Month: December 2017

MY HOLIDAY WISH: NO MORE YEAR-END REVIEWS

Just one year ago, the biggest quandary for many of us was how to get through the holidays without decking a gloating red neck relative wearing a MAGA cap. The challenge this year? How to avoid those painfully insufferable year-in-review retrospectives. It was bad enough the first time. Inflated inaugural crowd figures. Alternative facts. Muslim bans. Death and hate in Charlottesville. Scaramucci’s 10-day reign of terror. I’d rather have a colonoscopy without anesthesia than be forced to meander down that memory lane.

That’s why we are closing the shop for a few weeks and heading to a warmer clime, one where it is easier to tune the outside world out for a spell. By “we”, I am including Melissa, my lovely bride and diligent copy editor.

Together, we have produced 108 blog posts since initiating this endeavor in the fall of 2016. It has been the perfect retirement activity for me. I am congenitally unable to pound two boards together, paint (either a portrait or a wall), repair small machinery, hunt, fish or perform other manly arts. Since all the good mall benches were taken, I decided to give blogging a shot.

It has been an immensely enjoyable and rewarding experience. Researching various issues, thinking them out, and expounding on them – all without giving a hoot about a publisher’s profit margin – has been a dream come true. So thank you, dear readers, for making it possible to start a new “career” at this late stage of life. Old journalists don’t die, they just blog away! I will be back doing just that in late January. Meanwhile, Happy Holidays to all of you.

SAVOR THE MOMENT: ROY MOORE ISN’T A SENATOR

Sometimes it takes a really good day for us to grasp just how bad things are. For liberals, yesterday was that kind of day. Those of us on the left end of spectrum went into a euphoric frenzy at 9:24 p.m. CST Tuesday. That’s when the AP called the special Alabama Senate election for the Democrat. We tossed exclamation points at social media posts like drunken sailors, and wondered when it was that we last felt this good. The consensus was either Woodstock or Obama’s first inauguration.

Then we woke up the next morning. It still felt good, except for those of us in the geezerhood who should know better than to over-pump our arthritic arms into the wee hours of a new day. Yet, there in the dawn’s new light, we slowly grasped the perspective and parameters of our jubilation. The source of our abiding joy was the surprising realization that a disgusting, homophobic, racist, misogynistic, accused child molester of a troll named Roy Moore was not going to become a United States Senator from Alabama. Against all odds, he was defeated by a margin of 1.5 percent by a seemingly decent, if unknown, guy named Doug Jones, the first Democrat in more than 25 years to win a state-wide election in Alabama.

Hubert H. Humphrey, an architect of modern liberalism, once said that the moral test of government is how it treats “those who are in the dawn of life; . . . those who are in the twilight of life; . . . and those who are in the shadows of life . . .” This was the great moral fiber that paved the way for Head Start, Social Security, Medicare, the Civil Rights Act and anti-poverty programs. Those were the kind of victories that liberals once cheered in a bygone era.

Now we get excited when the U.S. Senate is spared a despicable worm like Moore, twice removed from his state judgeship for a complete disregard for the rule of law. That’s how bad things are in this country. Keeping one more malignant goiter from attaching itself to our body politic is as good as it gets for liberals right now. We have every right to savor the electoral demise of Roy Moore and, with it, the stinging loss it represents for his fellow traveler in bigotry and sexual misconduct, Donald J. Trump. After all, Humphrey also taught us this about navigating a successful progressive movement: “Never give in and never give up.” Small victories have a way of multiplying into bigger ones.

That’s not to deny the core reality that these are painfully dark, grim times in these United States. We have a moronic, megalomaniac of a president who, according to Washington Post fact checkers, lied 1,628 times during his first 298 days in office. He has taken incivility to new heights and has emboldened and licensed an army of freelance bigots to bully, castigate and demean people on the basis of their race, religion, sexual orientation and national origin. Meanwhile, Congressional Republicans are on the verge of passing a tax bill that will redistribute even more wealth to corporations and the rich, at the expense of middle class families struggling to maintain a decent standard of living.

Does the Alabama Senate election change any part of this bleak equation? No, at least not immediately. But it gives us something that is essential to our movement for transformational change. It gives us hope. At a time of intense cynicism and hyper-partisanship, one of the most Republican states in the country said values, decency and dignity matter more than party and Trump’s ego-driven agenda. Granted, Alabama voters didn’t deliver that message by a large margin. But they said it in a way that counted. Given what we’ve been through this year, that’s worth a few moments of euphoria.

TIME TO LET GAYS MARRY AND HAVE THEIR CAKE TOO

Poor Antonin Scalia. He missed the dessert course of gay rights cases at the Supreme Court this week. Only his untimely death could have kept this corpulent originalist from an oral argument banquet he knew was coming long before he died. The question before the Supremes? Can an anti-gay-marriage baker refuse to make a wedding cake for two grooms?

Nobody could have anticipated a wedding cake dialectic back in 1986. That was when the Court decided Bowers v. Hardwick, a ruling that upheld state sodomy statutes criminalizing sexual relations between same-sex partners. The majority held that the Constitution confers no protections on gays and lesbians.

Seventeen years later, however, the Court embarked on what Scalia considered a slippery slope “to end all morals.” In 2003, the Court reversed its earlier decision and, in Lawrence v. Texas, said laws effectively banning gay sex were unconstitutional. Although none of the litigators in that case were even remotely thinking about gay marriage back then, Scalia was several chess moves ahead. In a sharply crafted dissent, he prophetically predicted that it was only a matter of time before the Court would be fighting over gay wedding cakes.

If “homosexual conduct” is no longer proscribed, Scalia posited in his dissent, “what justification could there possibly be for denying the benefits of marriage to homosexual couples exercising the liberty protected by the Constitution?” Those words, although composed in a font of deep sarcasm, later served as the plaintiffs’ road map in legal battles that brought down the Defense of Marriage Act in 2013 and, finally, in 2015, established the constitutional right to marry for gay and lesbian couples.

Scalia didn’t know whether it would be a butcher, a baker or a candlestick maker, but he was pretty certain that this “slippery slope” of gay rights would one day end up with a hoot and a holler from somewhere in the vast matrimonial industrial complex. Stepping up to prove him right was Colorado baker Jack Phillips. The betrothed couple, David Mullins and Charlie Craig, went to Phillips’ Masterpiece Cakeshop to order a cake for their wedding. The baker told them he was personally opposed to gay marriage and, for that reason, would not bake them a wedding cake.

Mullins and Craig argue that Phillips’ refusal to do business with them violated Colorado’s law prohibiting discrimination on the basis of sexual orientation. The Colorado Civil Rights Commission agreed, and found Phillips in violation of the statute. The issue before the Supreme Court this week was over whether the baker’s free speech rights were violated. Phillips argued that the act of making a cake for a gay wedding was, in effect, forced speech in support of the marriage.

Don’t let the relative frivolity of a wedding cake fool you. There’s a lot more than dessert riding on this case. If the baker gets a judicial pass to discriminate against lesbians and gays, a long line of other vendors are likely to emerge: dress makers, florists, photographers, caterers, venue owners. And that’s just in the context of weddings. In Colorado and at least 21 other states, it is against the law to discriminate in hiring on the basis of sexual orientation. If the baker wins this case, it’s not a stretch to imagine homophobic employers passing over LGBT applicants based on “free speech” rights.

The history of civil rights legislation is replete with demands for exceptions to discrimination bans, but those adopted have been narrowly and specifically defined in the statute. For example, a religious institution may limit hiring to practitioners of that religion. The “free speech” exemption is a dishonest and absurdist escape from the very intent of nondiscrimination laws. Using the Colorado baker’s argument, a racist landlord could refuse to rent an apartment to blacks on the basis that to do so would be “forced speech”, namely that he approves of black people.

In the real world, selling a cake for a gay wedding, or renting an apartment to a black family, endorses neither the marriage nor the tenants. It simply follows the law. In the public marketplace, a seller’s wares must be dispensed in accordance with applicable nondiscrimination laws. Granting a pass for discrimination based on the discriminator’s personal belief could well set off the slipperiest slope of them all. All discrimination emanates from personal belief. That’s why the laws were adopted in the first place. You can believe someone is inferior because of who they are, you just can’t penalize them for it when doing business with them.

The notion that Jack Phillips, by making a wedding cake, would be forced into advocating for the marriage of his two would-be male customers is total nonsense. He’s not making a toast, throwing rice or even going to the wedding. He’s not blessing the happy couple. He’s just baking a cake. As Justice Sonia Sotomayor said, “When have we ever given protection to food?” Unfortunately, this Court appears sharply divided on the issue. The crucial vote will likely be that of Justice Anthony Kennedy who kept everyone guessing this week by offering critical comments to both sides.

The only safe bet right now is that in some afterlife or another, Antonin Scalia is chuckling to himself. He was, after all, right about one thing: When you give basic human rights to the oppressed, those who benefit from the oppression will fight to maintain their ways. It’s time to serve up the just desserts (with Justice Scalia’s posthumous dissent duly noted): Let them eat cake.

IT’S TIME TO ATONE FOR BILL CLINTON’S SEXUAL HARASSMENT

If our come-to-Jesus moment on sexual harassment is going to amount to anything other than a passing blip, we need to accept the painfully awkward truth that Bill Clinton should have resigned the presidency for carrying on a sexual relationship with an intern.

For 20 years, we have fooled ourselves into a false state of moral ambivalence over Clinton. We gave a pass to a popular president whose uncanny ability to compartmentalize turned him into a role model for every would-be sexual harasser. This is not a time to let old wounds fade away. There can be no healing for what ails us until they are reopened and appropriately treated.

The only prominent Democrat who has had the courage to speak this truth is Sen. Kirsten Gillibrand of New York. In an interview with the New York Times podcast, “The New Washington,” Gillibrand was asked if, based on what we now know about inappropriate sexual behavior, Clinton should have resigned when his relationship with the intern, Monica Lewinsky, came to light. In a rare move for a member of Congress, the senator sat in silence while formulating her answer, which was: “Yes, I think that is the appropriate response.” Within hours, the Democratic establishment pounced. Philippe Reines, a long-time political operative for the Clintons, sent this tweet to Gillibrand: “Over 20 yrs you took the Clinton’s endorsements, money and seat. Hypocrite. Interesting strategy for 2020 primaries. Best of luck.”

That is precisely the kind of party line, patriarchal , protect-the-good-old-boys thinking that has allowed sexual harassment to run rampant in most of our male-dominated institutions, which is to say 98 percent of them. Look, Bill Clinton was guilty of classic, textbook sexual harassment. It was not a close case. Lewinsky was a 22-year-old intern. Clinton was the president of the United States. It’s hard to imagine a greater power disparity. When White House aides grew suspicious of the relationship, Lewinsky was forced to move from the White House to the Pentagon. When she complained, Clinton promised to bring her back after he won reelection. Her employment conditions were based on a sexual relationship with the leader of the free world.

Incredibly, there was no serious push to remove Clinton from office for this gross abuse of power. Yes, he was impeached by the House and acquitted in the Senate, but the charge was lying about the sex, not engaging in it with an intern. Once framed as a fidelity issue, as in a married man lying about having sex outside the marriage, Clinton’s defense garnered empathy in Washington political circles, even among conservative Republicans. The only problem was that it shouldn’t have been about lying; it should have been about a boss having sex with an intern.

So, does any of this really matter now? Yes, it matters mightily because the Clinton-Lewinsky episode is the original sin supporting a perverse double standard when it comes to sexual harassment and misconduct by elected leaders. In just the past few weeks, this amazing reckoning over sexual behavior has banished all sorts of private sector A-listers to the has-been junk heap of fallen careers: Matt Lauer, Garrison Keillor, Charlie Rose, Kevin Spacey, Harvey Weinstein, etc. Yet, Roy Moore, accused of stalking and fondling teenage girls as young as 14 when he was in his 30s, may well be elected to the Senate from Alabama later this month. Many Alabama voters say they don’t approve of Moore’s conduct but they like his politics. Sound familiar? That’s what a lot of presidential voters said last year when they elected Donald Trump after more than a dozen women accused him of sexual misconduct, and he was heard on tape boasting of such behavior. And, of course, that’s what many of us said back in the 1990s about Bill Clinton: he might be a cad, but he was a good president who led us through two terms of peace and prosperity.

Of course, there is more than Monica Lewinsky in this story. Clinton’s accusers of sexual misconduct have told stories ranging from rape to groping. Sadly, these women became pawns of anti-Clinton conservatives because nobody else would hear them out. The Clinton team attacked them relentlessly, not unlike what the right is doing now to Roy Moore’s accusers. Remember this line from former Clinton staffer James Carville?: “If you drag a hundred dollar bill through a trailer park, you never know what you’ll find.”

People ask why women wait so long to report sexual misconduct. Knowing that they would be called trailer park trash probably had a lot to do with it. Now is the time to the bury that repulsive form of advocacy. Here’s what else needs to go: the notion that a leader’s politics should mitigate against serious and proven transgressions of sexual misconduct and harassment. There is no other way to assure that our workplaces and our governments are free from the toxicity of sexual harassment. There can be no more passes for voting the right way.

If we are really ready to move beyond ruthless victim bashing, and deal head-on with the insidious forces of sexual misconduct, we have to own up to the fact that Bill Clinton didn’t deserve, and shouldn’t have been given, a pass. His choice to have sex with an intern was as disqualifying for retaining his office as it would have been for a corporate executive who engaged in the same behavior.

At some point in this fast-moving morality play on sexual misbehavior, there is apt to be more focus on those still-pending accusations against Donald Trump. If Democrats want to engage in that dialogue with any respect and credibility, they need to follow Sen. Gillibrand’s lead and acknowledge the obvious: Clinton should have resigned. That’s the only way the terrain moving forward is going to be changed.