Robert Jensen : Expanding the Dead-End Debate over Abortion

Posted on July 3, 2013 by Thorne Dreyer
Editorial cartoon by Dick Wright / Columbus Dispatch. Image from Lukas Mikelionis. 

Expanding the dead-end debate over abortion

Rather than settling for simplistic answers or ignoring the question, we can recognize the confusion many of us feel in the face of such a vexing problem.

By Robert Jensen | The Rag Blog | July 3, 2013

The abortion debate in Texas — and throughout the country — has dead-ended: pro-life v. pro-choice, saving the unborn child v. protecting the rights of the mother, responsibility v. freedom. Every encounter leaves each side more dug in.

As the Texas Legislature takes up abortion bills in its second special session, we can deepen that debate simply by recognizing the complexity of the issue, which usually is plowed under in the short-term goal of passing or defeating a particular bill. That’s politics, but beneath are deeper questions.

I am a firm supporter of abortion rights for women. So, let’s take that side first. By framing the issue in terms of women’s right to choose, abortion-rights supporters typically minimize or avoid the question of the moral status of the fetus, which can’t be taken lightly.

Simply asserting that life begins at conception feels like an inadequate answer, but we can’t pretend that viability — the ability of the fetus to survive outside the womb — is the obvious point at which a fetus becomes a person. Rather than settling for simplistic answers or ignoring the question, we can recognize the confusion many of us feel in the face of such a vexing problem.

For the anti-abortion side: It is time to recognize that this debate takes place in a male-dominated society in which women are routinely at risk, including at home. Though many think it’s an old-fashioned word, the United States is a patriarchal society, and in patriarchy women are not safe from men’s control and men’s violence.

A continuum of domination — from subtle forms of harassment and coercion, to physical assault and rape — means that many women become pregnant under conditions in which meaningful options are severely limited. To further constrain women by limiting access to abortion further entrenches male dominance.

We should recognize that the abortion debate is also a debate — overtly or covertly — about sexual behavior. Abortion opponents often are critical of practices such as premarital or gay/lesbian sex. Abortion supporters typically support an expanded conception of acceptable sexual practices. Again, we routinely get locked into a dead-end debate — “family values” v. “sexual liberation” — and, again, the tendency to caricature the other side can obscure deeper questions.

I am a firm supporter of encouraging healthy sexual exploration for everyone, not limited just to heterosexuals who are married. In short, I’m against patriarchal sexual rules that are harsh and life-denying.

But I am a critic of the way in which the liberal approach to sex has led to an increasingly coarse sexual culture, seen most glaringly in the routine objectification and degradation of women in pornography, stripping, and prostitution. In short, I’m against liberalized sexual norms that also can be harsh and life-denying.

Acknowledging the complexity of the moral question doesn’t automatically mean we should outlaw abortion. Acknowledging the brutality of patriarchy doesn’t mean we cannot consider some limits on abortion. Recognizing that the abortion debate embroils us in equally contentious debates about sexual behavior doesn’t magically clear up the issue.

My political positions are rooted in a feminist analysis that highlights the destructive nature of patriarchy. While I don’t expect everyone to agree with me, I hope it’s possible to disagree more constructively.

The United States is a deeply religious country committed to secular government. No single authority can produce easy answers to problems that are morally and politically complex. My hope is that whichever side “wins” any specific political struggle, all sides can recognize that victory does not put to rest questions that should trouble us all.

[Robert Jensen is a professor in the School of Journalism at the University of Texas at Austin and board member of the Third Coast Activist Resource Center in Austin. His latest books are Arguing for Our Lives: A User’s Guide to Constructive Dialogue and We Are All Apocalyptic Now: On the Responsibilities of Teaching, Preaching, Reporting, Writing, and Speaking Out. His writing is published extensively in mainstream and alternative media. Robert Jensen can be reached at rjensen@austin.utexas.edu. Read more articles by Robert Jensen on The Rag Blog.]

The Rag Blog

Posted in Rag Bloggers | Tagged , , , , , , | 2 Comments

Lamar W. Hankins : Women’s Freedom and Texas Republicans

Posted on July 3, 2013 by Thorne Dreyer
Demonstrator at the Texas State Capitol, Austin, Texas, July 1, 2013. Photos by Deborah Kirksey Coley / The Rag Blog.

Women’s freedom and Texas Republicans

A political party that actually loves liberty would not seek to deny it to any of our citizens, especially pregnant women who may be vulnerable and in need of compassion.

By Lamar W. Hankins | The Rag Blog | July 3, 2013

Any reader of this column is undoubtedly aware of the actions last week of Texas State Senator Wendy Davis, who successfully filibustered the anti-abortion bill known as SB 5, filed in the first 2013 special session of the Texas Legislature called by Gov. Rick Perry.

Gov. Perry has now called another special session to give the Legislature another chance to pass this anti-abortion legislation. What Davis did was try to stop a bill that not only would deprive Texas women of their reproductive freedom without improving women’s health services, but was a clear violation of the Supreme Court’s 1973 decision in Roe. v. Wade.

While there are many opinions about when and if a pregnancy should be terminated, I won’t dwell on that debate because a woman’s right to an abortion is settled constitutional law. The Supreme Court held 40 years ago that a woman’s right to privacy, guaranteed by the Due Process clause of the 14th Amendment, allows her to decide when and if to terminate a pregnancy.

The court established a trimester framework for state regulation of abortion that was not based on the best medical knowledge at the time, and has been widely criticized by both proponents and opponents of abortion.

Clearly, though, under our constitution, a state cannot completely deny a woman the right to terminate a pregnancy. But under Roe v. Wade and its successor cases, states have a legitimate interest in protecting a woman’s health when she undergoes medical procedures, and states have an interest in protecting the potentiality of human life depending on how far along the fetal development is.

These two matters have been the focus of most abortion rights battles over these past four decades.

Under the trimester approach of the court, a state’s regulatory authority over abortions is restricted. During the first trimester (approximately 13 weeks), a state cannot regulate abortion. During the second trimester (weeks 14 through 26), a state may focus on its concerns for the health of a pregnant woman by regulating abortion procedures that can reasonably affect the woman’s health. During the third trimester, a state may regulate or prohibit abortion except when it is necessary to protect the life or health of a pregnant woman.

Opponents of abortion rights have argued that abortion is unsafe and expanded medical protocols are necessary to protect women. But according to research by the Guttmacher Institute, a research, policy-analysis, and educational organization, “Abortion is one of the safest surgical procedures for women in the United States. Fewer than 0.5% of women obtaining abortions experience a complication, and the risk of death associated with abortion is about one-tenth that associated with childbirth.”

Media Matters reports that “Associations representing the OB/GYNs and hospitals of Texas say that a Texas bill mandating new restrictions on doctors and clinics that provide abortions does nothing to improve women’s health care and has no medical basis…”

In SB 5, abortion opponents decided to focus their anti-abortion efforts on trying to severely reduce the number of clinics where women can seek an abortion by requiring such facilities to be upgraded by adding expensive services and equipment that do not appear justified by any concern for women’s health. The effect of these new requirements would reduce the number of available clinics, thus limiting abortion facilities to only the most populated metropolitan areas of Texas.

In 2008, there were 67 abortion providers in Texas, and 92% of Texas counties had no abortion provider, according to the Guttmacher Institute. The number and distribution of abortion providers severely impedes access to abortions for one-third of Texas women. Now there are 47 abortion clinics in the entire state of 254 counties. A report from Media Matters concludes that the proposed law Rep. Davis filibustered would reduce abortion clinics in Texas to five.

The old SB 5 and the new HB 2 require that a physician who performs an abortion or induces one with drugs must have “active admitting privileges at a hospital” that is no more than 30 miles from where the abortion or induction is performed. Further, the hospital must provide obstetrical or gynecological health care services that are not offered by all hospitals in Texas.

Oddly, the legislation also requires that the patient be given a telephone number to contact health care personnel 24 hours a day after the procedure, and requires providing the name and telephone number for the hospital nearest to the home of the patient in case emergency care is needed after the abortion is performed. In my experience, providing contact information after a medical procedure or surgery is standard medical practice in Texas, though most physicians may assume that their patients know where the nearest emergency room can be found.

The Texas Hospital Association states that the anti-abortion legislation does nothing to improve women’s health because emergency room physicians would be the ones treating a woman who needs emergency care due to complications from an abortion. Emergency room physicians can contact the physician who performed the abortion by telephone, regardless of whether that physician has privileges at the hospital providing the emergency room treatment or how far away the physician may be.

The requirement that an abortion provider have hospital privileges at a hospital 30 miles from where the abortion is performed does nothing to assure that women “receive high-quality care and that physicians (are) held accountable for acts that violate their license.”

Some of the most severe restrictions on physicians in the legislation, which are contrary to practices approved by the Food and Drug Administration (FDA), concern the administration of “abortion-inducing drugs.” Those FDA-approved practices allow the administration of such drugs (namely, what is called the “Mifeprex regimen” and often referred to as RU-486) in a physician’s office or clinic.

Texas State Capitol.

The legislation, however, allows the administration of the Mifeprex regimen only “at an abortion facility” licensed under the Texas Health & Safety Code. This interference in a physician’s normal practice of medicine and a woman’s right to seek the treatment is not justified by FDA regulations, nor by any concern for pain felt by a fetus since the drug regimen is approved only for use within 49 days (seven weeks) of conception. Abortion opponents claim that a fetus can feel pain at 20 weeks, which justifies further regulation of abortion at that point in a pregnancy, but not before then.

The only purpose of this Mifeprex regimen provision is to interfere with the constitutional right of a woman to terminate a pregnancy within seven weeks of pregnancy — a period well within Roe’s 13-week time frame during which states may not regulate the right to an abortion. And it prevents her from using the services of her primary care physician unless he or she works at an abortion clinic and has privileges at a nearby hospital that provides obstetrical or gynecological health services.

Such a blatant violation of Roe. v. Wade is a sufficient reason, standing alone, to oppose the legislation.

The Texas District of the American Congress of Obstetricians and Gynecologists has found that SB 5 is “not based on sound science” and is an “attempt to prescribe how physicians should care for their individual patients.” Without question, the organization of OB/GYNs is, as it describes itself, “the Nation’s leading authority in women’s health.”

Its “role is to ensure that policy proposals accurately reflect the best available medical knowledge.” Its conclusion about this legislation is clear: “(The bill) will not enhance patient safety or improve the quality of care that women receive…(and it) does not promote women’s health, but erodes it by denying women in Texas the benefits of well-researched, safe, and proven protocols.”

Republican claims that the anti-abortion legislation the party is pushing enhances women’s heath are dishonest and bogus.

The way the Republican Party has been behaving, especially in Texas, demonstrates that (to paraphrase the words of George W. Bush) they hate American women for their freedoms. The GOP has become the domestic political equivalent of al-Qaeda when it comes to women’s health care and the right to terminate a pregnancy.

The party of Lincoln constantly conspires to reduce the freedom and liberty interests of Texas women. It works with anti-abortion activists to terrorize Texas women who want to terminate their pregnancies, as well as the physicians who provide them health services.

Rep. Wendy Davis’s valiant filibuster and the efforts of her supporters in the closing hours of Gov. Perry’s first called special session of the Texas Legislature show that many women and men in Texas will not sit idly by while the tribe of Texas Republicans maneuver to take away the constitutional rights of women.

A political party that actually loves liberty would not seek to deny it to any of our citizens, especially pregnant women who may be vulnerable and in need of compassion, understanding, and unfettered medical assistance.

[Lamar W. Hankins, a former San Marcos, Texas, city attorney, is also a columnist for the San Marcos Mercury. This article © Freethought San Marcos, Lamar W. Hankins. Read more articles by Lamar W. Hankins on The Rag Blog.]

The Rag Blog

Posted in Rag Bloggers | Tagged , , , , , , , | Leave a comment

HISTORY / Bob Feldman : A People’s History of Egypt, Part I, 525 BC-641 AD

Posted on July 3, 2013 by Thorne Dreyer
Cleopatra VII and her son Caesarion at the Temple of Dendera. Image from Wikimedia Commons.

A people’s history:
The movement to democratize Egypt

Part 1: 525 BC to 641 AD period — From the Persian invasion to the Byzantium Empire

By Bob Feldman | The Rag Blog | July 3, 2013

[As literally millions demonstrate in Egypt in an attempt to bring down the Mohammed Morsi government, and as the Egyptian military appears poised to take action against the Morsi regime, we begin Bob Feldman’s Rag Blog “people’s history” series, “The Movement to Democratize Egypt.” Also see Feldman’s series on The Rag Blog.]

Most people in the United States now realize that most Egyptians want to see their society politically and economically democratized. But most people in the U.S. may not know much about the history of the over 83 million people who currently live in Egypt, beginning in 525 BC when the country was invaded by the army of the Persian Empire, led by Cambyses II, the son of Cyrus II (“Cyrus the Great”).

As The Rough Guide To Egypt observed, “the Persian invasion of 525 BC began…rule by foreigners” in Egypt that essentially lasted until 1952.

Despite a number of unsuccessful revolts by people in Egypt against their Persian rulers during the next two centuries, “Egypt remained under Persian control until 332 BC, when their entire empire succumbed to Alexander [the Great]” of Greece, according to The Rough Guide To Egypt.

And according to Jason Thompson’s A History of Egypt, “so detested was the Persian yoke that when Alexander the Great arrived in Egypt, he was welcomed as a savior.” Initially, there was no resistance by people in Egypt to the rule of Alexander and — following Alexander’s death in 323 BC — to the rule of the Greek Ptolemaic Dynasty of General Ptolemy Soter I and his descendants between 322 and 30 BC.

But according to A History of Egypt, “the population of Ptolemaic Egypt consisted of a comparatively small number of relatively privileged Greeks superimposed onto the great masses of native Egyptians, most of whom lived around subsistence level but whose back-breaking labor supported Ptolemaic society and government;” and, not surprisingly, “Ptolemaic rule…became highly resented over time.”

As the same book recalled:

There were numerous rebellions, especially during the second and third centuries BC. Most may have resulted from economic desperation or lax central control because of dynastic infighting, but some…expressed a longing for the glorious past when Egyptians ruled Egyptians. A distinctly “nationalistic” literature appeared… Government officials extorted everything they could from the peasantry, frequently leaving them insufficient means to sustain themselves. Famine, inflation, banditry, and flight are all too abundantly attested during the later Ptolemaic Period…

The last representative of the Ptolemaic Dynasty to rule Egypt, Cleopatra VII, was made queen by the Roman General Julius Caesar after his troops killed her brother and rival for the Egyptian throne, Ptolemy XIII, in 47 BC.

But, according to A History of Egypt, Cleopatra was “so unpopular that Caesar permanently stationed three legions in Egypt ” and “when he departed in spring 47 BC to new conquests…Cleopatra was pregnant.” Then, after Julius Caesar was assassinated in 44 BC, Cleopatra formed a similar political/sexual alliance with Mark Antony.

But, after Octavius Caesar’s Roman forces defeated Antony and Cleopatra’s forces in 31 BC at the Battle of Actium (and both Antony and Cleopatra committed suicide), Egypt became a province of the Roman Empire in 30 BC.

As part of the pre-partitioned Roman Empire until 395 AD, Egypt was exploited as the grain-producing “breadbasket” of Rome; and during the 30 BC to 395 AD period of rule by Romans and their Roman legions, “vast amounts of Egyptian land” that had been owned by the state under the Greek Ptolemaic dynastic rule “were now mostly sold to private individuals, some of whom acquired extensive estates,” according to A History of Egypt.

As a result, “small landholders, though comprising a large proportion of the population, were increasingly hard-pressed;” and “many became little better than serfs and slaves on the estates of the privileged, who assumed powers that previously had belonged to the state, giving them even greater control over the peasantry,” according to the same book.

In 330 AD, Roman Emperor Constantine founded Constantinople; and when the Roman Empire was partitioned for the last time into East and West in 395 AD, Egypt became a province of the Constantinople-based eastern Byzantium Empire until 641 AD; and during this period “Egypt’s grain and revenue remained extremely important to Constantinople,” according to A History of Egypt.

But the same book also notes that, “the Byzantine yoke became so odious to Egyptians, both politically and religiously…that they were not averse to the change of rule that came in the seventh century.”

[Bob Feldman is an East Coast-based writer-activist and a former member of the Columbia SDS Steering Committee of the late 1960s. Read more articles by Bob Feldman on The Rag Blog.]

The Rag Blog

Posted in Rag Bloggers | Tagged , , | Leave a comment

RAG RADIO / Thorne Dreyer : Author and Labor/Social Justice Activist Bill Fletcher Jr.

Posted on July 3, 2013 by Thorne Dreyer

Rag Radio podcast:
Noted author and activist Bill Fletcher Jr.

Bill Fletcher Jr. is a longtime author, commentator, and labor, racial justice and social/economic justice activist, and an international solidarity leader.

By Rag Radio / The Rag Blog / July 2, 2013

Noted author and activist Bill Fletcher Jr., was Thorne Dreyer’s guest on Rag Radio, Friday, June 21, 2013.

Rag Radio is a syndicated radio program produced at the studios of KOOP 91.7-FM, a cooperatively-run all-volunteer community radio station in Austin, Texas.

Listen to or download our interview with Bill Fletcher Jr. here:


Bill Fletcher Jr. is a Senior Scholar with the Institute for Policy Sudies, an editorial board member and columnist for BlackCommentator.com, and past president of TransAfrica Forum. A graduate of Harvard University, Fletcher is a longtime labor, social and economic justice, and racial justice activist and an international solidarity leader.

After graduating from college, he went to work as a welder in a shipyard and has worked for several labor unions and served as a senior staffer for the national AFL-CIO. Over the years he has been active in workplace and community struggles as well as electoral campaigns.

Fletcher is the author of “They’re Bankrupting Us” and Twenty other Myths about Unions, co-author (with Peter Agard) of The Indispensable Ally: Black Workers and the Formation of the Congress of Industrial Organizations, 1934-1941, and the co-author (with Dr. Fernando Gapasin) of Solidarity Divided: The Crisis in Organized Labor and a New Path toward Social justice.

He is a syndicated columnist and a frequent commentator on radio, television, and the Internet. Find articles by Bill Fletcher Jr. on The Rag Blog.

Rag Radio is hosted and produced by Rag Blog editor and long-time alternative journalist Thorne Dreyer, a pioneer of the Sixties underground press movement.

The show has aired since September 2009 on KOOP 91.7-FM, an all-volunteer cooperatively-run community radio station in Austin, Texas. Rag Radio is broadcast live every Friday from 2-3 p.m. (CDT) on KOOP and is rebroadcast on Sundays at 10 a.m. (EDT) on WFTE, 90.3-FM in Mt. Cobb, PA, and 105.7-FM in Scranton, PA.

The show is streamed live on the web by both stations and, after broadcast, all Rag Radio shows are posted as podcasts at the Internet Archive.

Rag Radio is produced in association with The Rag Blog, a progressive Internet newsmagazine, and the New Journalism Project, a Texas 501(c)(3) nonprofit corporation. Tracey Schulz is the show’s engineer and co-producer.

Rag Radio can be contacted at ragradio@koop.org.

The Rag Blog

Posted in Rag Bloggers | Tagged , , , , , , , | Leave a comment

Michael James : Kids at Chicago’s New True Vine Church, 1961

Posted on July 2, 2013 by Thorne Dreyer
Kids at the New True Vine MB Church, Chicago, 1961. Photo by Michael James from his forthcoming book, Michael Gaylord James‘ Pictures from the Long Haul.

Pictures from the Long Haul:
Kids at the New True Vine Church  
in 1961 Chicago

I take their pictures, and I realize now that things are beginning to come together: people of different colors, poverty, photography, Chicago, and change. I am in the early stages of my own new true vine.

By Michael James | The Rag Blog | July 2, 2013

[In this series, Michael James is sharing images from his rich past, accompanied by reflections about — and inspired by — those images. This photo will be included in his forthcoming book, Michael Gaylord James’ Pictures from the Long Haul.]

Early September 1960 and I’m out on the highway again, heading across Pennsylvania-Ohio-Indiana and into Chicago, then the “hog butcher to the World.” This time I’m in a yellow and black 1957 Desoto convertible with my folks, Hal and Florence James.

Day breaks and we pull up to the Executive House on Wacker Drive. At noon we wind our way up Sheridan Road and I begin going through the final steps to be a college student; I’m a brand new freshman at the small Presbyterian-affiliated Lake Forest College just outside Chicago.

Incoming Foresters are given a red and black beanie with class of 1964 stitching. I was already partial to red and black, they being the colors of my earlier teen years passion, the Downshifters Hot Rod Club. Later I’ll learn red and black are anarchist colors, a political stripe I have affinity with, though I end up being closer to democratic centralism in my street fighting and community organizing days.

Later I will reluctantly return to my early Democratic Party political roots; thanks Mom and Dad, and Go, Adlai Stevenson. These days I see involvement in the progressive wing of the Democratic Party as analogous to Mao working with Chiang Kai-shek to hold back the Japanese. There’s a lot (!!!) to be desired about the Democratic Party, but stopping right wing Republicans and the rise of fascism is high priority.

I’m not about to wear a beanie, even when Dad says he doesn’t think things have changed since his days at the University of Chicago. And I’m certainly not going to wear it after a guy from the Kappa Sig fraternity tells me to put it on. I’m all about school spirit but was voted “coolest” in my Staples senior class and I’m not about to compromise on this headwear.

After a goodbye to the folks it’s on to meeting people and checking out the new scene. I have my first Commons aka cafeteria experience. On Monday I’m a walk-on and become a member of the Foresters football team. I’ll develop good relations with the cafeteria workers. I have fond memories of running wind sprints in crisp fall weather at dusk, then words from the coaches, loving the hot shower, and loving even more extra plates of food in the Commons.

The football games and their bus rides take me to new places, playing schools previously unknown to me. We’re talking Augustana, Carthage, Millikan, North Central, Illinois Wesleyan, Monmouth, Elmhurst, and Hamline. I will break four bones in my right hand when hitting a tree, on an angry spree, after returning from a game in Rock Island by bus and my girlfriend Lucia hadn’t signed out for an overnight (with me).

In the fall of 1963 the University of Chicago is bringing back football, and we play their club team. My dad  played a year there under the legendary coach Alonzo Stagg. Wasylik, Hanke, and Triptow are my coaches. This game would be my last, following a halftime challenging-authority altercation with coach Nick Wasylik, who actually was a fine guy.

The world continues to open up for me. I discover sociology (or sociology discovers me); I thought that was how one became a social worker. A professor encourages me to think about the big picture and the social-economic-political forces and conditions that shape peoples’ lives. I’ll head off to University of California Berkeley on a Woodrow Wilson Fellowship in 1964 and on a return visit to LFC my professor-sociologist-hero Dr. Don Roos and I argue over the Vietnam War. I was so disappointed!

History professor Carl Perrini, who studied with UW Madison’s William Appleman Williams (a founder of Studies on the Left), shows me the Autobiography of Big Bill Haywood; I read my first book about radicals, learning about the Western Federation of Miners and the Industrial Workers of the World (IWW).

From Haywood I pick up a tip. When Rockefeller’s Pinkertons and the FBI were after Big Bill it was the local cops who tipped him off. I’ve been friendly with local cops even during wild rebellious times. One was the late Maurie Daley of Chicago’s infamous Red Squad. He harassed, spied-on and chased many a radical, but was certainly a more likeable Red Squad pig than the Eastern European dudes.

Maurie’s kid also played football at LFC, a fact I learn while talking to Daley when I spot him sitting in a van on a drug stakeout. Earlier he had made contact after being transferred to the 24th District, leaving a message for me at the Heartland Café saying he was “Che Guevara’s nephew!”

I develop admiration for many teachers at LFC. Gerry Gerasimo turns me on to issues of social class, status, and conflict; George Tomashevich introduces me to Africa’s depth, the Ashanti, and African independence movements. Sculptor Helmut Van Flein transfers my hot rod welding skills into making sculpture.

Sam Pasiencier, mathematician turned spiritual guy, helps me develop my Mexico 1962 photos after I drive my Triumph motorcycle to Mexico. And Alan Bates tells me I need to rewrite, that my words aren’t golden the first time out. He also turns me on to Lawrence Ferlinghetti and his way-cool Coney Island of the Mind.

Dr. Smucker is the College Chaplin and teaches a Christian Ethics class. He initiates my interest in Christian communal sects like the Amana Colonies and New Harmony, Indiana. A Mennonite and a wonderful guy, he returns a paper I had written on Gandhi that ended with an upbeat paragraph about truth and goodness triumphing in the end.

Donovan Smucker says: “not necessarily,” and gives examples of unfortunate endings to human struggles. He calls me a “meliorist” and I confess that to this day I still believe conditions for people can and should improve. It’s up to us to make it happen.

The class takes a field trip. We visit various housing sights in Chicago. We look at Lake Meadows and its’ three large “integrated” buildings; the lower income building is 70% black, while the highest-rent abode building is 70% white. The midrange-rent building is 50% white and 50% black. And we visit the Cabrini Green Projects.

Now I had been in situations where I was one of a handful of whites among blacks — on visits to the Apollo Theater in Harlem, going to see Mahalia Jackson, the Swan Silvertones, and the Dixie Hummingbirds et al at Madison Square Garden, Ray Charles at the Pan Pacific Auditorium in San Jose, and a high school graduation party in Norwalk, Connecticut.

However, being a white guy with a busload of white students, I find myself wandering behind the class. That’s when I run into the kids outside the New True Vine MB Church. I take their pictures, and I realize now that things are beginning to come together: people of different colors, poverty, photography, Chicago, and change. I am in the early stages of my own new true vine.

[Michael James is a former SDS national officer, the founder of Rising Up Angry, co-founder of Chicago’s Heartland Café (1976 and still going), and co-host of the Saturday morning (9-10 a.m. CDT) Live from the Heartland radio show, here and on YouTube. He is reachable by one and all at michael@heartlandcafe.com. Find more articles by Michael James on The Rag Blog.]

The Rag Blog

Posted in Rag Bloggers | Tagged , , , , , , , , | Leave a comment

Alan Waldman : ‘Waking the Dead’ is an Excellent Brit Cold-Case Series

Posted on July 2, 2013 by Thorne Dreyer

Waldman’s film and TV
treasures you may have missed:

Cops, a profiler, and a forensic scientist crack old murder cases.

By Alan Waldman | The Rag Blog | July 2, 2013

[In his weekly column, Alan Waldman reviews some of his favorite films and TV series that readers may have missed, including TV dramas, mysteries, and comedies from Canada, England, Ireland, and Scotland. Most are available on DVD and/or Netflix, and some episodes are on YouTube.]

Waking the Dead won a 2004 “Best Drama Series” International Emmy, the “Best TV Crime Program” award from Britain’s Television and Radio Industries Club, and nominations for a “Best Television Episode Teleplay” Edgar and another International Emmy.

It aired 46 two-part episodes between 2000 and 2011 over nine seasons — five of which are currently on Netflix. It starred Trevor Eve as the head of a fictional cold case unit, Sue Johnston as its profiler, and Wil Johnson as a police officer.

In seasons 1-5 they were teamed with Holly Aird as a forensic scientist, and in seasons 1-4 Claire Goose was a police partner on the team. Others replaced the latter pair in subsequent series, including Tara Fitzgerald (Brassed Off, Sirens), who briefly headed the six-episode spinoff series The Body Farm, after Eve left the show.

The cold-case team uses new evidence, including DNA, to re-open and solve old cases. Here is an episode.

Eve’s character, Detective Superintendent Peter Boyd, is sometimes stern, angry, and unorthodox, whereas Johnston’s Dr. Grace Foley is calming and reasonable.

Episodes deal with murders, kidnapping, sexual child abuse, arson, mysterious disappearances, gangsters, and more.

Series producer Colin Wratten said about the research and grisly special effects on Waking the Dead: “With the amount of gruesome script research I’ve done on my BBC computer, I’m probably on every government watch list.”

This is a compelling, dramatic cop series, and it had a nice long run.

[Oregon writer and Houston native Alan Waldman holds a B.A. in theater arts from Brandeis University and has worked as an editor at The Hollywood Reporter and Honolulu magazine. Read more of Alan Waldman’s articles on The Rag Blog.]

The Rag Blog

Posted in Rag Bloggers | Tagged , , , , | Leave a comment

Ted McLaughlin : Wendy Davis, Energized Dems Deal Blow to Texas GOP and War on Women

Posted on June 27, 2013 by Thorne Dreyer
Pro-choice demonstrators at the Texas State Capitol in Austin, Sunday, June 23, 2013. More than 1,000 packed the place on Sunday and the numbers kept growing during the week. Photo by Alan Pogue / The Rag Blog.

A new day for Democrats in Texas:
New political stars and a raucous crowd
deal blow to GOP’s insidious attack on choice

By Ted McLaughlin | The Rag Blog | June 27, 2013

[The Week that Was! As the Supreme Court made landmark decisions about voting rights (two thumbs down) and gay marriage (it’s about time!), thousands of cheering pro-choice Texans — wearing orange shirts that read “Stand With Texas Women” and rooted on by Planned Parenthood president Cecile Richards, daughter of the late and great Texas Gov. Ann Richards — filled the rotunda and packed the galleries of the State Capitol of Texas in Austin for their own marathon filibuster. The enthusiasm was intoxicating.

It was a massive three-day show of opposition to Texas Republicans’ attack on women’s health in the form of a draconian new abortion law — and of support for Texas Sen. Wendy Davis and her dramatic filibuster in the Senate chambers. Davis has emerged as a superstar and a legitimate candidate for higher office in Texas. The events captured the imagination of the nation. As MSNBC’s Rachel Maddow said Tuesday night: “Texas: Who knew!” Oh, and coming next week: “Kill the Bill, Volume 2.” See you there. — Thorne Dreyer / The Rag Blog]

AUSTIN, Texas — The teabagger governor of Texas announced Wednesday, June 26, 2013, that he is calling a second special session of the Texas legislature. Three issues are on the agenda — transportation funding and juvenile justice (both of which died in the last session because Republicans wasted the whole 30-day session trying to shut down the state’s abortion clinics), and, of course, the same old anti-choice legislation that was filibustered to death in that first special session.

Perry seems determined to keep the issue alive, and give Democrats something to make sure their supporters remain energized and engaged.

Texas Democrats have been a dispirited bunch for a long time now. It has been more than 20 years since a Democrat held statewide office, and prospects for the future seemed dim because there were really no politicians in the party with true statewide appeal.

That changed dramatically on Tuesday night, when a couple of female State Senators put themselves in the limelight to stop (at least temporarily) an odious anti-choice bill that would almost certainly close 37 out of 42 clinics in the state that do abortion procedures — and in the process they inspired and renewed thousands of Democrats across the state.

Texas Senators Wendy Davis, left, and Leticia Van de Putte in the Texas Senate Chamber, Tuesday, June 26, 2013. Photo from Jobsanger.

The new Texas political stars are Sen. Wendy Davis and Sen. Leticia Van de Putte. Davis got the ball rolling by declaring she would filibuster the bill (which had to be approved by midnight, when the session ended, or it would die).

She got the floor about 11:15 a.m. and began her filibuster — and then she held the floor for over 10 hours. She was helped by the other 11 Democratic senators who lobbed her “softball” questions to keep her filibuster growing, but the real work of the filibuster was on her capable shoulders — and she performed admirably.

With only a couple of hours to go before midnight, the Republican majority was able to stop her by claiming for the third time that she was not being germane to the bill with her discourse. It was arguably not true, but truth or rules have never been very important to Texas Republicans. The other 11 Democratic senators stepped forward with a barrage of parliamentary maneuvers (points of order, parliamentary questions, etc.).

One of the most prominent of these senators who sprang to the defense of Sen. Davis was Sen. Van de Putte. And with only about 15 minutes until midnight, she challenged the Senate president by demanding to know, “At what point must a female senator raise her hand or her voice to be recognized over her male colleagues?” The crowd in the gallery began to applaud her, and that applause turned into more than 20 minutes of shouting and applauding that delayed a vote on the GOP bill.

With time running out, the GOP tried to hold their vote — but as Democratic senators pointed out, the vote was not finished before midnight, and by Texas law, the session was over at midnight. This caused a big mess — as Republicans claimed the bill was passed, since the vote started before midnight, and the Democrats claimed the bill was dead since the vote was not finished before midnight.

The official senate record backed Democrats, showing the bill was passed on 6/26 and not on 6/25 as required. The Republicans then tried to fix that by illegally altering the senate record (see below).

The top picture shows the original Senate log, and the bottom one shows the log after being altered by Republicans. The senators then argued among themselves for a while — and at about 3 a.m. the Republicans backed down and admitted the bill had been passed after midnight, which means the bill was DEAD.

The governor will call another special session and most likely get the bill passed (even if they have to lock the public out and do it in secret). But for right now, the bill is dead. And the Republicans did nothing good for their image, since their shenanigans were observed by hundreds of thousands of Texans and other Americans.

I watched the proceedings on the Texas Tribune‘s live YouTube feed. More than 182,000 people watched on that stream, but that was just a portion of those watching the proceedings, since there were approximately 199 other live feeds — not to mention all the traffic on social media like Twitter and Facebook.

And while the Republicans were humiliated, thousands of Texas Democrats (and others) were energized — and Sen. Wendy Davis and Sen. Leticia Van de Putte were able to increase their political capital immensely. They are now both credible candidates for statewide office. And combined with the new statewide Democratic effort to register new voters, and the added impact of changing demographics, this means Democratic prospects in Texas are brighter than they have been in many years.

To put it bluntly, it was a great night for Texas Democrats and a terrible night for Texas Republicans.

[Amarillo resident Ted McLaughlin, a regular contributor to The Rag Blog, also posts at jobsanger. Read more articles by Ted McLaughlin on The Rag Blog.] 

Photos by Alan Pogue / The Rag Blog:


The Rag Blog

Posted in Rag Bloggers | Tagged , , , , , , , , , , | 3 Comments

Tom Hayden : The Right-Wing War on Democracy

Posted on June 27, 2013 by Thorne Dreyer

President Lyndon B. Johnson signs the Voting Rights Act, 1965. Photo from AP.

The right-wing war on democratic rights:
Voting rights, immigration reform imperiled

Lost in both the partisan spin and rhetorical legalisms is that the scale of political power is being tipped far to the right in spite of progressive majorities which elected and reelected President Obama.

By Tom Hayden | The Rag Blog | June 27, 2013

With the fiftieth anniversary of the 1963 March on Washington approaching, is the time at hand for mass protest and civil disobedience against the Republican/Tea Party’s war against voting rights and immigrant rights?

That’s among the immediate questions as the Roberts Court has dropped its hammer on the 1965 Voting Rights Act while a dubious “immigration reform” bill passed the Senate on its likely way to an even worse fate in the Tea Party-controlled House.

Together with the Court’s Citizens United decisions protecting secret money in campaigns, Republicans are doing everything possible to cement a grip on power as a numerical white minority bloc. Successful Republican efforts to gerrymander House seats to gain ground in the Electoral College, combined with the rising tide of anti-abortion restrictions in southern states, reinforce the drift towards a new civil war — one fought by political means with recurring episodes of mass violence.

The Court’s narrowing of affirmative action also guarantees a widening of the racial divide in education and economic opportunity.

The Court’s composition reveals its underlying partisan character, with the decisive tilt occurring after the 2000 election between Al Gore, Ralph Nader, and George Bush, in which the Court usurped the verdict of a majority of voters, thus becoming a de facto branch of the Republican apparatus.

Photo by Richard Ellis / Getty Images.

The Republican bloc now includes: Roberts [Bush, 2005], Alito [Bush, 2006], Scalia [Reagan, 1986], Kennedy [Reagan, 1988], and Thomas [Bush, sr., 1991]. The Democratic bloc includes Ginsberg [Clinton, 1993], Stephen Breyer [Clinton, 1994], Sonia Sotomayer [Obama, 2009], and Elena Kagan [Obama, 2010].

The Republican tilt is likely to continue indefinitely, with Obama only able to appointment replacements to retiring liberals. The tilt will become a lock if a Republican president is elected in 2016.

Lost in both the partisan spin and rhetorical legalisms is that the scale of political power is being tipped far to the right in spite of progressive majorities which elected and reelected President Obama.

In the voting rights decision, the Court has prevented aggressive action by the Justice Department to deter egregious methods of suppressing voter turnout among communities of color. University surveys show that most whites in the Southern states, with the addition of Pennsylvania, are more prejudiced than the national average [Annenberg survey, 2008 data].

Most lost or settled voting rights cases have occurred in the South. {New York Times, June 23]. It is true that both blatant and more subtle cases of voter suppression occur outside the states covered by the Voting Rights Act, but that is an argument for expanding the Section 5 protections, not weakening them.

The point is that Barack Obama was elected twice with the support of 75-95 percent of African-American, Latino, and Asian-American voters, and any government-imposed inhibitions on their registration and turnout will make the difference in close national and state elections. Without federal intervention, the challenge of protecting voting rights will be left largely to massive volunteer efforts by civil rights and labor organizations.

With respect to the immigrant rights bill passed by the Senate this week, the measure shifts U.S. military buildups from the Muslim world to the Mexican border, airports, and coastlines. The Statue of Liberty is replaced by a Minuteman at the watchtowers.

Border wall boondoggle. Photo by
Scott Olson/Getty Images.

The projected cost is $40 billion, which is sure to rise with overruns, making the costs comparable to other major military operations. The total number of Border Patrol agents will double to 40,000, and the fencing is to cover 700 miles. Sen. Patrick Leahy was right in calling the bill a boondoggle for Halliburton. [For the historical record, the original fencing metal strips came from Halliburton’s corporate predecessor, Brown and Root; the metal was from landing strips installed for U.S. aircraft during the Vietnam War.]

The billionaires’ boondoggle aside, the question is whether — and when — the immigrant rights bill will include voting rights, if ever. Obama temporarily legalized the DREAM Act youth who participated heavily in the 2012 election. Their future now is linked to the immigrant rights bill, or will require an extension of Obama’s executive order.

It is estimated that between 800,000 and 1.2 million of the DREAM Act generation could become empowered to vote. In addition, there are one million projected voters in the category of Title II, the Agricultural Worker Program. That would leave about 9 million immigrants facing the pitfalls of the so-called “pathway to citizenship” which will take perhaps 13 to 20 years.

According to an analysis by Peter Schey, it is likely that 4 to 5 million mostly low-income immigrants will be unable to adjust their status because of roadblocks to eligibility.

It is anyone’s guess whether the Tea Party Republicans in the House will accept any immigration reform, especially reform that will empower low-income, brown-skinned people to vote. That would shift the political balance of power towards the multicultural majority, now represented by Obama, for the coming generation.

The all-important electoral balance will shift away from the Republican Party in Florida, Texas, Arizona, Nevada, Colorado, and elsewhere — through the fault lines of the Mexican War of the 1840s.

The point is that the Tea Party, the Republican Party, and Corporate Agriculture will consent to between 2 and 7 million brown-skinned people becoming new voters. If the conservatives finally acquiece, it is reasonably certain that they will make the “pathway to citizenship” as uphill, filled with obstacles, and gradual as possible.

This is not only about raw partisan political power, but about the last stand of the xenophobes and nativist elements in America’s political culture. Those who consider these words an exaggeration should read again Patrick Buchanan’s State of Emergency [2006] with its foaming fear of a new reconquista in California, or Reagan Defense Secretary Casper Weinberger’s prediction of war with Mexico.

Historically, it was difficult enough to achieve democracy in America as a form of minority rule. The British had to be defeated and a new republic given birth where the minority of while male property owners were enfranchised. Each expansion of democratic voting rights has come in the wake of war or massive civil strife.

Now, even with a new and more tolerant American majority coming into view, the resistance from the Right will harden in every way. Politics, including the politics of American progressives, will be seen increasingly through this lens.

[Tom Hayden is a former California state senator and leader of Sixties peace, justice, and environmental movements. He currently teaches at Pitzer College in Los Angeles. His latest book is The Long Sixties. Hayden is director of the Peace and Justice Resource center and editor of The Peace Exchange Bulletin. Read more of Tom Hayden’s writing on The Rag Blog.]

The Rag Blog

Posted in Rag Bloggers | Tagged , , , , , , , , , | 4 Comments

Steve Russell : Big Brother in the Data Mines

Posted on June 27, 2013 by Thorne Dreyer
Cover of the first Signet Classics edition of George Orwell’s 1984. Image from Vintage Paperback Archive.

We’re talking yottabytes here: 
Big Brother in the data mines

We’ve been living for some time in the world set out in Moore’s Law, which predicts that computing power will double every two years, a proposition that obviously has mathematical limits we have yet to reach.

By Steve Russell | The Rag Blog | June 27, 2013

One of the television talking heads really hurt my feelings in a report the other night on Edward Snowden, the traitorous hero or heroic traitor who leaked the existence of PRISM, wholesale collection of data from the servers of various major players on the Internet. Not once but twice, he demanded to know how a 29-year-old high school dropout could become a computer jock for the National Security Agency with a top-secret clearance?

I was once an 18-year-old high school dropout who was a computer jock for the NSA (USAF branch) with a top-secret clearance. In the three years I worked up to my elbows in top secret intelligence, I can remember two items the leaking of which would have landed the news on the front pages along with the leaker in the pokey.

We were all told regularly and often what the consequences of revealing classified information would be. Would I have done that? I like to think I would if the public interest in the information clearly outweighed my own safety, but that circumstance never came up, so I can’t know. Before you spit your coffee on the keyboard, remember that the very oath every military person takes involves putting the interests of the country above your own.

Spying on the retail level has been part of war on this continent at least since the pueblos pulled off a sneak attack that sent the Spanish colonists all the way back to El Paso del Norte, licking their wounds.

Spying on the wholesale level awaited technology, not intent. Governments had always tried to gin up networks of informers, some of which became famous in history and did the job for a period of time. Scholars estimate that one in seven East Germans informed for the Stasi on some level. People, over time, seem to revert to their own values over those imposed by government, and so become less reliable as informers. People lack the discipline of computers.

During WWII, Bletchley Park began to move warfare into the digital age. Communication had for some time been by wire and by broadcast, and so intelligence became a contest between code makers and code breakers in, as the computer geeks say, real time.

One obvious method of code breaking is to archive and collate vast numbers of messages and look for patterns. This became possible by entrusting analysis to Alan Turing’s mathematics, which became the Allies’ ACE (“Automatic Computing Engine“) in the hole.

Once the algorithms were written, the issue became how to capture and store mountains of communication data. We’ve been living for some time in the world set out in Moore’s Law, which predicts that computing power will double every two years, a proposition that obviously has mathematical limits we have yet to reach.

By the time the calendar turned over the date that gives the title to George Orwell’s dystopian novel, 1984, the technology was possible for Big Brother to be watching us. When the date whizzed by with no more notice than Y2K, some of us wondered whether the American people, like Winston Smith, had learned to love Big Brother?

Image from The Matrix.

Apparently, not all people share amorous attachment to the government, since the sales of Orwell’s novel have spiked with the revelations about PRISM.

Back to the Okie teenager who got his top-secret clearance in 1965. We learned our trade on computers that stored data in kilobytes. When we moved to intelligence, we were dealing with megabytes. There were rumors about gigabytes, like the computer in my home on which I compose this column. Today’s NSA is storing data in yottabytes. That is, a septillion bytes.

We are told PRISM collects “metadata,” not identifiable to individuals or even organizations. Numbers called to and from, length of call. Not content. Not even who made the call.

Excuse me, but how would it help catch terrorists if it could not be focused on individuals or organizations? Back when I did this, just about everything we had in the computer was from communications intercepts and aircraft sorties. Collating that told us all kinds of useful things about our adversaries.

The question how many data points it takes to focus on an individual is not one of opinion but one of mathematics, and the number of data points is directly related to the level of certainty we demand. In the case of cell phone metadata, there’s some evidence that a mere four hits on the same number can identify 95% of individuals.

Because published studies in scientific journals are limited, that could be wrong, but the fact remains that the question is not one of opinion, but of mathematics.

By cross-referencing telephone and Internet metadata with bank records, which are already in electronic form and do not require a search warrant to access, the NSA can discover things about you that your parents may not know.

We are told that the metadata can be accessed from the desktop computer of any analyst who has the proper clearance. You know, like the one I had at age 18? Let’s not give Big Brother too much credit for having his attention focused on us, but let’s not pretend that it’s impossible or that the right hand always knows what the left hand is doing when thousands of people have access to yottabytes of data.

Big Brother does not care about you, but he cared enough about Martin Luther King, Jr., to bug his motel room, a laughably primitive method. He cared enough about the Black Panther Party and the American Indian Movement to insert double agents, which is also kind of labor intensive and old fashioned.

If the United States is data mining on this level, what do you think China and Russia are doing? China in particular has pulled off some hacks into corporate databases that left me scratching my head.

This is not an argument to shut down PRISM, assuming that would be possible given the resources already invested in storage. Consider these words like a weather report, since, after all, the databases being mined were already in corporate hands before the government touched them. I’m unclear that maximizing shareholder value is a less dangerous imperative than maintaining a government in power.

“You don’t need a weatherman to know which way the wind blows.”

[Steve Russell lives in Sun City, Texas, near Austin. He is a Texas trial court judge by assignment and associate professor emeritus of criminal justice at Indiana University-Bloomington. Steve was an activist in Austin in the sixties and seventies, and wrote for Austin’s underground paper, The Rag. Steve, who belongs to the Cherokee Nation of Oklahoma, is also a columnist for Indian Country Today. He can be reached at swrussel@indiana.edu. Read more articles by Steve Russell on The Rag Blog.]

The Rag Blog

Posted in Rag Bloggers | Tagged , , , , , , , , , | 2 Comments

Posted on June 27, 2013 by Thorne Dreyer


Posted in RagBlog | Leave a comment

Lamar W. Hankins : Ted Cruz’s Opposition to Liberty

Posted on June 27, 2013 by Thorne Dreyer
Texas Sen. Ted Cruz. Photo by Chip Somodevilla / Getty Images.

States’ rights trump the Constitution:
Ted Cruz’s opposition to liberty

Cruz’s homophobia is so pronounced that he has criticized other politicians for being too accepting of gays.

By Lamar W. Hankins | The Rag Blog | June 27, 2013

[The Supreme Court issued rulings on two landmark marriage equality cases on Wednesday, June 26, striking down a federal law that denies federal benefits to same-sex couples married in states that recognize gay marriage and allowing a lower court ruling that struck down California’s same-sex marriage ban to stand.]

It was gratifying to read of Sen. Lisa Murkowski, R-Alaska, declaring that she has changed her mind about her opposition to gay marriage. Her change of heart is based on the right to privacy, support for encouraging committed families, and recognition that denying first-class citizenship to people because of their choice of life partners also denies such people the liberty promised by the constitution.

Murkowski did not explain her reasons exactly as I have explained them above, but my comments fairly interpret what she said. She does not believe that religions or religious beliefs should control our civil rights. But she does not suggest that any church or religious group be required to recognize same-sex marriages:

As a Catholic, I see marriage as a valued sacrament that exists exclusively between a man and a woman. Other faiths and belief systems feel differently about this issue — and they have every right to. Churches must be allowed to define marriage and conduct ceremonies according to their rules, but the government should not tell people who they have a right to marry through a civil ceremony.

Murkowski was moved by the experience of a same-sex couple in Alaska who adopted a family of four children so that they could stay together. Murkowski recognized that the two women are denied rights that all heterosexual married couples enjoy and found such a “second-class existence” intolerable when viewed from the perspective of the Republican and Christian values she espouses.

This view seems imminently reasonable, so why have only two other Republican United States senators agreed with her — Sen. Rob Portman (Ohio) and Sen. Mark Kirk (Illinois), who announced earlier this year that they too support same-sex marriage in the civil context? That leaves 43 Republicans in the U.S. Senate who oppose the freedom to marry the adult of one’s choice. (According to an ABC News report, nearly 50 Democrats in the senate support or do not oppose same-sex marriage.)

There is no fiercer Republican opponent of same-sex marriage than Texas’s Sen. Ted Cruz, who many believe is the future of the Republican Party. Cruz claims to be what I would call the “liberty senator,” except that the only liberty he consistently supports is liberty that his Tea Party constituents embrace. Cruz tries to finesse his position on same sex marriage by arguing that the matter is, under the Constitution, left to the states to decide:

The Constitution leaves it to the states to decide upon marriage and I hope the Supreme Court respects centuries of tradition and doesn’t step into the process of setting aside state laws that make the definition of marriage.

But Cruz is disguising his abhorrence of gays with his paean to states’ rights. In his view, the personal freedom to decide whom to marry is not a constitutional guarantee for all, but a privilege to be doled out by the states to those fortunate enough to live in one of the 11 states that permit same sex marriage.

Cruz seems not to remember that the Supreme Court’s decision in Loving v. Virginia, which overturned that state’s law against interracial marriage, was based on the U.S. Constitution. In its ruling, the court found that Virginia’s anti-miscegenation statute violated both the Due Process Clause and the Equal Protection Clause of the Fourteenth Amendment:

No State shall make or enforce any law which shall abridge the privileges or immunities of citizens of the United States; nor shall any State deprive any person of life, liberty, or property, without due process of law; nor deny to any person within its jurisdiction the equal protection of the laws.

If Cruz’s limited liberty ideas had been in effect in 1965, the Supreme Court might not have allowed women to have access to birth control, which had been denied by the state of Connecticut. The court ruled that the right to privacy and due process entitled women to use birth control if they choose to do so. States cannot deny access to birth control under our Constitution.

For Cruz, states’ rights seem to trump the Constitution, at least whenever his political and religious views are affected. Fortunately for the rest of us, the Supreme Court has usually recognized that the rights and liberties guaranteed by the Constitution protect us all from state legislators and voters who would deny to some those rights and liberties we should all treasure, and from which we should all benefit.

Cruz’s homophobia is so pronounced that he has criticized other politicians for being too accepting of gays. Former Dallas mayor Republican Tom Leppert twice marched in Dallas’ gay pride parade, actions that Cruz finds offensive: “When a mayor of a city chooses twice to march in a parade celebrating gay pride that’s a statement and it’s not a statement I agree with.”

At the federal level, Cruz has defended marriage between one man and one woman as the fundamental building block of society. But the difference between same-sex marriage and heterosexual marriage is not obvious. In both cases, the couples can nurture children, work, engage in religious preferences together or separately, own property together, and live together in every other way.

But because same-sex marriage partners are denied the automatic extension of the privileges of marriage, such as property rights, medical decision-making, inheritance, and the right to make decisions on the death of the other partner, same-sex partners are far from equal to their heterosexual counterparts.

A couple married in Vermont who move to Texas, for example, will not enjoy the “full faith and credit” of Vermont’s law permitting same-sex marriage if that couple seeks to divorce — that is, the couple cannot divorce in Texas, their then legal residence. This is a situation Cruz is proud to have helped create.

His campaign website crows,

When a Beaumont state court granted a divorce to two homosexual men who had gotten a civil union in Vermont, Cruz, under the leadership of Attorney General Greg Abbott, intervened in defense of the marriage laws of the State of Texas, which successfully led to the court judgment being vacated.

It is counter-productive to a civil society to allow such chaos to prevail. The couple will have to re-establish residence in Vermont in order to have a court supervise the dissolution of their marriage and division of property. If children were involved, the consequences would be even more troubling — the children would be held hostage to the religious beliefs of Ted Cruz, as well as his narrow and limited definition of liberty.

Cruz ignores the Full Faith and Credit clause (Article IV, Section 1) of the U.S. Constitution. Understood in plain English, this clause means that the various states must recognize the legislative acts, public records, and judicial decisions of the other states in our union. With the Full Faith and Credit Clause, the Constitution drafters wanted to do two things: unify this country and preserve the autonomy of the states.

If the Supreme Court applied this provision to same-sex marriages created in one state when the parties have moved to another state, it would not require any state to allow same-sex marriage, but it would require every state to behave toward all married couples residing in their state in a legally equal fashion. If a quickie Las Vegas opposite-sex marriage can be enforced in Texas, the sanctity of marriage is not harmed by enforcing in Texas a same-sex marriage entered in Vermont.

Such an outcome may be a part of the “gay rights agenda” Ted Cruz loves to oppose. I don’t know because I don’t know what the “gay rights agenda” is. If by gay rights, one means that people who are gay should be treated without discrimination under our laws, then I favor such an “agenda.”

This is not a grant of special rights to gay people, but merely an effort to treat gays with the same respect our laws provide to all who suffer discrimination because of their status. Opposing discrimination against gays for being gay fulfills the promise of liberty, something Cruz claims to champion.

But as we have learned over the past two years or so, Cruz doesn’t like liberty as much as he likes talking about liberty. Cruz’s liberty reminds me of Anatole France’s idea of equality under the law, which “forbids rich and poor alike to sleep under bridges, beg in the streets and steal loaves of bread.” Cruz is all for liberty that allows gays as well as straights to marry someone of the opposite sex. He thinks that makes us all equal.

[Lamar W. Hankins, a former San Marcos, Texas, city attorney, is also a columnist for the San Marcos Mercury. This article © Freethought San Marcos, Lamar W. Hankins. Read more articles by Lamar W. Hankins on The Rag Blog.]

The Rag Blog

Posted in Rag Bloggers | Tagged , , , , , , , | Leave a comment

Posted on June 27, 2013 by Thorne Dreyer

Type your summary here

Type rest of the post here

Source /

The Rag Blog

Posted in RagBlog | Leave a comment