Today in Judeo-Christian justification: Immigration

Late in the New York Times' story about how evangelical leaders are teaming up with President Obama to reform immigration law -- including a sort of amnesty for illegal immigrants already on American soil -- we hear from Bryan Fischer of the conservative American Family Association.

Bryan Fischer, director of issue analysis for the American Family Association, a national conservative Christian organization in Tupelo, Miss., said, “What my evangelical friends are arguing is that illegal aliens should essentially be rewarded for breaking the law.

“I think it’s extremely problematic from a Judeo-Christian standpoint to grant citizenship to people whose first act on American soil was to break an American law,” said Mr. Fischer, who hosts a daily radio show on which immigration is a frequent topic.

Well, sure. It's not as though the core doctrine of Christianity involves redemption and forgiveness for a lifetime of sins. It's certainly not like Jesus told his human followers to offer forgiveness for sins "not seven times, but seventy-seven times."

Now, I'm not saying that illegal immigrants should be offered amnesty. (Although I think it makes sense, but that's not the point here.) But even though I'm agnostic these days, I have a long background in the church. And I hate to see people blithely invoke "Judeo-Christian" tradition to justify their policy preferences -- particularly when their invocation actually contradicts the religion they use as justification.

George Will's silly plan for Republican outreach to Latinos

George Will thinks the GOP can capture some of the Latino vote by ... making Puerto Rico a state. He uses his Sunday column to profile Luis Fortuno, the Republican governor of Puerto Rico:

Conservatives need a strategy for addressing the immigration issue without alienating America's largest and most rapidly growing minority. Conservatives believe the southern border must be secured before there can be "comprehensive" immigration reform that resolves the status of the 11 million illegal immigrants. But this policy risks making Republicans seem hostile to Hispanics.

Fortuno wants Republicans to couple insistence on border enforcement with support for Puerto Rican statehood. This, he says, would resonate deeply among Hispanics nationwide.

But why would that be the case? Latinos aren't abandoning the Republican Party over concerns about the citizenship of other Latinos 1,000 miles away from U.S. shores. They're abandoning the GOP because they don't like how Republicans are treating them right here in the lower 48 states. The Arizona immigration-enforcement law, as has been much noted, makes it likely that U.S. citizens and legal immigrants of Latino descent will have to go the extra mile to literally prove themselves to police -- all by virtue of their race.

Making Puerto Rico a state doesn't address those concerns. Using the rationale offered by Will and Fortuno, it frankly smacks of a "some of my best friends are Latinos" tokenism -- we're happy to bring a majority Latino state into the union, it seems, as long as that state can only be reached by plane or boat. Such factors would probably exacerbate the GOP's image problem among Hispanics, and probably deservedly so.

Bag O' Books: "American Gods" by Neil Gaiman

Despite being very, very, very nerdy, I've never been much of a reader of fantasy books. I've got friends who are all up in Robert Jordan's house, and I feel like I should be there with them. But I'm not.

I occasionally -- thanks to the influence of my wife -- make an exception for the books of Terry Pratchett. He's an English fantasy writer, creator of the "Discworld" series of books that tell fantasy stories filtered through the lens of British humor. It works for me. And a few years ago, I greatly enjoyed "Good Omens," a novelistic collaboration about the Apocalypse from Pratchett and Neil Gaiman, who's probably better-known for his graphic novel work.

Which is why I picked up Gaiman's "American Gods" a few weeks ago. And I wish I'd enjoyed it more than I did. Which, ok, I did enjoy it a little bit. But it wasn't really absorbing. Without Pratchett's collaboration, Gaiman comes across as a very, very smart guy who's more interested in ideas than in storytelling. The end result is something cool, a bit didactic, somewhat entertaining, but never fully gripping.

Short synopsis: Our protagonist, Shadow, finishes a stint in prison only to go to work for a mysterious figure named "Wednesday." Wednesday, it turns out, is the American version of the Norse god Odin, who is rounding up all the other ancient gods brought to these shores by ancient cultures from around the world to mount a final all-consuming battle against the new gods who are displacing them in American culture -- the gods of debt, technology, credit cards and cable TV, among others.

Which gives you a taste of where "American Gods" is coming from -- a wry critique on the culture, which creates its gods in living, breathing form through the act of worship. The end battle, when it comes, doesn't really offer us insight about the critique -- it's there to round the story out. The result is a "novel of ideas" -- a term that usually describes books that are overly preachy -- that doesn't really commit to being a novel or to its own ideas.

But maybe I'm expecting too much. "American Gods" is reasonably diverting, so long as Neil Gaiman's reputation hasn't been oversold to you. And better an novel of incomplete ideas than no ideas at all.

Arizona will stop enforcing a controversial law

No, not that law:

At the first tick of the clock Friday, an array of automated cameras on Arizona freeways aimed at catching speeders were to stop clicking.

There is no glitch. The state, the first to adopt such cameras on its highways in October 2008, has become the first to pull the plug, bowing to the wishes of a vocal band of conservative activists who complained that photo enforcement intruded on privacy and was mainly designed to raise money.

It was a tumultuous, impassioned run here. A man wearing a monkey mask racked up dozens of tickets, fighting them in court, to protest the system.

Some of the loudest critics were conservatives, who organized protest groups and prodded legislators to impose restrictions on their use, arguing the cameras amounted to, as one put it, the “government spying on its citizens.”

The data suggested that the system led to a 19-percent drop in fatal collisions. But it's good that Arizona officials see the wisdom of backing away from an intrusive law that seems likely to catch and penalize a fair number of innocent people in its sweep. If only that logic were applied more widely.

It all depends on whose ox is being gored, I guess.

Once again, Andy McCarthy wants Iraqis to be grateful for being invaded

There's not a lot I'm going to say about Andy McCarthy's latest column in National Review, except that I want to note -- again -- the amazing and repugnant way he characterizes Iraqis:

When the WMD did not materialize, the result of “look forward, not back” was to portray nation-building — a goal the public never agreed to — as the dominant purpose of our prohibitively costly presence in Iraq, an ungrateful Muslim country that generally despises Americans. 

This isn't the first time that McCarthy has called Iraqis "ingrates" -- and really, there's a (can't get around this word) imperialist presumption to his attitude that's quite simply breathtaking. "You'll take our invasion -- and the years of bloody violence it unleashes -- and you'll like it!"

As McCarthy notes, we didn't actually invade Iraq in order to bestow the blessings of freedom -- even in the anger that permeated America after 9/11, there probably wouldn't have been much stomach to go nation-building for the pure and simple pleasure of nation-building. We invaded Iraq to protect ourselves. And it turns out that we were mistaken in doing so. Most folks aren't grateful to you, though, when you act in your own interests.

Don't get me wrong (it must always be said): Saddam Hussein was a bad guy. But let's try a little empathy exercise: If you were an Iraqi and had your life under a vile dictator usurped by outsiders -- who gave you years of bloody and explosive violence and public infrastructure problems, only to end up with an apparent strongman leader with ties to Iran -- how grateful would you be feeling? McCarthy, like too many of his ilk, is so proud of the efforts and sacrifices of U.S. servicemen and women that he can't even imagine why Iraqis wouldn't see it the same way. The problem isn't really one of Iraqi non-gratitude. The real problem is Andy McCarthy's chauvinism.

Why Philly?

As my wife and I have contemplated what our futures hold -- now that we're seeking ravenously after full-time employment -- we've had to figure out our priorities. And it's emerged that one of the top priorities is trying to stay in Philly. But why?

Part of it might be inertia: It's expensive and energy-consuming to move. But part of it is that we've become fond of the city. And I don't always understand that: In some ways, the two years we've spent here have been the roughest, hairiest, least-fun years of my adult life. We want to stick it out.

Again, why?

Maybe because -- despite the challenges -- there's a lot to love. I like Philly. I like Cafe Lutecia and Almaz Ethiopian restaurant and the art museum and the orchestra and Rittenhouse Square and Jafar Barron and the Monday jazz jam with Orrin Evans and Cafe L'Aube and Grace Tavern and Shakespeare in Clark Park and Skorpion and Makael and Ekta and Gusto and Paolo's and the Phillies and Andrew's Video Vault and the silly debates over the New Black Panthers and the amateur boxing gyms with "Rocky" posters and Malcolm X Park and Joseph Fox Bookshop and the library and Bill Conlin and vending cart food and not needing a car and the BoltBus and being near New York without having to pay New York prices and having my son grow up some place that isn't 90 or 95 percent white and PhillyGrrl and Brendan Skwire and the Roots and all the farmer's markets and Stu Bykofsky (but not John Yoo) and Mayor Nutter's cute way of acting angry when he knows that's what the public wants and West Philly and South Philly and Fairmount Park and the Schuykill River trail and the skyline -- oh that gorgeous skyline.

And even the Piazza. A little bit. But not the Eagles. I hate the Eagles.

Those are just my reasons. My wife could and would add a few more, I know. But those are the things I know after two quick-but-traumatic years. And I know I've only scratched the surface of what this town holds, and what it can show me. It's not "home" the way that Lawrence, Kansas used to be for me -- but I had eight years to make Lawrence my home.

I don't know if I'll have that much time here. But I kind of hope so. We'll see.

Gabriel Schoenfield, the Pentagon Papers and democratic self-governance

Gabriel Schoenfield, writing in the summer issue of National Affairs, revisits the Pentagon Papers incident and makes an extraordinary claim: Daniel Ellsberg, the Pentagon Papers leaker, undermined democracy by showing the American public how their government worked.

No really:

Whatever one thinks of Ellsberg's motives — and however one might appraise the harm his actions inflicted on American foreign policy — the fact is that, at its root, Ellsberg's leak was not just an assault on orderly government. In a polity with an elected president and elected representatives, it was an assault on democratic self-governance itself.

For better or worse, the American people in the Vietnam years had elected Kennedy, Johnson, and Nixon; they had acted at the ballot box to make their leadership and policy preferences clear. Yet here was a mid-level bureaucrat, elected by no one and representing no one, entrusted with secrets he had pledged to the American people to protect, abusing that trust to force his own policy preferences upon a government chosen by the people.

Here's the problem. Earlier in the piece, Schoenfield admits that the "government chosen by the people" was elected by lying to the people.

Given its size and complexity, the (Pentagon Papers) collection defies easy summary. But it did show, among other things, that officials throughout the 1960s presented the public a much rosier picture of events in Vietnam than was justified by the intelligence policymakers were receiving. The papers demonstrated, for instance, that President Johnson had every intention of beginning a bombing campaign against North Vietnam before the 1964 election, even though he strenuously denied it during the election season. They showed that American intelligence officials told the Johnson administration in advance of its 1965 escalation of the war effort that the move was not likely to succeed. And they documented how the internal justification for the war shifted over time from the containment of communism to the protection of America's own prestige abroad.

A couple of thoughts:

* Seems to me our Constitution recognizes, through creation of the judicial branch, that democratic self-governance cannot rely entirely upon elected officials to safeguard democratic self-governance. Elected officials are to be given substantial deference, of course, but that deference isn't unlimited.

* If democratic self-governance is to mean anything at all, though, it must be informed governance. The people must have a reasonable idea of what it is that elected officials are doing on their behalf. I won't argue that there's no need at all for state secrets -- but there's probably substantially less a need than what's usually invoked. Democratic self-governance does not mean, however, that people elect officials to go do the job and then close their eyes and hope for the best. As the Pentagon Papers case proves, sometimes the White House will classify information precisely in order to avoid being held accountable by voters.

It's silly to argue that Ellsburg was "forcing" a policy outcome through his leaks: As Schoenfield notes, Ellsburg wasn't an elected official -- he had no power at all to change American policy. But Ellsberg did give Americans insight into how the policy had been made, and how what they'd been told by their leaders differed from the reality of the war in Vietnam. Daniel Ellsberg, then, enabled real democratic self-governance -- he didn't short-circuit it.

The logic of our Constitution is that we can't always depend on elected officials to make correct decisions. It's up to citizens to hold them accountable. Schoenfield claims to be upholding democratic self-government, but it's hard to see how his critique does anything but enable Nixonian lawbreakers to govern in ways the people who elected them never intended.