My new favorite slogan

You know, I think I have a new favorite slogan:

WE BUILT THAT!

Take Wal-Mart for instance. It didn’t become one of the world’s largest retailers because Sam Walton was so good at stocking shelves and ringing cash registers. The Walton family provided the leadership, true enough, but the labor, the actual building, came from millions of ordinary Americans working long hours at low-paying jobs.

Sam Walton didn’t build Wal-Mart.

WE BUILT THAT!

Or take the auto industry, the railroads, the hospitals, the universities. Take any large, successful organization or enterprise that is making some small group of people very wealthy. What do they all have in common? It wasn’t the labors of the rich that built the enterprise.

WE BUILT THAT!

Look at the United States of America. With all our flaws and failings, we’ve got a few things right. We’ve recognized (or at least, a good number of us have realized, starting with our founding fathers) that our strength comes not from imposed uniformity of religion or politics, but from a cooperative and tolerant diversity.

Jesus didn’t build America.

WE BUILT THAT!

The list goes on and on. I love that slogan.

Stray thoughts: congressional review of state secrets

If you’ve been reading Ed Brayton’s blog, you know that one of the big problems with the current administration, like administration before it, is a penchant for using the so-called State Secret Privilege to avoid accountability for any questionable activities it might be engaging in. In fact, if anything, the current administration is even worse than the last one, and worse yet, they’re proving successful at getting the courts to rubber-stamp this kind of blanket immunity. And that’s eroding the distinction between the democratic republic we’re supposed to have, and the effective dictatorship we’re heading for.

So here’s my stray thought of the day: if the judicial branch won’t provide any checks and balances to the executive, why not Congress? The genius of the American constitution is the trade-off between the democratic power of the legislature and the executive power of the president, with the additional safeguard of an independent judiciary (on paper, at least). So why can’t we have a congressional investigation into the administration’s reckless invocation of the State Secret Privilege? Obama can’t argue that only the state has the right to be “in” on the secret, because Congress is just as much the state as he is. And if the president still won’t allow Congress to exercise its constitutional responsibility to provide checks and balances to the abuse of executive power, then maybe it’s time for them to exercise their constitutional power of impeachment.

I’m no political scientist, so I don’t know whether that’s either desirable or doable, but I thought I’d put it out there. From what I remember from social studies class, it seems like the right thing to do.

Social justice versus family values

Writing for the Christian Science Monitor, Brad Knickerbocker observes:

For the first time since the founding of the Republic, none of the major party candidates for president or vice president is a WASP – a white, Anglo-Saxon Protestant – a fact that was confirmed when Mitt Romney picked Paul Ryan to be his running mate.

As Knickerbocker goes on to observe, if there’s anyone who wants to vote for a Protestant, they’ve only got one choice this year: Barack Obama. Is this the end of an era?

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Heroes that actually deserve the name

There are relatively few people in this world today who impress me enough for me to call them heroes. But they exist. Belatedly, imperfectly, incompletely, I would like to thank them for inspiring me and encouraging me to expect more and better things.

Here, in no particular order, are some of them. Please help me fill in the names I will inevitably overlook.

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FRC quick to exploit shooting

On Wednesday, a young man named Floyd Corkins made an inept attack on the offices of the Family Research Council, an act of politically-motivated domestic terrorism that is no different from bombing an abortion clinic. Clearly, such actions are unjustified, indefensible, and reprehensible. Working on the theory that one bad turn deserves another, the FRC immediately tried to exploit the shooting to launch an attack on the reputation of the Southern Poverty Law Center, a longtime foe of the FRC’s anti-gay crusade.

“Let me be clear that Floyd Corkins was responsible for firing the shot yesterday,” Family Research Council President Tony Perkins told reporters in Washington about the suspect. “But Corkins was given a license to shoot an unarmed man by organizations like the Southern Poverty Law Center that have been reckless in labeling organizations hate groups because they disagree with them on public policy.”

Right. Because the FRC’s relentless slanders against gays wouldn’t have offended anybody if it hadn’t been for those damn kids and their stupid dog.

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Voting for Mormons: another perspective

Blair Kelly claims to “strongly disagree” with my position on voting for “a Mormon,” and has written a full post explaining all the why’s and how’s. It’s a pretty good read, and I’d recommend it. My only quibble is that I’m not so sure we really disagree.

I would want to ask any candidate, Mormon or otherwise, some of the questions I posed above. What I’m arguing is that a person who claims to be Mormon is likely to answer them in an unsatisfying way… Therefore if you say you’re Mormon, chances are I won’t vote for you. I argue this is a perfectly legitimate position to take. But if you say you’re a Mormon and that the story about the origins of the Lamanites is clearly bunk, homosexuals deserve equal rights, Joseph Smith’s tales were very tall indeed, creationism is a load of garbage, women should have all the entitlements of men, and that you support stem cell research, then you will have purchased more of my attention…

That’s pretty much the distinction I was trying to make. If you’re judging somebody solely on the basis of the fact that they’re affiliated with the Mormon church, you’re really making a decision without adequate information. You can assume that any Mormon swears allegiance to all the things Mormonism is notorious for (and odds are you’d be right), but that’s an unfortunate handicap, not a reliable basis for decision-making. Still, it happens a lot, especially in politics, where necessity often forces us to make decisions based on inadequate information.

The point I want to make, though, is that we should never allow ourselves to become so complacent about the facts that we no longer care whether there is any more to the story than the fact that the candidate is a Mormon. If no other information is available, then we may not have a better basis for our decision-making, but we must always bear in mind that under these circumstances, we’re making a poorly-informed choice. Determining the candidate’s actual qualifications means asking for more than just his or her denominational affiliation. Asking the right questions may turn out to prove that initial prejudices were correct after all. But we still have to ask, as a matter of principle.

Dawkins and Mormons (follow-up)

Looking over the comments from yesterday’s post, it seems that some people understood my point about Dawkins’ Mormon quote, and others didn’t. It’s an important point, though, so I want to follow up and try to make it clear for everyone.

The problem I see is not that Dr. Dawkins is impugning the sanity of people who would seriously consider voting for Mitt Romney. That’s fine, that’s fair game. Romney is a candidate for the US presidency, and it’s perfectly reasonable to discuss his expected behavior as president if he were elected. The problem is that the quote, as originally phrased, does not address Mitt Romney’s qualifications, it addresses the qualifications of “a Mormon.” Not any specific Mormon, but just “a Mormon”—and thus, by implication, any Mormon.

That may seem like a quibble, but it isn’t. There’s a hugely significant difference between saying you’d be crazy to vote for Mitt Romney because he makes important decisions based on irrational beliefs, on the one hand, versus saying you’d be crazy to vote for “a Mormon,” on the other. One is a specific assessment of a specific individual based on observed patterns in his behavior, and the other is prejudice against an entire class of people, based on religious affiliation, regardless of individual qualifications for the position. The former is fair game; the latter is prejudice based on religious affiliation.

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Well darn.

PZ Myers has a post up that has my feelings a bit mixed. It’s a quote attributed to Richard Dawkins:

Yes, America STILL manages to reach Mars despite half the country preparing to elect a man who believes he’ll get a planet when he dies. It is all the more to the credit of the sane, rational half of America that it manages to achieve so much despite being positively held back by the other half, the half that believes the universe is 6,000 years old, the half that seriously contemplates voting for a Mormon.

I have tremendous respect for Dr. Dawkins, but I have to say, this is an incredibly bad quote, and I hope he didn’t really say it. As phrased, it is an appeal to religious bigotry, plain and simple. I think I know what it’s trying to say, and I definitely agree that (a) Mitt Romney would be a terrible choice for president and (b) the anti-science activism of fundamentalist right-wingers is a serious detriment to America’s ability to thrive and progress in a modern technological world. However, the suggestion that it would not be “sane” and “rational” to consider voting for a Mormon is just plain bigotry. Merely having a denominational affiliation does not dictate how qualified a candidate might or might not be to serve, nor does it even reliably indicate how strongly or weakly he or she upholds the tenets of the denomination. There are plenty of valid criticisms to be made of Mr. Romney; we do not need to stoop to this.

I do not regard Dr. Dawkins as a religious bigot, and I believe that this quote, if genuine, is merely an unfortunate and ill-considered choice of words. But if someone said that it would not be sane and rational to vote for an atheist, I’d make the same protest. Candidates stand or fall on their own qualifications, and should not be arbitrarily dismissed based on religious affiliation. I hope that if this quote is legit, Dr. Dawkins retracts it or at least clarifies it.

New name, same old crap

OneNewsNow reports that the Alliance Defense Fund, whose defense of bigotry and discrimination has suffered serious setbacks in recent years, is hoping to win some new support by adopting a new name. And in the best conservative Christian tradition, they’ve decided to pick a name that completely misrepresents what it is that they actually do.

The new name is Alliance Defending Freedom — but president and CEO Alan Sears tells OneNewsNow the group’s purpose remains the same.

“Defending religious liberty, the sanctity of life, and marriage and family. Only the name has changed,” says Sears.

“The change is to help more people easily understand the work that we do and why it matters…”

You know, that kind of reminds me of another C. S. Lewis quote.

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