (as a private organization) has the right to set their own standards.”
Deron Smith, a BSA spokesman, declined to share his thoughts about the new group. He emphasized that the BSA has been around for more than a century and has about 2.6 million members.
“We’re pleased that the overwhelming majority of our members, families and chartered organizations remain committed to the Boy Scouts of America,” Smith said in a written statement. “We believe kids are better off when they are involved in Scouting, and we remain focused on our goal of reaching and serving youth in order to help them grow into good, strong citizens.”
To watch the convention from home will cost $24. There will be a live stream for most of the day.
MINNEAPOLIS - Confidential files turned over for a lawsuit set to go to trial in Minnesota may shed new light on the problem of sexual abuse within the Boy Scouts of America.
The documents were produced in litigation brought against the Boy Scouts and a former scoutmaster, Peter Stibal II, who is serving 21 years in prison for molesting four Scouts. Attorneys for one former Scout won a court order for the nationwide internal files, commonly known as "ineligible volunteer" or "perversion files." They cover the years 1999-2008, much more recent than similar files forced into the open in an Oregon case last year.
"We are intending to use those to show they have had a longstanding knowledge of the scope of a serious problem like Stibal," said Jeffrey Anderson, the lead attorney for the molested Scout. "They kept files not known to the troops and members of the public and had a body of knowledge that was not made public."
Anderson, who built a national reputation for frequent lawsuits in clergy abuse cases, declined to say what the new documents might show ahead of the trial that begins Monday in St. Paul. He said he expects attorneys for the Scouts to try to block the introduction and release of the files. He wouldn't say how many former leaders the files cover. But the release of more than 1,200 files in the Oregon case suggests the number could be large.
An attorney for the Scouts did not return messages seeking comment. The Scouts' public relations director, Deron Smith, said in a prepared statement that protecting Scouts is "of paramount importance" to the organization, which claims over 2.6 million young people and over 1 million adult leaders as members in its various branches.
"The BSA requires background checks, comprehensive training programs for volunteers, staff, youth and parents and mandates reporting of even suspected abuse," Smith said in the statement.
He didn't say whether the Scouts would try to block release of the files, but said the organization believes keeping them private would make people more likely to report abuse.
In the Oregon case, Boy Scout files made public from the years 1965-1985 revealed a decades-long cover-up, showing that men suspected of abuse were often excluded from leadership positions but rarely turned over to law enforcement. The files also contained accounts of alleged pedophiles allowed to stay in Scouting under pressure from community leaders and local Scouting officials.
Patrick Boyle, who as a journalist was among the first to expose efforts by the Scouts to hide the extent of abuse by their leaders, said the files could show how the Boy Scouts evolved in their response to abuse allegations over the years — or didn't.
"What's potentially powerful about these files is they can give us some idea of how big the problem has been in recent years, and might even give us an idea of whether the abuse prevention efforts by the Scouts have had any impact," said Boyle, who now serves as communications director for the nonprofit Forum for Youth Investment in Washington.
When Ramsey County District Judge Elena Ostby ordered the Scouts in January to give up the files, she also ordered the removal of information that could identify people named in the files.
Even without names, Marci Hamilton, a professor at the Benjamin N. Cardozo School of Law in New York and a longtime advocate for child sex abuse victims, said any release of new files might eventually reveal new perpetrators and new institutions such as troops, churches and schools where abuse occurred, emboldening other victims to seek justice.
"It can be a real wakeup call to survivors who have not come forward," Hamilton said.
Portland, Ore., attorney Bill Barton, who handled the first big abuse case against the Scouts in the 1980s, said he didn't think the newer files would illuminate much about what he considers the core issue, a history of Scouting officials minimizing the problem.
"I think the broad landscape's pretty much on the table," Barton said.
The Minnesota plaintiff is identified only as John Doe 180. His lawsuit targets the national organization, the local Northern Star Council and River Hills United Methodist Church in Burnsville, which sponsored his troop. It also names Stibal, who was accused of abusing him in 2007-2008. It alleges the national and local organizations knew for decades that pedophiles had infiltrated Scouting and should have known the danger Stibal presented. He was sentenced in 2011 to more than 21 years in prison for molesting four Scouts from 2003-2008. The lawsuit seeks unspecified damages over $50,000.
Anderson said John Doe 180, now in his late teens, did not want to speak ahead of testifying.
"He is a courageous young man who really stepped forward in a way that resulted in Stibal having gone to prison," Anderson said. "Hopefully through his actions other kids will be safer for it, and the Boy Scouts better for it."
For the Christian right, having a “faith-based” worldview extends far beyond claims about demons and angels. Unsurprisingly, the world of fundamentalist Christians is absolutely crawling with conspiracy theories, urban legends, and just plain bizarre beliefs about how the world works. Here’s a list of 10 of the weirder ones are currently in circulation.
1) Same-sex marriage is an elaborate scheme concocted by lesbians to entrap men. David Usher of the Center for Marriage Policy managed [ http://www.rightwingwatch.org/content/center-marriage-policy-worries-lesbians-will-trick-gay-men-fathering-their-children-and-beco ] to cough up a theory that is an outstanding blend of homophobia, misogynist myths about the mendacity of women, and paranoia about the supposed gravy train that is child support. He argues that women [ http://www.renewamerica.com/columns/usher/130821 ] will marry each other and conscript men into supporting them by “pretending they are using birth control when they are not.” The men will then “become economically conscripted third parties to these marriages, but get nothing in return,” presumably because the only reason a man would want to care for his own children would be in exchange for sex and housework. He also assumes that the only sources of income women have access to are child support and welfare; the possibility that women hold jobs doesn’t seem to occur to him.
Usher is trying to find a way to justify the increasingly ridiculous right-wing claim that same-sex marriage is somehow undermining “traditional” heterosexual marriage. He has zero-evidence for his claim outside of his belief that women are generally sleazy liars, and will “cheat” men out of the straight marriages they’re entitled to by sneaking off with women.
2) Planned Parenthood is trying to get kids “hooked” on sex. The anti-choice organization American Life League has been peddling the idea for a long time now that Planned Parenthood works like a mythical drug dealer, but with sex. The theory, summarized in this amazing video [ http://www.liveleak.com/view?i=04b_1329454586&comments=1 ], goes like this: Planned Parenthood lures otherwise asexual young people into thinking sex is fun (something they are dead certain that you would never, ever think if not for Planned Parenthood). They then trick them into having sex by telling them contraception works, but (evil laugh), the contraception doesn’t work and the young people get pregnant and have to have abortions. Which means profit for Planned Parenthood! This neat little theory requires ignoring both the fact that Planned Parenthood is a non-profit and that the overwhelming scientific evidence [ http://www.guttmacher.org/media/inthenews/2013/06/05/ ] shows that contraception does work, but ignoring facts and evidence is what the Christian right does best.
3) Gay men wear special rings for the sole purpose of giving innocent straights HIV. This one was trotted out recently [ http://crooksandliars.com/susie-madrak/pat-robertson-gay-activists-were-spre ] by everyone’s favorite disseminator of Christian right urban legends, Pat Robertson. “You know what they do in San Francisco, some in the gay community there they want to get people so if they got the stuff they’ll have a ring, you shake hands, and the ring’s got a little thing where you cut your finger,” he explained, suggesting there’s a serial killing ring of gay men who kill with HIV for reasons undetermined. Robertson backpedaled, but as Anderson Cooper suggested [ http://videocafe.crooksandliars.com/heather/anderson-cooper-takes-down-pat-robertson-o ], only because he got caught.
4) The abortion-mad Chinese eat human fetuses. This one is popular in anti-choice circles, because it hits both the abortion-obsessed and racist sweet spots. The claim is sometimes that the Chinese eat “fetus soup” as an aphrodisiac, because concern that other people are enjoying sex too much is always part and parcel of any anti-choice urban legend. This obviously false bit of racist propaganda is spread mostly through email [ http://urbanlegends.about.com/od/horrors/a/eating_babies.htm ], though prominent anti-choice activists like Jill Stanek have also perpetuated it [ http://www.jillstanek.com/archives/2007/04/sweet_and_sour.html ].
5) Crazed liberals in Illinois want to teach 5-year-olds how to have sex. A Chicago school district has implemented a mandatory sex education program for each grade level, leading Christian right publications [ http://www.lifenews.com/2013/08/30/chicago-public-schools-mandate-sex-ed-classes-for-kindergarten-students/ ] to accuse the district of practicing “pedophilia” by trying to get kindergartners to think about “sex and sexual acts.” While it’s no surprise that fundamentalists love the opportunity to titillate and outrage themselves by imagining kids getting blow job lessons, the reality is much more mundane….and pedophilia-preventive. Lessons for kindergarten and first grade [ http://articles.chicagotribune.com/2013-02-23/news/ct-met-cps-sex-education-policy-20130224_1_cps-students-stephanie-whyte-whyte-plans ] will simply be about anatomy, with an emphasis on learning the difference between “good touch vs. bad touch,” specifically so children who are targeted by pedophiles know to report what’s happened. But perpetuating the belief that evil pervert liberals are targeting innocent children clearly matters more to the Christian right than stopping real-life perverts who are actually targeting children.
6) Obama is the Antichrist and plans to rule America by sharia law. Even though you’d think Obama would be getting on with this plan already instead of wasting time talking about bombing Syria, the belief that any day now a combination of sharia law and the apocalypse will be brought on by Obama still rules in Christian right circles. Public Policy Polling found that an alarming 13 percent of Americans are sure Obama [ http://www.theguardian.com/world/2013/apr/02/americans-obama-anti-christ-conspiracy-theories ] is the Antichrist and another 13 percent entertained the possibility. Christian right-wingers are always on the lookout for “evidence” that Obama’s secret sharia plan is about to take off, leading to headlines likes this one from Breitbart.com [ http://www.breitbart.com/Big-Government/2012/08/03/Obama-administration-paves-the-way-for-sharia-law ]: “Obama administration paves the way for sharia law.”
7) Charles Darwin took it all back the day he died. This one has been around since the 19th century, but still has a significant amount of play on the Christian right, as part of the ur-conspiracy theory which holds that scientists are just making up evolutionary theory as part of a grand atheist conspiracy conducted for reasons unknown. Interestingly, this is one legend leaders in the Christian right have been trying to put to bed recently, with even the group Answers In Genesis [ http://www.answersingenesis.org/articles/2009/03/31/darwins-deathbed-conversion-legend ]—which believes that dinosaurs and humans lived in harmony [ http://www.answersingenesis.org/search/?q=dinosaurs+humans&search=Go ] together—denying that Darwin recanted his atheistic views on his deathbed.
8) JK Rowling is trying to lure your children into Satanism with her Harry Potter books. Hardline Christian conservatives have always been afraid pop culture is a conspiracy of Satan’s to attract impressionable young people, so it’s unsurprising that Rowling’s Harry Potter series, with its portrayal of fantasy magic, made the top of the list of products to be feared. The hysteria hit a peak in 2001, with fundamentalist activists accusing the books [ http://legacy.utsandiego.com/news/diversions/20011109-0838-religion-harrypotter.html ] of trying to “desensitize readers and introduce them to the occult” and “trafficking in evil spirits [ http://www.wnd.com/2001/11/11787/ ].” Things were made worse when the Onion published a satirical article Christian conservatives didn’t realize was satire [ http://www.snopes.com/humor/iftrue/potter.asp ], causing them to literally believe young kids told the Onion [ http://www.theonion.com/articles/harry-potter-books-spark-rise-in-satanism-among-ch,2413/ ] things like, “But the Harry Potter books showed me that magic is real, something I can learn and use right now, and that the Bible is nothing but boring lies.” The furor has died down somewhat, but plenty of evangelical leaders still routinely claim demons can possess your body if you read Harry Potter [ http://jezebel.com/teenage-exorcists-explain-the-dangers-of-sexually-tra-979711935 ].
10) Birth control pill turns your uterus into a grave littered with teeny-weeny corpses of fully formed babies. Kevin Swanson, Christian right talk show host, expelled this one recently [ http://www.rightwingwatch.org/content/swanson-wombs-women-birth-control-embedded-dead-babies ], claiming that “certain doctors and certain scientists” are finding that women on the pill have, “these little tiny fetuses, these little babies, that are embedded into the womb.” An evocative image, albeit one that requires not only falsely believing the pill “kills” embryos (it works by suppressing ovulation), but also simply refusing to believe that menstruation actually exists.
These are just a sampling of the stories you’ll hear in hushed, can-you-believe-it tones in Christian right circles, where the urban legend is a primary form of communication.
Miss America fits in at tiny, super-conservative college in Va., returns for second year
In this photo taken Aug. 19, 2013, Miss America 2011, Teresa Scanlan, who is now attending Patrick Henry College in Purcellville, Va., speaks to the Associated Press during an interview at the campus coffee shop. To an outsider the bikini-clad, Vegas-savvy Scanlan, mixing with fellow students at ultra-conservative Patrick Henry College, that caters to homeschoolers and regulates the private affairs of its students, may be a jarring contrast. But it’s proved a good fit for Scanlan. Photo: Manuel Balce Ceneta [ http://www.ctpost.com/entertainment/television/article/Miss-America-fits-in-at-tiny-conservative-college-4794867.php ]
By MATTHEW BARAKAT, Published: September 7, 2013
PURCELLVILLE, Va. — It’s a startling contrast to some observers — the glamorous, bikini-clad Miss America from 2011, Teresa Scanlan, finding her home at the tiny, super-conservative Patrick Henry College. The school requires students to dress modestly and “seek parental counsel when pursuing a romantic relationship.”
But the match has been a good one. Scanlan returned to campus in late August to begin her sophomore year. Among the things she loves about her classmates and her campus: “I’ve never had to sign an autograph, and I’ve never had to take a picture. Here, I can be just another student,” she said.
Blending in is not always easy for Scanlan, who won the Miss America Contest at 17, representing Nebraska. The youngest Miss America in more than 70 years, she spent a year fulfilling her duties and enrolled at Patrick Henry in 2012. She says the school’s workload matched the grueling schedule as Miss America.
The school was established in 2000 with the goal of giving home-schooled Christian conservatives a foundation to help them effect change in government, the law and journalism.
The school started with 90 students and a single major — government. It is still a tiny campus in the outer suburbs of Washington, D.C., but now has 320 students and five majors, including journalism, literature and history. The SAT scores of its students are comparable to top-tier state universities.
Scanlan, who came from a homeschooling family, says she wanted to go to Patrick Henry ever since she was 8.
She said she’s frustrated by stereotypes that some hold about Patrick Henry students. She recalled a recent photo essay published about the school that she felt went out of its way to depict students as cloistered weirdos. The reality, she said, is that while the students are Christian, they come from a variety of backgrounds.
“There’s this idea that we don’t struggle with the same problems, that we don’t understand real world problems ... that everyone comes from wonderful, happy families, that we’re close-minded and brainwashed. That kind of pushes my buttons,” she said.
The degree to which some people are willing to make snap judgments about her has occasionally taken her aback. As a teenager, she admits her schedule as Miss America and some of the accompanying expectations, wore on her. The negativity she faced from anonymous Internet critics was hurtful.
“To have someone look at a picture of you and decide just based on that picture that they hate you, and that they’re going to tell the world that they hate you — that takes some getting used to,” she said.
During her year as Miss America, she began to feel depressed and, at times, even suicidal. The depression continued during her freshman year, she said, when she found her coursework grueling, with a heavy emphasis on reading and writing. She earned a 3.75 grade-point average, but was disappointed because she had set a goal of a 3.9 or higher, which she feels she needs to get accepted into Harvard Law School.
She reached out to her parents for help during her spring semester, and she’s now taking fewer classes and worrying less about others’ expectations.
“I’m finally starting to let go of some of the stress, some of the responsibility,” she said.
While she loves her school, she said she has occasionally received criticism from some there who feel the Miss America pageant, particularly the swimsuit competition, is not compatible with a Christian lifestyle because it shows too much skin or objectifies women. Scanlan respectfully disagrees.
“I have never violated my conscience. I was never compromising my morals,” she said. “For myself, I have never believed it’s wrong for a female to wear a swimsuit that would show the same amount of skin a man. It’s a bit of a double standard.”
The school’s founder and chancellor, Mike Farris, also said he received sporadic complaints that Scanlan’s status as a Miss America was supposedly contrary to the school’s code and values.
“I don’t view getting into the pageant world to be incompatible with Christian values,” said Farris — who made his name as a lawyer defending homeschooler families.
Farris never had any doubts that Scanlan would be a good ambassador for the school. Farris sensed she could be a starter on Patrick Henry’s Moot Court team, which Farris coaches and regularly wins national championships.
“She’s very bright, a great communicator,” Farris said, noting she placed third in a regional in Moot Court championships as a freshman. “Yeah, no doubt I expect a national championship out of her.”
Kira Clark, a Moot Court teammate of Scanlan’s and now a roommate, described Scanlan as “a caring, incredibly ambitious, smart, compassionate person who puts her friends first.”
On the small campus, she said students don’t dwell on the fact that Scanlan was Miss America.
“We see her as a sister we can be proud of, rather than a celebrity we can be taking advantage of,” Clark said.
Despite her plans to reduce stress, Scanlan remains ambitious. On her LinkedIn profile, she lists herself, among other things, as “2028 presidential candidate.” She would be 35, the constitutional minimum to serve as president.
Farris, who designed the school with the idea of launching Christian conservatives into the public sphere, said Scanlan and many other Patrick Henry students set such goals and he encourages them to aim high.
“If they mess up and only get to be governors and senators, I’ll live with it,” Farris said.
Student from California gives birth in dorm room, bleeds to death
By David Zucchino September 6, 2013
Ayaanah Gibson, a pregnant 19-year-old freshman from Sacramento, was alone in her dormitory room at Benedict College in Columbia, S.C., over the Labor Day weekend. At some point, Gibson gave birth, lost consciousness and bled to death, according to the local coroner.
Gibson’s body was found late Tuesday night, along with the baby, which apparently was stillborn, said Gary Watts, the Richland County coroner.
"She died from a loss of blood due to a spontaneous delivery," Watts said in a telephone interview with the Los Angeles Times. He said Gibson, a chemistry major, was 30 to 32 weeks pregnant.
Watts said there was no indication of foul play. He said toxicology tests will be performed to determine whether Gibson was taking medication that might have interfered with her judgment or caused her to lose consciousness.
Gibson likely would have survived if she had received immediate medical attention, Watts said.
Gibson did not call 911 or otherwise seek help. She lived in a single-person dormitory room at Benedict, a small, private college in downtown Columbia. The school is located within 1½ miles of South Carolina’s three largest hospitals.
Benedict College is a Baptist-affiliated school with about 3,200 students. Founded in 1870, it is a historically black college.
The school identified Gibson late Thursday after her family was notified of her death.
"The Benedict family is deeply saddened about the unexpected loss of one of its students," the school said in a statement. "Please continue to pray for the Gibson and Benedict College Family."
The school said it has provided counselors on campus to meet with students and has kept the campus chapel open at night for students to pray.
Ed Suominen was raised in a small sect of Lutheran Christianity called Laestadianism [ http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Laestadianism ]. Of the 32,000 denominations into which Christianity has fractured, his is one of the more conservative. Members believe in the literal truth of the Bible, including the creation story. They eschew sins like drinking, dancing, watching television, wearing earrings, and playing school sports. They marry only within their own sect and believe God alone should decide how many children they have. Suominen followed the rules; he met and married the right kind of girl, and together they have 11 children.
“You set up an artificial chromosome with each digital 'gene' determining a parameter for some widget you want to design. Then you created a population of individual widgets by running simulations with different sets of randomly chosen parameters, and had the widgets 'mate' with each other. You repeated this process over many successive generations, throwing in some mutations along the way. Those widgets that worked best in your simulation had the best shot at having 'children' in the next generation.”
Outsiders sometimes scratch their heads about the dogged insistence of creationists that Adam and Eve actually existed 6,000 years ago in a perfect garden without predators or pain, until they took Satan’s bait and bit into a world-changing apple. How is it, 100 years after Darwin, that we are still fighting about what will be taught in biology classes? Why, in their determination to refute evolution, do some Christians seem intent on taking down the whole scientific enterprise?
The answer lies in Suominen’s lived experience. As he puts it, “You don’t have original sin without an original sinner. And without original sin...you don’t need a redeemer.” In other words, the central story of Christianity, the story of a perfect Jesus who becomes a perfect human sacrifice and saves us all relies on the earlier creation story.
After evolutionary computation cracked the walls of Suominen’s information silo, his curiosity and training as an engineer took over. He spent the next year consuming books about Christianity, by defenders of the faith and by critics. He wrote about his spiritual journey in a series of musings now published under the title, An Examination of the Pearl [ http://examinationofthepearl.org/ ].
Since evolution is what most compelled his fascination, he began exploring the various ways Christians try to reconcile biblical teachings and biology. The end result was a second book, Evolving Out of Eden [ http://evolvingoutofeden.com/ ], written with Robert Price, a Bible scholar and former Christian. Suominen launched the project torn between curiosity and a desire to affirm old beliefs. By the end, he confessed [ http://www.patheos.com/blogs/friendlyatheist/2013/06/10/how-i-lost-my-christian-faith-while-writing-a-book-on-evolution/ ]: “I was raised a fundamentalist and spent four decades living as one; I’m still not ready to call myself an atheist. But after co-authoring this book, I just can’t see where there’s any room for a god.”
In a recent interview, Ed Suominen discussed his life-changing journey.
Valerie Tarico: Your book is about evolution, both biological and personal. You’ve been through a change in worldview that most people can only imagine. Does it feel disorienting?
Ed Suominen: Yes, it’s a tremendous change. But I feel much less disoriented than when I was battling cognitive dissonance every day trying to maintain a coherent worldview out of pieces that just wouldn’t fit together. I’d come home from church on Sunday and spend hours or even days trying to recover my intellectual integrity. One part of my brain would continuously play the ominous soundtrack from my childhood indoctrination, repeated in church every Sunday: Believe or be damned. Meanwhile, another part would list off the hundreds of issues that made “belief” impossible and dishonest. And evolution with all of its theological dilemmas headed up that list.
It’s wonderful to be able to stand up and look over that toxic fog of piety and just see, accepting reality for what it so clearly is. I am happier now than I ever was in the church, despite the social loss of leaving it.
VT: Do you ever find yourself wishing you’d never opened Pandora’s Box?
ES: My old church had its annual nationwide summer services right near our home this July. Here I was, within 20 miles of a gathering of around 2,000 members of “God’s Kingdom,” which considers itself the only true church on earth. There were people I’d grown up with, people I’d been with in the pews and on camping trips for my whole life. They stayed in their place, and I stayed in mine, an outsider now. I certainly felt some pangs of longing. But it was only about the people, not the institution that envelops and controls them.
When I listened online to the sermons preached during those services, I wondered how I’d ever taken any of it seriously. One was all about Noah and the ark, and how God’s patience had run out when believers started intermarrying with people from “the world.” It’s an ancient myth copied from the epic of Gilgamesh, and this guy is sitting there doing a gross misreading of the text while taking it all very literally otherwise. The story itself is so ridiculous that many people in the church don’t really buy it. Yet it’s one of those things that you really are expected to believe—the Bible is God’s word, not to be questioned.
VT: How have your 11 children and your wife responded to your changes?
ES: While I was still wrestling with all this, my wife turned to me one Sunday morning and said, “I know this is how we were raised, but I’m not buying it anymore.” She had been doing some reading, too, and that was that. I had to study and ponder and write, even for a while after she made her quiet, no-nonsense departure from the church. She is a wonderful, bright woman whom I love and admire very much.
I respect my children’s privacy too much to talk extensively about their beliefs or lack thereof. That’s their business. But I will say that they seem to all be doing just fine with the changes in my wife and me, from the oldest to the youngest. Our home is a place where they can be free to think and believe, or not believe, for themselves.
VT: Would you say you lost your faith gradually, or might you describe it as a series of plateaus, punctuated equilibrium?
ES: Your “series of plateaus” analogy is an excellent one. I recall a few defining moments, starting with the realization that my God of the Gaps was gone. Evolution provided an elegant and tangible answer to the question for which the guided, supernatural process of creation previously had been my only answer: “How could all of these amazing forms of life, myself included, have just happened to arise?”
Then there was the upsetting day when I spoke with a preacher whom I respected (and still do) after sharing with him some of my thoughts about evolution. I asked him if I really had to reject human evolution and believe in Adam and Eve to be a Christian. He was thoughtful about it, but his response made clear where I stood with respect to the faith we both held dear: Yes, the fall of humankind in Eden is a foundational point of Christian theology. I wandered around in a daze for a while, sad and scared, but realizing that he had only told me what I already suspected.
I enlisted my friend Robert M. Price to see if there was any plausible theological solution. Dr. Price had been serving as a sort of spiritual therapist for me, helping me deal with the issues I’d been finding with my religion once evolution had “cracked the walls of my information silo,” as you adeptly put it. At this point, our work together turned into a full-blown writing project, and together we plowed through books by Francis Collins, John Haught, Kenneth Miller, and others who claimed to make sense of Christianity in view of evolution. But to us, despite trying to approach the theology with an open mind (which Price does even as an atheist), the only thing sensible about their books were their eloquent defenses of evolutionary science.
VT: Most creationists seem pretty adept at deflecting the evidence for evolution. Why did it get you?
ES: I saw it happening right in front of me on my computer screen. As an engineer with lots of software experience, I understood what the computer was doing. Simulated organisms were evolving remarkable abilities to move, swim, etc., and nobody was designing them to do that. Random mutations and genetic crossover between the fittest individuals in the population produced a new, slightly more evolved population. Repeated over hundreds of generations, it worked.
My reading did nothing but confirm this. All of the arguments I saw against evolution were made by believers in defense of their faith. I tried to look at both sides of the story, but it became obvious that there was only one side with any credibility. The other was just wishful thinking and denial.
VT: Out of all of the ways in which believers have tried to reconcile evolutionary biology and the Christian tradition, which seem to you the most robust or credible?
ES: That’s an insightful and difficult question, because the plausibility of these writers in the realm of theology seems to be inversely proportional to their acceptance of the science. You can head in one direction or the other, but you can’t have it both ways, despite their protests that they can. One of the most eloquent and level-headed about the scientific findings and issues for traditional theology is John F. Haught. Yet his tedious appeals to the “drama” and “aesthetic intensity” of evolution are so far off our credibility meter that it would be difficult to summarize our conclusions without sounding uncharitable. Our view of all these sorts of evolutionary apologetics, his included, might be apparent from the title of one of our subheadings, “Shoveling After the Parade.”
The most robust attempt to reconcile the irreconcilable may well be Philip Gosse’s “omphalos” idea that the universe was created recently with the appearance of great age. Of course, God created Adam with a navel and trees with rings! They wouldn’t be recognizable without those “retrospective marks,” after all. (Christians are faced with the same issue concerning Jesus and his magic Y chromosome.) It’s ridiculous and reduces God to a cosmic cosplayer, but at least it doesn’t try to dismiss all of the Bible’s clear teachings about a young earth and special creation, or fancifully reinterpret 2,000 years of Christian theology.
ES: The stakes are too high to expect much rational deliberation of the evidence, I’m afraid. For me, the evidence of evolution snuck in the back door when I wasn’t looking.
Perhaps the best thing to say to creationist friends and family is that you understand why they believe so strongly, and that you’ll be happy to help them whenever they might wish to look beyond those beliefs. The first and most productive step might be getting them to acknowledge, to themselves at least, that religion is the real motivation for every single argument against evolution.
On Election Day, November 2, 2010, more than eight million Americans voted for congressional candidates who claimed to represent the Tea Party and its grassroots insurgency against the federal government. Most of the Tea Party candidates won. Their victory marked a sea change in American government. Even before the winners were sworn in, reporters began to refer to the 112th Congress as “the Tea Party Congress.” On the day of the swearing-in, the prominent Tea Party backer David Koch likened the electoral success of the Tea Party to the American Revolution. “It’s probably the best grassroots uprising since 1776 in my opinion,” he said.
The proposals of the new Congress had little in common with the revolutionary slogans of 1776, but many of them would be familiar to activists who had participated in the grassroots uprisings on behalf of the rich in the twentieth century.
On January 5, for example, House Republicans introduced a “balanced budget amendment” that was really a tax limitation amendment—modeled on the precedents that the National Taxpayers Union and the National Tax Limitation Committee had furnished in the 1970s. A flurry of other balanced budget amendment bills followed. On January 23, Senate Republicans, led by Orrin Hatch, introduced a tax limitation/balanced budget amendment bill of their own that was even more restrictive.
The next day, Representatives Steve King (R-IA) and Rob Woodall (R-GA) introduced a one-sentence proposal to repeal the Sixteenth Amendment. On March 15, 2011, Representative Ron Paul (R-TX) introduced the Liberty Amendment, precisely as Willis Stone drafted it in 1956.
And throughout the session, Republicans introduced bill after bill to cut top income tax rates and make estate tax repeal permanent. Many of these tax proposals were regressive enough that they might have made even an Andrew Mellon blush. But they would have warmed the heart of J. A. Arnold if he could have lived to see them. They could almost have been copied from the 1927 program of the American Taxpayers’ League.
Thanks in part to proposals like these, the Tea Party Congress is likely to be remembered as one of the most conservative Congresses in American history. Scholars have described this rightward turn in Congress as “historic,” as “a new phase in the extreme ideological polarization of U.S. politics,” and as a “historically unprecedented development.” And they have pointed to unprecedented conditions to explain it. The historic segmentation of media markets is said to have allowed voters to surround themselves in closed and ideologically extreme social worlds. The influx of money into politics following the Supreme Court’s decision in Citizens United v. Federal Election Commission, 558 U.S. 50 (2010), is said to have given an edge to ultraconservative candidates whose policy proposals flatter the pocketbook interests of the very richest Americans.
Some new conditions like these are surely part of the explanation for how such radically inegalitarian tax policy proposals came to dominate the policy agenda of Congress. But these new conditions cannot be the whole story, because so many of the proposals themselves are old: not founding-fathers old, but early-twentieth-century old. They are the harvest of a century of rich people’s movements.
Why Rich People’s Movements Now?
What can we say about the sources of this new radicalism, and how long it is likely to be with us? The answers depend on a proper understanding of the history of rich people’s movements.
Even commentators who recognize that the Tea Party has historical roots might be forgiven for thinking those roots do not go very deep. Social scientists have noticed other movements that share many of the hallmarks of rich people’s movements—including the use of protest tactics by relatively affluent people; the fact that the activists were already fully enfranchised participants in the political system; and the fact that these activists seem to demand the preservation of comfortable consumer lifestyles, rather than the realization of some utopian vision of the future—and have argued that these are distinguishing characteristics of late-twentieth-century social movements. An influential body of scholarship on “new social movements” argues that protest movements took on these characteristics in postindustrial economies of the late twentieth century because economic development had made earlier agrarian and industrial class conflicts passé. The rising incomes of even ordinary wage earners made the late-twentieth-century United States into a consumer society. It is small wonder, to this way of thinking, that some protest movements today consist of affluent consumers protesting their taxes, rather than wage earners protesting their poverty. Another body of scholarship argues that the professionalization of social movement organizations in the late twentieth century made possible a mainstreaming of social protest, by taming the more disruptive protesters and by standardizing tactics so that they became easier for ordinary citizens to learn and apply in new contexts. Some scholars have also credited, or blamed, the mass media for the spread of social movements to the middle classes. Television, for example, brought images of the 1960s protest movements to middle-class households around the country, and thereby taught a new style of politics to previously staid suburbanites. All of these scholars describe how the economic and technological transformations of the twentieth century made the social movement repertoire available to ever-more affluent people. It is tempting to see the rich people’s movements of our time as the endpoint of these transformations—the newest new social movement, the capstone on the social movement society, or the last ripple in the widening circle of people who have appropriated and repurposed the political techniques of the poor.
Whatever the uses of theories like these for explaining the emergence of new social movements in the late twentieth century, they would miss the mark in accounting for rich people’s movements, because rich people’s movements are not that new. When the Texas tax clubs under the leadership of J. A. Arnold mobilized for tax cuts in the top brackets, they were not expressing the demands of suburban consumers in a postindustrial economy; they were advocating for the interests of rural bankers in a predominantly agrarian economy. When Edward Rumely and Vivien Kellems first began to commit civil disobedience in protest against the federal income tax, television had not yet brought images of the Civil Rights movement into the homes of millions of Americans. For much of the twentieth century, these movements relied on tactics that were decidedly old-fashioned even for their times. In the 1940s, Rumely used direct mail techniques to bypass existing civic associations and recruit directly, because that was the model that he had learned in the Progressive Party. In the 1950s, Kellems organized through women’s clubs, argued on the basis of constitutional rights, and attempted to inspire imitators through civil disobedience, because those were the techniques she had learned from the fight for woman suffrage. In the 1960s, Willis Stone recruited supporters for the Liberty Amendment through fraternal organizations and veterans’ organizations, because those were the organizations in which he had acquired his own civic education after the First World War. The tactics of all of these activists hearkened to the early decades of the twentieth century because these social movement entrepreneurs acquired their skills and organizing experience in social movement organizations of that era.
Many activists in rich people’s movements know that their movements have deeper roots in the early twentieth century. In particular, they have often portrayed their movements as reactions to the so-called revolution of 1913. The ratification of the Sixteenth Amendment, according to these activists, was a turning point in the history of the United States. It marked the end of limited government and the beginning of a new era of expanding federal power. If any great social change of the twentieth century paved the way for rich people’s movements, according to this story, it was not economic growth or the development of the postindustrial economy or the development of new communications technologies, but the growth of the federal budget; and that development, the story goes, was set in motion by the Sixteenth Amendment.
This activist story also gets the causal dynamics wrong. It is true that rich people’s movements would not have emerged in the absence of federal taxes on income and wealth. But such movements are not inevitable just because the Constitution authorizes progressive taxes. They did not emerge in direct response to the ratification of the Sixteenth Amendment. To contemporaries, there was no “revolution of 1913.” It was not until after World War I that the dramatic consequences of the new federal income tax became clear. Nor did these movements grow in lock-step with the long-term expansion of the federal budget.
By comparing the campaigns described in this book, we can see instead that rich people’s movements arose episodically in response to immediate policy threats. The particular policies that provoked protest were heterogeneous. The top statutory tax rates on income and wealth nevertheless give us a crude but serviceable index of policy threats to the rich. By fixing our attention on the timing of new campaigns, the figure illustrates the simple point that activists started these campaigns in the wake of policy threats. It was not heavy taxes that caused protest. It was rapid tax increases on the rich that did.
Two late-twentieth-century campaigns look like exceptions to the rule, but these exceptions are more apparent than real. The campaign to revive a tax limitation amendment in 1978, for example, began at a time when top rates of federal income and estate tax were stable. However, activists launched this campaign at that time in order to capitalize on an influential movement for state and local property tax limitation; and that movement was triggered by policy changes that produced a rapid increase in local property taxes. The revival of a campaign for estate tax repeal in 1993, at a time when estate tax rates had not changed for almost a decade, also looks like an exception to the rule. However, the activists who inaugurated that campaign were responding to a proposed increase in the estate tax, and their movement gained adherents when a previously scheduled expiration of the top tax rate was revoked. Even these campaigns were triggered by policy threats.
History teaches us that policy threats are necessary conditions for the emergence of rich people’s movements. Such threats help to explain not just when people felt aggrieved enough to protest taxes on the rich, but also who felt aggrieved enough to support tax cuts for the rich. In every case, the pool of potential recruits extended well below the top tax brackets. The non-rich sympathizers, however, always had particular reasons to see top tax rates as threatening—from the farm mortgage bankers of 1924 who feared that high tax rates advantaged their competitors, to the married women of 1952 who saw that they were subject to higher marginal tax rates than their husbands, to the upper-middle-income taxpayers of 1978 who saw that inflation could push them into higher income tax brackets. Many people like these campaigned for tax cuts in the top brackets because they believed they were also protecting their own economic security.
These movements took advantage of the structure of political opportunities established by the American constitutional order, which may help to explain why they seem so distinctively American. In Western Europe, affluent people who feared taxes on the rich in the twentieth century sometimes started new political parties. But they rarely used the sort of populist tactics employed in the United States, and they never made the sort of constitutional arguments that characterized the American movement. Perhaps it is unsurprising that the American rich and their allies turned to social movement organizing and interest group lobbying instead of third-party politics; the combination of direct presidential elections, single-member districts, and the winner-takes-all electoral system make it difficult for small political parties to achieve anything in the United States. But there is more to the explanation than that. These political institutions merely create obstacles to founding new political parties. They do not dictate which alternative to party politics will be pursued by threatened people.
Why did policy threats to the rich provoke grassroots movements instead of conventional interest-group lobbying? Given the ease with which many rich people have secured selective tax privileges by back-room lobbying, the choice to pursue universalistic benefits for all rich people by means of public grassroots lobbying campaigns is puzzling. The solution to this puzzle is tradition. The rich and their allies joined grassroots social movement campaigns because that is what they were recruited and taught to do by experienced movement entrepreneurs. Those entrepreneurs were passing on tactical skills and lore that they had learned in other movements. To call this set of political practices a tradition is to say that it is more than merely a recurrent phenomenon. It is to say that similar patterns recur because people learn from and imitate the past.
It may be that all social movements rest on a bedrock of tradition. For rich people’s movements, however, the existence of a social movement tradition was almost certainly indispensable. Short-term causes such as policy threats were necessary, but not sufficient, conditions to explain mobilization. Social movement tactics have a history; they must be passed down in order to become available to particular people at a particular time. It is doubtful whether rich people’s movements would exist at all today if activists did not have a long movement tradition to draw on.
Under What Conditions Do They Win?
The history of rich people’s movements may also tell us about their prospects for victory in the future. Even the wildest optimists in the Tea Party Caucus probably did not expect their proposals to become law, at least as long as the Democratic Party retained the presidency and the majority in the Senate. But the comparison of past rich people’s movements shows that such radical proposals may influence policies even when they are not enacted. Rich people’s movements in the twentieth century made extreme demands that made moderate groups appear comparatively reasonable. Sometimes they also used tactics that threatened public order—for example, by calling on businesses to disobey the Internal Revenue Service, or plausibly threatening to call a constitutional convention that could throw American politics into turmoil—and thereby permitted moderate conservatives to sell their own preferred policies as ways to co-opt an unruly movement and restore order. The Tea Party may have similar effects. Its activists have not won the war against the income tax, nor are they likely to repeal the Sixteenth Amendment. By keeping radical tax proposals on the policy agenda, however, they have positioned a radical flank for battles to come.
The history of rich people’s movements shows that the mobilization of a radical flank can indeed influence the shape of federal tax policy. Influential Republican politicians sometimes felt compelled to propose tax cuts in order to obviate the need for more radical proposals to repeal the Sixteenth Amendment. The Republican chairman of the House Ways and Means Committee, Daniel Alden Reed of New York, made this argument explicitly to his collegues in 1944. “[T]he movement to limit federal tax rates by constitutional amendment should be noted,” he wrote; “One way to meet this issue is by voluntary Congressional action to establish moderate tax rate levels.” So did the presidential candidate Dwight David Eisenhower in 1952, when he wrote that “a prudent and positive administration should be able to approach the goal which the amendment seeks without the difficulty and dangers involved in the adoption or continuing operation of such an amendment to our Constitution.” There is no evidence that rich people’s movements had any direct influence on legislation under these leaders. But in a handful of other instances, including the Revenue Act of 1926, the ERTA of 1981, and the EGTRRA of 2001, there is evidence—in the timing of the laws, in the geographic distribution of legislators’ support, and in the statements of some members of Congress—that at least some provisions of the law were intended as responses to movement demands. These acts legislated some of the largest tax cuts in American history. So it is that rich people’s movements, through their influence on the ERTA and the EGTRRA, made a small but real contribution to the growing income inequality—the rise of the so-called 1 percent—that is one of the most important social changes of our time.
Sometimes rich people’s movements had an impact, but at other times, the radical rich found themselves isolated and powerless. Their failure to influence policy is most evident in the case of the Sixteenth Amendment repealers. The activists of the American Taxpayers’ Association and the Committee for Constitutional Government tried for two decades to bend federal tax policy toward greater inequality, with no measurable success. Their peak years of mobilization corresponded to the years when federal income tax rates were highest, and yet there is little evidence that they were able to pull top tax rates down. It is possible that these movements may have exercised a kind of diffuse cultural influence, and thereby helped to restrain policymakers by swaying public opinion against progressive taxation; perhaps federal revenues would have grown even more rapidly in the absence of their grassroots pressure. History does not give us a comparison case that would provide the critical test of this hypothesis. But it is clear that, in many instances, their efforts had no immediate impact. Consider the Liberty Amendment campaign. The peak years of the Liberty Amendment Committee coincided with one of the biggest income tax cuts in American history, but the activists could claim no credit for the Kennedy-Johnson tax cuts. Their radical posture condemned them to stand on the sidelines while liberal technocrats cut rich people’s taxes.
Why were these movements sometimes so influential and other times so impotent? The comparison of campaigns shows that geographically dispersed grassroots mobilization made a difference. Activists sometimes had particular influence when they were able to mobilize in congressional swing districts, as when the tax clubs swayed the votes of Representatives Green and Garner in 1926. As the comparisons across states have shown, policy crafting was also crucial for allowing these activists to get tax cuts for the rich on the policy agenda. Some tax cuts for the rich could not get a serious hearing because they were too politically costly. Activists had the greatest impact when they were willing to craft their policy demands to obscure these costs, and package their favored tax cuts with additional policy benefits for new allies.
But to move beyond agenda access to influence legislation required more than clever policy crafting. It also required a critical mass of ideological allies in Congress and the presidency. There were only three presidents in the last century who allied themselves openly with rich people’s movements—Calvin Coolidge, Ronald Reagan, and George W. Bush—and it was during their administrations that these movements exercised the greatest sway over legislative outcomes. The late-twentieth-century movement for estate tax repeal provides a critical test of presidential influence. Activists managed to get the Death Tax Elimination Act through both houses of Congress, only to have it vetoed by President Bill Clinton in 2000. Estate tax repeal would become law the following year, when President Bush signed the EGTRRA. The support of the president made the difference.
The program of the party that controlled Congress mattered too. Both the Revenue Act of 1926 and the EGTRRA of 2001 passed Congress when it was united under conservative Republican control. The ERTA of 1981 does not quite fit this pattern. It was passed by a divided Congress, with the help of some Democratic votes in the House. Even in this case, however, it was near-unanimous Republican support that made it possible; and congressional Democrats were under extraordinary pressure from a popular Republican president and an assertive grassroots campaign that nearly called a constitutional convention.
Rich people’s movements, in short, may influence policy when their partisan allies have control of elected policymaking bodies. For this reason, the most important legacy of rich people’s movements for American politics may be the capture of the Republican Party by veteran activists of these movements in the twenty-first century. This also may be the most important lesson of rich people’s movements for students of other American social movements. Sociologists know that activists are most likely to win collective benefits from policymakers when those policymakers are their partisan allies. But our most successful theoretical models of social movements persist in treating the party in power as an external condition, like the weather. The lesson that social movement scholars have drawn from their studies is that a movement may be most influential when its grassroots campaign is timed to match a window of political opportunity opened by its partisan allies in office. The most astute activists in twentieth-century rich people’s movements saw the same historical pattern, but they drew a different conclusion. The lesson they drew was not that they should time their actions carefully, or wait for partisan allies to show up and open a window of political opportunity. It was that they should take over a political party.
The Century of Rich People’s Movements
The first century of rich people’s movements is over. Rich people’s movements emerged in response to big wartime increases in the progressive rates of income tax and estate tax; comparable tax increases are almost unimaginable today. The most influential social movement entrepreneurs who led these movements acquired their skills in social movement organizations of the Progressive Era, and those movements and organizations are mostly long gone too. Rich people’s movements have been thoroughly institutionalized and thereby tamed. Many former activists are now well entrenched in the Republican Party and its allied think tanks, and their tactics are now correspondingly oriented toward inside lobbying. Some movement goals remain unrealized only because they are nigh unachievable. The barriers to amending the Constitution are so high, for example, that the Sixteenth Amendment will almost certainly remain unrepealed. For all of these reasons, it is tempting to think that the story told here is at an end.
I think it is much more likely that the story of rich people’s movements is just beginning. The Tea Party may prove to have been a flash in the pan. The long-term trends, however, suggest that something like it will be back. The population of the United States is growing older. The cost of caring for our elders and our sick loved ones continues to rise. For these reasons, the pressure on the federal budget is unlikely to abate. Pressure on the budget means that pressure for tax increases is unlikely to go away; and the threat of tax increases, in turn, is likely to stimulate more protest. Even when a tax increase can be targeted to a narrow segment of the richest Americans, it is likely to provoke a broader backlash, if people lower in the income distribution believe that this policy change signals further tax increases to come. People need not be dupes in order to protest on behalf of others who are richer than they are. The activists and supporters of rich people’s movements were defending their own real interests, as they saw them. A tax increase on the richest 1 percent may be perceived by many upper-middle-income property owners as the first step in a broader assault on property rights. When it is so perceived, we can expect a movement in defense of the rich.
Knowledge of the history of rich people’s movements will not allow us to predict the date when these movements will arise, or who exactly will join them. Such movements do not arrive like clockwork, any more than tax increases do. What we can predict is that some people will be ready to protest when policy threats come. We can also predict that some skilled movement entrepreneurs will be ready to help them organize. The proliferation of professional tax protest organizations since the 1970s has given rise to a generation of skilled movement entrepreneurs whose experience in rich people’s movements equips them for future campaigns. When policy threats make people ready to protest, there will be no shortage of movement entrepreneurs who have the skills and the mailing lists to recruit them.
No doubt the rich people’s movements of the future will also surprise us. They will exploit new technologies and organizing techniques. They will draw on some very old arguments and policy ideas, but they will recombine them and thereby invent some new ones. They will craft their policy proposals to recruit strange-bedfellows coalitions, just as their predecessors did. We can be confident that they will also continue to have all of the characteristics that so baffled observers of rich people’s movements in the twentieth century. They will use the traditional tactics of the poor on behalf of tax cuts for the rich. They will behave like outsiders, but demand policies designed to benefit people who are consummate insiders in American politics. They will include many protesters who look unusually well heeled, and who will demand collective benefits for people even better off than themselves.
Rich people’s movements have a permanent place in the American political bestiary. As long as one of our great political parties is programmatically allied with the radical rich, it is safe to predict that rich people’s movements will continue to influence public policy in ways that preserve—and perhaps even increase—the extremes of inequality in America.
Reprinted from “Rich People’s Movements [ http://www.amazon.com/dp/0199928991 ]” by Isaac William Martin with permission from Oxford University Press USA and published by Oxford University Press USA ( http://www.oup.com/us ).
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