Lies, damned lies, and Harry Reid

Almost none of my liberal friends liked my Monday column for The Philly Post, in which I took Harry Reid to task for his apparent lies about Mitt Romney's taxes. The best response came from a friend via email:

Eh, you're not making the sale with me on this one.  I think you're too enamored with "civility" in general.   The Republicans' and Rove's treatment of Clinton, Kerry and Obama just isn't in even the same moral universe as alleging that (someone said that) Romney didn't pay taxes.  And what these Republicans stand for--in terms of policy--is just morally wrong, so I don't much care how we oppose it, as long as it's legal and it gets the job done. 

Here, he quotes from my column: "But if we’re now at a point where we openly and knowingly root for our side to do a better job of lying to and misleading the public better than the other guys can, well, then, the game is over. Governance will have little relationship to the truth, and that will mean that democracy is all but done for. And Harry Reid? He’s helping dig the grave with every unsubstantiated comment he makes about Mitt Romney’s taxes."

I don't think anyone has any illusions about what Reid's gambit is, and nobody would mistake it for "governance."  If there were any connection between habitual lying and the persistence of democracy, we'd all have been done for from day one.  And if we have to submit to a tax policy like Romney's proposing, many of us will be a lot closer to actual, rather than metaphorical, graves.      

I think it's possible I'm overly enamored with civility, sure, though much less than I was four years ago. It does remain important to me, to some extent, because I'm a liberal who went to a conservative college, grew up in a conservative state, and have lots of conservative friends. But civility isn't really my concern here. Truth is.

But as my friend points out, untruths--lies, let's call them--are the currency of politics, and it has ever been thus. Does it really reduce our ability to, you know, govern?

I think so. One reason President Obama and Republicans have been unable to compromise on issues like the debt ceiling is because both parties have reasonably different visions of government and its functions. There's a lot of substance that divides the two sides. But that's always been the case, yet that division is much more meaningful these days--nominees can't get confirmed, budgets can't get passed, etc.

Part of the reason why, I suspect, is because so many Republican voters believe that Obama is a socialist Kenyan Muslim--somebody who is so dangerous and "other" that a deal cannot and should not be made, because he is almost literally the devil. Substance divides us, in other words, but lies clutter up the demilitarized zone where deals can be made and government allowed to function.

Beyond that, I think marinating our politics in lies is simply corrosive, bad on its own terms. I realize that makes me naive, and not at all savvy at the Machiavellian game that so many folks play, but, well, I can live with that.

Is turnabout fair play, as some of my correspondents suggest? Is it so important that Romney be defeated that such tactics are justified? In the former case, I guess it depends on what you care about. In the latter case, if you're justifying such tactics because of the substance of Mitt's tax policy, why not make the attack on Mitt's tax policy? There's certainly plenty of grist for that particular mill.

I get it: Part of politics is defining your opponent negatively, and there are almost no limits on that. I still can't support Reid's tactics. Maybe it's because of my background: I've never been a professional political advocate; I spent most of my career as a daily newspaper reporter who wasn't allowed to root for either political party. I won't claim I was the best reporter that ever worked, but I had my moments. And what I cared about mostly in those days was the truth of a story--not about who won. And I hated it when people lied to me. That hasn't changed. If I have to choose between Obama and Romney this November, I'll vote for Obama. But I'm not a fan of lies, distortions, and McCarthy-style tactics no matter where they come from, and I'll point them out whenever I see them. 

Letter to a Christian friend: Gays, and gay marriage, and (yes) Chick-fil-A

A good friend of mine from my Christian days emails me with some heavy queries: 

What would you say are the most important values everyone, regardless of belief, should pass on to their children? What would you want a Christian parent to teach their children that would be in line with Biblical teaching of Jesus Christ?  

What do you believe the appropriate Christian response to the Chick-fil-a ordeal would be? How should a Christian owner of a business conduct their business? What mistakes do you think the owner of Chick-fil-a has made?

Going beyond Chick-fil-a, what do you believe the appropriate Christian response to be to homosexuals? same sex marriage?

If Jesus is God and the Bible is true, and you were committed to live under the authority of Christ in all areas of your life, how would you respond to these questions? Do you think your responses would be different?

My response, edited and modified for the wider audience:

I really do respect and love my Christian friends, and my 30 years in the church informs much of who I am today. When I've been critical of Christians, it's often been noting the variance of their actions and political positions with what I understand the Mennonite understanding of Christianity to be; I've attempted to resist judging them against a secular standard. And I've resisted telling my Christian friends who are against gay marriage that they're wrong, because I think that it's perfectly legitimate as a Christian to read scriptures and see condemnation of homosexual activity in them. My sympathies are more with liberal Christians who have come to a different conclusion, but with my distance from the church, it all looks a bit like an argument over the number of angels who can dance on the head of a pin; I don't share enough of a theological foundation to tell my brothers and sisters what their attitude toward same-sex marriage should be. 

Let me say this, though. 

Mennonites, I think, should step lightly on this topic--if only because they have a long history of being at variance with the culture, and having to flee country after country because of it. There's a history of exile because their beliefs and practices seemed odd and alien to their neighbors. And I guess it might behoove Mennonite Christians, in particular, to contemplate that history and what it says about the power of the state and if they'd want that power used to help or hinder their own relationships.

But I'm not Mennonite, not Christian, and my opinion doesn't count. 

What should Dan Cathy have done differently? From the perspective of his theology, I'm not sure. If he believes that gay marriage is wrong, and that he's called to witness that belief, well. You do what you gotta do. If he's obeying the dictates of his conscience--and I have no reason to believe otherwise--then, well, it is what it is.

His business does exist in secular culture, or at least a culture more secular than the circles he moves in. If he wants to use his business as a tool for evangelism, he should realize that it will limit his business. Certainly, I can't imagine my family choosing Chick-fil-A over the Wendy's next door, probably ever again. If he's comfortable with that tradeoff, that's his right and his choice to make. I can't tell him to do things differently, but neither do I have to support or accommodate his choices. Just as he doesn't (I think it's fair to say) support or accommodate many of mine. (To clarify, again: He has the First Amendment right to his beliefs and expressions of same; government shouldn't punish his business because of those expressions.)

I don't expect Christians not to be Christians, in other words.

How would my answers differ if I was, essentially, Christian? I don't know, though I have my suspicions. For a variety of reasons, I'm not Christian anymore; it's been a conscious choice, one that has some attendant pain. But I worked to make my last church open and accepting to gays, not as subversion, but as an expression of the values that I and others felt, well, called to at the time. It's possible I was never a good Christian. 

At the very least, though, I'm pretty sure that Jesus would've hung out with gay people. Had dinner with them, that kind of thing. I'm not sure where he'd find himself in a church I've long thought--since our college days, at least--emphasizes the supposed "evil" of homosexuality to an outsize degree. As always, the church is urging its neighbors to pluck the cinder out of their eye while failing to notice the beam in its own. It was ever thus. 

That said, you and I differ--value-wise--on this, and maybe only a few other things. The things I teach my child, I expect, are pretty much the things you teach your child: To be honest; to be kind, especially to those less fortunate than you; to treat others as you'd have them treat you. The lessons aren't terribly complicated, but they're awfully tough to live, aren't they? I know I continue to fail.

Thanks for your continued friendship. And thanks for listening.

Chick-fil-A

I'm not going to eat a sandwich today because one side wants me to. I'm not going to not eat a sandwich because the other side wants me to. It strikes me that there's something vulgar about the way fast food has become the battlefield upon which we do battle over an issue of civil rights, so I'm not going to play that game.

This is what I'm going to do:

I'm going to fervently hope that my gay and lesbian friends achieve the right to civil marriage.

I'm going to loudly advocate, using my little platforms, that that right be extended to them.

I am going to vote for politicians who agree with me on this issue, and against those who don't.

And I'm going to donate money, when I have it, to organizations that work to secure that right.

Finally, I'm going to demand that my elected officials respect the rights of those people who disagree with me, because that, too, is the right thing to do.

I ... won't participate in a gaudy display of face stuffing or tribalistic chest-beating over this. People are welcome to put their dollars where there values are; I understand and affirm that. But there's something about this Chick-fil-A brouhaha that trivializes the bottom-line issue: Who gets to have their relationships recognized--and with that recognition, access to a host of legal rights and institutions that make the coupled life so much easier to live. I believe that my gay and lesbian friends should have that right. And I believe that many--though not all--of my friends who feel otherwise will someday feel embarrassed by today's events.

UPDATE: Having just published this piece, I hit upon what I find disconcerting about the great Chick-fil-A support day: It's the display of giddy joy and pleasure being displayed by so many in their efforts to withhold such rights from their fellow Americans. I understand the arguments against gay marriage, and why some folks hold those beliefs: I don't begrudge them that. But I guess I wish it could be done soberly. Instead, it's devolved into team-spirit phallus-waving. And I am deeply dismayed by it.

Thomas Sowell's cherry-picking straw man

Thomas Sowell says President Obama and the elites are lying to you because, get this:

Perhaps the biggest lie of this election year, and the one likely to be repeated the most often, is that the income of “the rich” is going up, while other people’s incomes are going down. If you listen to Barack Obama, you are bound to hear this lie repeatedly. 

But the government’s own Congressional Budget Office has just published a report whose statistics flatly contradict this claim. The CBO report shows that, while the average household income fell 12 percent between 2007 and 2009, the average for the lower four-fifths fell by 5 percent or less, while the average income for households in the top fifth fell 18 percent. For households in the “top 1 percent” that seems to fascinate so many people, income fell by 36 percent in those same years.

Several big problems in two paragraphs:

• Having spent some time reading about this issue the last couple of years, I can tell you that the argument is not that the rich are getting richer and that the poor are getting poorer. Rather, it's that the super-rich rich are getting richer...and everybody else has been stagnating for the last 30 years or so, resulting in a reduced share of the nation's mostly growing prosperity during that time.

• That's actually been happening. The CBO took on that question in another report last year. And here's what they found:

As a result of that uneven income growth, the distribu- tion of after-tax household income in the United States was substantially more unequal in 2007 than in 1979: The share of income accruing to higher-income house- holds increased, whereas the share accruing to other households declined. In fact, between 2005 and 2007, the after-tax income received by the 20 percent of the population with the highest income exceeded the after- tax income of the remaining 80 percent.

Live by the CBO, die by the CBO. Here's a picture of that conclusion:

• That doesn't mean Sowell's CBO statistics are wrong, only that they provide too narrow a snapshot of the country's income—and at a bad time, during the brutal heart of the recession. Yes, all groups' income fell during that time period. Nobody denies that. The case is that the broad trend toward inequality is probably still under way, though we won't have CBO-generated post-2009 examination of the data for awhile yet. 

But there are plenty of hints—in continued high unemployment, in the still-staggering poverty rate—that post-2009 is going to look like the inequality trend is continuing. Will it? We'll have to see. But Sowell's numbers don't really prove what they say he proves. 

Larry Mendte is wrong about Dan Cathy and Chick-fil-A

My Philly Post colleague Larry Mendte says this morning that people who boycott Chick-fil-A over Dan Cathy's stance on gay marriage are probably being hypocrites.

I need to get my car inspected this week, but first I have to send my mechanic a short survey to find out where he stands on a number of controversial issues. If he disagrees with me, I can’t possibly give him my business. And when I go to the supermarket, I need a grocery list of how the makers of each of the products I plan to buy stand on gun control, abortion rights and immigration. 

It sounds awfully silly, but that seems to be where we are heading after the Chick-fil-A gay marriage controversy.

Well, no.

The reason Mendte doesn't know about the political positions of his mechanic or grocers is because those folks probably haven't actually publicized those positions.  Dan Cathy, on the other hand, sat down for an interview with the Baptist Press that was explicitly designed to promote the link between the business and "Biblical values."

Here's part of the rest of the interview:

Cathy believes strongly that Christians are missionaries in the workplace. "Jesus had a lot of things to say about people who work and live in the business community," he said. His goal in the workplace is "to take biblical truth and put skin on it. ... We're talking about how our performance in the workplace should be the focus of how we build respect, rapport and relationships with others that opens the gateway to interest people in knowing God."

Now, there's something kind of admirable about this. There are plenty of Sunday Christians who leave their sense of morality and ethics in the sanctuary when they go to work the rest of the week; Cathy isn't one person at church and another at the office. So, you know, great.

But: Cathy has also made it his mission to publicize the thread between his faith and the way his business operates.  He has made "Biblical values"—and, specifically, "traditional marriage"—part of the Chick-fil-A brand.

That's his right. It's also the right of consumers to decide they don't care much for that brand. (It's not the right of government to punish Cathy's business for that stance, however.) It's not hypocritical for them to decide they'd rather spend their chicken sandwich money elsewhere.

Jonah Goldberg, the death penalty, and James Holmes

UPDATE: Welcome, National Review readers! You can find my response to William Voegeli here.

Jonah Goldberg has a column at NRO, saying that death penalty opponents are noticeably silent after the Aurora massacre because, hey, James Holmes is pretty inconvenient for their cause: "I say, let us give Holmes a fair trial. If convicted, execute him swiftly. If you disagree, explain why this man deserves to live."

The reason the death penalty debate hasn't flared up, post-Aurora, is because the debates have been focused on actions and policies that might've prevented the massacre in the first place. There are cases to be made both for gun reduction and arming citizens more thoroughly; there are arguments to be made about our mental health care system. Is anybody making the argument that the threat of the death penalty would've deterred Holmes? Even Goldberg isn't making that case. So the death penalty debate is kind of beside the point, as far as our current discussions go.

But, you know, Goldberg wants to have the debate. Since he implicitly concedes that deterrence isn't the point of the penalty—Colorado does have the death penalty, though it's rarely used—retribution is the real aim here. I'm not thrilled by the state killing people out of pure retribution, but I'll concede that many people may find it justification enough.

Goldberg's broader point, though, is that the existence of James Holmes somehow legitimizes the death penalty. There's no real question of his guilt, and he's white, so you can't say he'd be getting the punishment as the result of a racist system. Goldberg brushes off the idea of mental illness in this case, probably too easily, but there you go. This is an easy case, he's saying, so why not the death penalty now?

I've mentioned before the old lawyer's saw that "hard cases make bad law." Well, sometimes easy cases make bad law. James Holmes' plain guilt in this matter wouldn't make the death penalty system less likely to impose racially disparate punishments, wouldn't clear up the muddled questions of guilt in so many other cases. Goldberg doesn't argue that the death penalty system works well in the hard cases, only that it would in the easy cases. Well sure. That doesn't make the death penalty system worth the expense or the rampant injustice it's been shown to mete out. 

Bottom line: James Holmes doesn't prove the death penalty works. Want to execute him? The law seems to allow for it. Just don't pretend it means anything more than it does.

Death of football watch

New York Times: 

An autopsy report released this week, just before N.F.L. training camps opened, concluded that the former Atlanta Falcons safety Ray Easterling, who committed suicide in April, had a degenerative brain disease widely connected to athletes who have absorbed frequent blows to the head. 

Easterling, who played for the Falcons for eight seasons in the 1970s, began coping with apparent dementia and depression about a decade into his retirement. Easterling was 62 when he died of a self-inflicted gunshot wound at his longtime home in Richmond, Va. 

The autopsy by the medical examiner in Richmond found signs of chronic traumatic encephalopathy, progressive damage that has been linked to blows to the head, and determined that it was the underlying major condition that accounted for Easterling’s difficulties.