That Old-Time Religion
In an earlier post, I suggested that the United States, while flirting dangerously with the dividing wall separating church and state, was not likely to topple into a true theocracy in the near future. I assumed that people like James Dobson and Pat Robertson would disagree, since their clear goal is to create a theocracy, and I'm sure they have a 12-point implementation plan. While it is likely that they have already crossed four of these points off the list, I don't think they will ever get more than half-way. Eventually, practicing Christians, Jews, Muslims, and others of faith will recognize that compromising the separation of church and state seriously erodes their freedom to worship as they see fit. Society will start bricking in those parts of the wall that have already been damaged.
Since writing these words, I have come to realize that few of my liberal colleagues residing in northwest Florida are as sanguine about this outcome as I am. They point to solid pieces of research such as that assembled by Kevin Phillips in "American Theocracy," which provides a compelling case for tracing the push for a radical, fundamentalist, Bible-based government back 150 years to reconstruction. Although there has been frequent intellectual and societal recoil from an ultra-right-wing, religious takeover from the American majority, there has never been a total rejection of these ideas. The would-be theocrats are diverted, not defeated, and emerge from a new corner when the dust settles. Each time their advance becomes stronger and more pronounced before being driven slightly underground again. Now, of course, the ultra-right wing has fully taken over the Presidency, the House of Representatives, the Senate leadership, and many key positions among the judiciary. Dismantling these inroads is not going to be easy.
Yet I take my hope from the fact that although the House Speaker, Senate President, US President and four of the members of the Supreme Court are all proponents of a dicatorial executive favored by the radical Christian right, they still find that there are limits as to how far they are willing to concede religious control of the US government. For all the posturing and bombast, we have not passed constitutional amendments banning gay marriage, Roe vs. Wade still stands, and evolution is still the cornerstone of most public biology classes.
Still, dangerous trends cannot be ignored. Patriotism has become frighteningly confused with religous beliefs, so that the top forwards I receive via e-mail tend to have soldiers saluting the flag with the cross in the background, or some similar imagery. Our military is in danger of being confused with an arm of the church, to the deep detriment of both institutions. The Christian right is also wedded to the idea of facing persecution and attack from every conceivable corner, thus increasing the belligerence and aggressiveness of what used to be considered a religion of love and empathy. These trends can, if unchecked, topple the nation from democracy into tyranny.
I still think that the majority of Americans are made uneasy by the extremist wing of the Christian fath, and that we will stop short of the brink of theocracy. My county schools still resist lay censorship, and ensure that textbooks are centered in the reality-based community rather than the faith-based fantasy one. If we can hold the line here, surely we can hold it anywhere.
Let us pray this is true.
The End of the World As I Know It
I grew up in Atlanta, and learned to read from the pages of the Atlanta Constitution. The left column of the front page was reserved for Ralph McGill, at the time a legend in journalism. He crusaded for political and social justice, for tolerance, and a free society. My goal in life was set by the time I was seven: I wanted to be a journalist, write for the Constitution, and change the world.
Well, as fate would have it, I did grow up and become a writer for the Constitution. However, Ralph McGill had died, and his heir, Eugene Patterson, had moved south to make the St. Petersburg Times one of the premier papers in the country despite its small size. The Constitution had been taken over by Cox Enterprises, now one of the major communications monopolies in the nation and even then a souless and gray corporation. If I wanted to change the world, a change in career had to come first.
The submersion of the Atlanta Constitution into insignficance was an early portent of the eventual demise of print media. It has not died yet, but it has entered the end times. The primary culprit for the media at large is the same as it was for the Atlanta papers: the hostile corporate takeover of a free press. News pages are sanitized so as to not offend the sensibilities of Wall Street Boards of Directors. Columns and editorials are written to advance the interests of the elite, and not of the populace. There are brief shining moments, usually in the news pages of the Washington Post and the editorials of the New York Times, but they are becoming few and far between. By and large, the print media has abandoned its essential function of providing independent oversight of the doings of the great and powerful, so as to allow members of the public a chance to have input into outcomes of great concern to the nation.
The world I grew up in barely exists. Like many others, I dreamed of becoming a newspaper reporter the way that others would dream of becoming a cowboy or train engineer. There was romance, tradition, a sense of fighting against the odds, and, as it turned out, there was fatalism as well.
And even though this represents the death of a dream, it was a childhood fantasy after all, and I've put many of these aside without regret. I find that I have few tears for the passing of journalisim as I knew it. It is far too entertaining to watch the emergence of new forms of media. The mind of man (and woman) is an amazing thing, and, like nature, it abhors a vacuum. So instead of print broadsides, we have Internet blogs, talk radio, a renaissance of political books representing all permutations of conservative, moderate and liberal thought, and fake TV that presents more accurate assessments of the world than the "real" network TV does.
It's just the tip of the volcano. The conservative camp has commandeered talk radio, while the liberal intellectuals have discovered the power of the Internet, but each factor is taking note of the other's success, and planning accordingly. There are think tanks on both sides of the aisle, and impassioned (if often uninformed) debate on major issues in virtually every living room. More outlets of expression and news dissemination open up each day.
I had a lot of dreams as a child. Some have come true. Others have fallen by the wayside. Still others have opened up when I thought I had no dreams left, and they have often become the most enduring. Throughout it all, I have learned to embrace the present, and welcome the future, as long as I keep doing everything in my power to keep the dreams of political and social justice, tolerance, and a free society alive also.
Government by the Unbelievers
A lot has been said about the strong ties between the religious faithful and the Republican Party. There has been a strong push to ground our laws and Constitution in the Biblical intrepretations espoused by a narrow slice of the Christian right. Inroads by the morally self-righteous are trending toward the creation of a government by the believers.
While James Dobson is welcome to disagree with me, I don't think this movement will result in a theocracy. Even the most conservative courts balk at the complete disintegration of the wall between church and state, and the public is getting tired of all the selective Bible-thumping. If we are to be Christian, surely providing a safety net to our most vulnerable citizens has to be in there somewhere. The majority of citizens are not lined up in support of programs that cut the supports for children in need and students trying to get a college education.
Unfortunately, we may come a lot closer to destroying social programs than even our Republican Congress, state legislature and court systems would take us. The power grab by the executive branches of both our nation and state has extended beyond warrantless surveillance programs and illegal camps for "detainees" both in Cuba and in Eastern Europe. Those placed in charge of domestic programs have been equally effective in sabotaging the will of the people as expressed in Congressional laws and budgets.
Bloggers and pundits have occasionally disected George Bush's appointments within such agencies as Homeland Security, Department of the Interior, Environmental Protection Agency and the Food and Drug Administration (and a long list of others). Such positions are invariably filled by people who have either relentlessly campaigned for the destruction of these departments, or whose incompetence ensures that these agencies will function poorly, if at all.
Those of us in the trenches of social services know that it goes much deeper than that. Both national and Florida Bush administrations have a deep antipathy toward helping anyone but multi-millionaires, and their appetite for eliminating assistance to the indigent and struggling members of society goes beyond what even the ultra-right wing Congressmen and legislators can bring themselves to accomplish.
So they use their administrative powers to override budget allocations and popular programs. Subsidized child care is one example. Most Americans believe it is in the best interest of the country to provide quality child care for parents who work in minimum-wage jobs. Done correctly, subsidized child care could expose children to ideas, vocabularies and concepts that they are not likely to witness in families hounded by financial and social stress. These programs could hold the answer to breaking generational cycles of poverty and despair.
However, they are not functioning in this manner. For one thing, neither Congress nor state legislators will allocate sufficient funds for child care workers to receive anything above minimum wage, or get benefits other than FICA. Thus, our child care workers are drawn from the same class of undereducated, stressed members of society as the children they serve. Turnover is horrendous, as staff workers leave as soon as they can get a better-paying job at the local fast-food burger emporium. Child care works when children are exposed to stable caregivers who choose their careers rather than land in them by default. We are a long way from that goal, and pulling further away by the day.
But this state of affairs is not eviscerating subsidized child care programs fast enough, so our state government has moved to speed the process. The Orwellian double speak by which this is being done rivals the brilliance of the Clean Air and Healthy Forest Acts. In our case, we have moved toward "local control" of subsidized child care programs by setting up an extra management layer (whose control of child care dollars and direction is tightly regimented), without increasing the funds necessary to pay for the additional overhead. Then we renamed the program, first as "school readiness" and then as "early learning," and embraced the rhetoric of demanding quality and accountability to ensure that our little ones were receiving the proper attention and care.
No one could ever possibly object to quality and accountability in programs serving small children. But the rhetoric and the administrative regulations are not really designed to improve quality and accountability. Instead, they are set up to do the following:
1) Set up programs for failure, by demanding outcomes impossible to achieve or measure. For instance, local coalitions must demonstrate that all dollars spent result in improved outcomes for children. That sounds terrific, but exactly how does one do this? Coalitions are mandated to provide training for child caregivers. It is not enough to prove that the caregivers know more about each subject area when they leave as they did when they came in; they have to prove they applied the knowledge learned and that this had a measurable effect on the individual children in their care. Major universities with enormous research grants have struggled with this issue. Local coalitions with no resources cannot possibly measure such intangibles.
2) Insist that all child caregivers assess enrolled children as to strengths and weaknesses in school readiness at least twice a year. These assessments cannot be checklists, but must be exhaustive and thorough. Again, this is a great idea, but the recommended assessments have proven difficult for providers in college settings to perform adequately. Not many child care centers are staffed with college graduates looking to make $6.50 an hour. Further, these assessments must be compiled and used to direct future child care iniatives. Naturally, there is no funding for this either.
3) Require that Coalitions spend 4% of their overall dollars on quality initiatives, while serving ever increasing numbers of children with the same total dollar amount as was appropriated five years ago. Thus, the pressure on wages is ever downward, and the ability to turn even a modest profit on child care is restricted even further. Quality depends less on the number of computers in a toddler classroom, and more on the nurturing and creative capacity of the caregiver.
As in the case of the No Child Left Behind Act, providers who cannot meet ever more stringent and unfunded mandates are penalized through even greater reductions in available resources.
The same basic premise underlies the administration of every social service program I touch. The national government pledges to reduce homelessness, and does so by redefining homelessness to discount the majority of those who are living on the streets (you would be surprised to know that homeless families are not homeless according to the federal definition, because they are accompanied). More people, and particularly children, are deemed ineligible for Medicaid every year. Targets for mental health programs are set at insanely (pun intended) high levels, while the funding for services is ever more constricted.
Thus, the movement to eliminate the social safety net goes on under the radar, but is relentless for all that. It is time to acknowledge what happens when government is administered by the very people who don't believe in it at all, but rather consider it an opportunity to plunder by the well-to-do and well-connected. We pass on deficits to future generations, while ensuring they lack the preparation and skills necessary to handle the debt load.
Government by religious believers is problematic. Government by unbelievers is devastating.
