August 25, 2011
Gov. Rick Perry would make a great president.
As he tirelessly reminds us, the United States is a shambles — mounting debt, high unemployment, religiously unrooted, over- taxed, entangled in entitlements, with a Federal Reserve Bank whose actions are treasonous and a federal government seeping like an oil spill into every individual's life.
It's time for a daring experiment, and he's just the man to undertake it. Imagine: He could totally eliminate the federal bureaucracy, return to the gold standard, bring Christ and creationism back into the public schools, secure foreign borders, privatize Social Security and health care. It would be the biggest social revolution since the New Deal, and he could do it all if he were the president — of Texas.
Rick, don't waste your purpose-driven life running for an office that will only frustrate you. You call Washington "the Devil's city," and now you're aspiring to go smack in the center of it. Besides, the U.S. is just too big and complex to allow your vision to flourish. But Texas! There you'd have a nice little country about the same size as Spain or Afghanistan, with a GDP and population close to that of Australia. You've spoken of this for years; why not go for it? Resurrect the Republic of Texas, born in valiant revolution against Mexico and independent for a decade, until in 1845 President Sam Houston, over great objection, got it folded into the U.S. — primarily so the federal government could assume Texas's enormous war debt. How's that for irony? For old-time Texans, the Republic is their meta-narrative, and who is better able to make their myth a realty than you?
Of course, there will be obstacles, but you're no Sisyphus — you can push those boulders right over the top. Presuming that the U.S. is now too weak-willed and war-weary to fight, you can begin as soon as your legislature ratifies the articles of secession.
It'll be chaos for a while, ushering the U.S. out of there and replacing the federal apparatus with a Texan one. The military will be a major problem, but they're getting so used to troop drawdowns that they'll beat a gradual and orderly retreat over five years, declaring victory. Then you can convert all those army bases into training centers for a beefed-up Texas Rangers. And while you're at it, you can use the abandoned Johnson Space Center in Houston for an ambitious program to put a Texan on the moon before the decade is out. What patriotism that would inspire!
Then there are all those U.S. federal grants to get off the citizens' backs — over $35 billion of them in 2009 — for agriculture, education, energy, environmental protection, child care, highways, on and on. I know that as governor you lobbied vigorously to get even more of them — $47.5 million last year for undocumented immigrant health care, for instance, and $14.5 million for No Child Left Behind, the educational standards program which you've called "a direct assault on federalism." But that's history now, and your countrymen will forgive you. There's always a price for freedom, and I'm sure all those farmers and oilmen and students and poor people will be more than willing to pay it.
Then there's immigration, which will be interesting, since you'll have to deal with not only one border but all of them. On the southern side, you can be as ruthless as you choose — drive those undocumented Mexicans out, like your forefathers did in the 1830's. But how porous will you let your other borders be? Will you require passports and work permits for Oklahomans? There may be a great influx of unemployed people from the States, seeking work in the Promised Land. On the other hand, there may be plenty of Texans, many educated and prosperous, who'd rather live in America. Will you let them go?
And then there are all those nasty entitlements. At least for Social Security, you've got a grace period. Non-citizens who've paid into the program can claim benefits, as long as they don't live in interdicted countries like Cuba or Cambodia. Presuming Texas is not added to the list (and why should America treat its separated sibling harshly?), your seniors can milk the system for decades, giving you time to devise and implement your plan for privatization. With Medicare gone, you can get those insurance companies back in the game, generating thousands of jobs to boot. And for those too poor to pay, well, we all know that Texans have big hearts and will take care of their neighbors like they used to, in the days before the welfare state.
As for money, returning to the gold standard probably wouldn't work right now, prices being what they are. You could tie your currency (the Pecos bill?) to oil or, appropriately, natural gas. You could also swallow your pride and continue to use the U.S. dollar, like Ecuador does. You can always switch to China later.
There are a lot more questions, like whether and how to insure bank deposits when the FDIC withdraws, but I'm sure you'll meet each and every challenge with your can-do resourcefulness. Shoot, if Georgia (the country, that is) can go independent, Texas surely can.
So Rick, set your sights on a presidency that really counts. There's a bill before your legislature calling for a plebiscite on Texas nationhood. Forget the U.S.; turn your mighty campaign force toward your homeland, where you've never lost an election.
Future Mr. President, you're made for Texas, and Texas is made for you.
Tuesday, August 23, 2011
Friday, August 19, 2011
CRACKDOWN IN BRITAIN
August 18, 2011
You can add one more country to the long, long list of repressive regimes in the world. It's not in the Middle East or Asia; it's right across The Pond.
Great Britain? How can this be?
Consider the reaction of the British government to the riots and looting that occurred in London, Birmingham, and other major cities last week: Mass arrests of suspected looters, many of them identified by the surveillance cameras ubiquitous in urban areas; 24/7 "speedy justice" trials, dishing out jail terms even to children and even for thefts as small as a couple bottles of water or packs of chewing gum; authorizing the police to quell disturbances with rubber bullets and water-cannon (evocative of that other Birmingham, on our shores); proposing to disable social networks (an eery parallel to the actions of despots in Egypt, Syria, and Iran); and just about the worst of the worst, evicting from public housing the families of the convicted.
Consider as well the rhetorical reaction. "This is criminality, pure and simple," said Prime Minister David Cameron when he returned to England early from his idyllic vacation in Tuscany to manage the situation. Days later, asked what those people thrown out of their homes would do then, Cameron replied, "They should have thought of that before they started burgling." The answer to the same question by no less an authority than London's housing commissioner himself, a man with the charmingly English name of Eric Pickles, was: "They could get a job."
The callousness, both in word and deed, is straight out of Dickens.
It's an exaggeration for me to lump Great Britain with the likes of Bahrain or Burma. To the credit of the police, with its long tradition of responding to crime temperately and usually without firearms, no deaths occurred in the mayhem. And yet the pronouncements and many of the actions of the government are disturbingly similar to those in truly repressive countries. Rather than seeking and addressing the root causes of the violence, they only serve to heighten the frustration and anger of those who feel cut off and boxed in.
And the denigration continues. In a speech on Monday, having had plenty of time for considered reflection, Cameron expanded his analysis beyond criminality, pure and simple. Calling the riots symptoms of "the slow-motion moral collapse that has taken place in parts of our country" — and everybody knows just which parts he meant — he ticked off the causes: crimes without punishment, undisciplined schools, absentee fathers, and that other old standby, "moral relativism." Not a word of compassion, not a hint of awareness, not a sign of support.
Opposition leader Ed Miliband broadened the scope of British decrepitude to encompass "greedy, selfish, and immoral" bankers, phone hackers, and politicians — examples, he said, of "a me- first, take-what-you-can culture." Enough incrimination to go around, but still just incrimination.
He might also have included the 100,000 citizens who signed a government website's petition in support of the eviction proposal.
For indications of the "moral collapse" of British society, Cameron should look no further than his own nose. Any government built on retribution rather than healing, on blaming the poor for their poverty, and on denying the role of racism in policy and policing is itself in moral collapse.
We Americans have been through this ourselves often enough, and in many ways the attitudes of our leaders today mirror those of Britain's. Even President Obama, who from his early work in community organizing should be the first to go to bat for the poor, has extended his compassion no further down than to the middle class.
Cutbacks in social programs and job-creating public works are just beginning to affect the most vulnerable here. Lacking hope for the future, what more is there than to take what you can, when you can? One wonders if and when the patience of our own desperate will snap.
You can add one more country to the long, long list of repressive regimes in the world. It's not in the Middle East or Asia; it's right across The Pond.
Great Britain? How can this be?
Consider the reaction of the British government to the riots and looting that occurred in London, Birmingham, and other major cities last week: Mass arrests of suspected looters, many of them identified by the surveillance cameras ubiquitous in urban areas; 24/7 "speedy justice" trials, dishing out jail terms even to children and even for thefts as small as a couple bottles of water or packs of chewing gum; authorizing the police to quell disturbances with rubber bullets and water-cannon (evocative of that other Birmingham, on our shores); proposing to disable social networks (an eery parallel to the actions of despots in Egypt, Syria, and Iran); and just about the worst of the worst, evicting from public housing the families of the convicted.
Consider as well the rhetorical reaction. "This is criminality, pure and simple," said Prime Minister David Cameron when he returned to England early from his idyllic vacation in Tuscany to manage the situation. Days later, asked what those people thrown out of their homes would do then, Cameron replied, "They should have thought of that before they started burgling." The answer to the same question by no less an authority than London's housing commissioner himself, a man with the charmingly English name of Eric Pickles, was: "They could get a job."
The callousness, both in word and deed, is straight out of Dickens.
It's an exaggeration for me to lump Great Britain with the likes of Bahrain or Burma. To the credit of the police, with its long tradition of responding to crime temperately and usually without firearms, no deaths occurred in the mayhem. And yet the pronouncements and many of the actions of the government are disturbingly similar to those in truly repressive countries. Rather than seeking and addressing the root causes of the violence, they only serve to heighten the frustration and anger of those who feel cut off and boxed in.
And the denigration continues. In a speech on Monday, having had plenty of time for considered reflection, Cameron expanded his analysis beyond criminality, pure and simple. Calling the riots symptoms of "the slow-motion moral collapse that has taken place in parts of our country" — and everybody knows just which parts he meant — he ticked off the causes: crimes without punishment, undisciplined schools, absentee fathers, and that other old standby, "moral relativism." Not a word of compassion, not a hint of awareness, not a sign of support.
Opposition leader Ed Miliband broadened the scope of British decrepitude to encompass "greedy, selfish, and immoral" bankers, phone hackers, and politicians — examples, he said, of "a me- first, take-what-you-can culture." Enough incrimination to go around, but still just incrimination.
He might also have included the 100,000 citizens who signed a government website's petition in support of the eviction proposal.
For indications of the "moral collapse" of British society, Cameron should look no further than his own nose. Any government built on retribution rather than healing, on blaming the poor for their poverty, and on denying the role of racism in policy and policing is itself in moral collapse.
We Americans have been through this ourselves often enough, and in many ways the attitudes of our leaders today mirror those of Britain's. Even President Obama, who from his early work in community organizing should be the first to go to bat for the poor, has extended his compassion no further down than to the middle class.
Cutbacks in social programs and job-creating public works are just beginning to affect the most vulnerable here. Lacking hope for the future, what more is there than to take what you can, when you can? One wonders if and when the patience of our own desperate will snap.
Saturday, August 6, 2011
ADVENTURES IN WONDERLAND
August 4, 2011
Politics is supposed to be the art of compromise, but the end result of the debt-ceiling debacle was the most artless compromise in memory. Actually, it wasn't compromise at all, it was capitulation. Imagine: Both houses of Congress, and the President of what used to be called the Greatest Nation in the World, held hostage by a handful of Republicans, most of them just halfway into their first term.
It's like freshman hazing in reverse, forcing the upperclassmen to scrub the Floor of the House on their knees while chanting "Freshmen rule! Freshmen rule!" It's like taking away the football from the varsity team and making them play Kick the Can.
We haven't seen a tea party this mad since Alice discovered Wonderland. Indeed, you wish Lewis Carroll were around to make sense of it. Nobody else can.
All his zany characters, and then some, are in the House of the March Hare, with its chimneys shaping into ears and its dome being thatched with fur. You've got the Tea Partiers gaggled at one corner of the otherwise empty table, crying to Alice the Minority Leader, "No room! No room!" You've got Eric "Mad Hatter" Cantor, spouting riddles no one can solve. ("Why is taxation not a deficit-reducer?" is even more inscrutable than "Why is a raven like a writing-desk?")
You've got John Boehner, the beleaguered and weepy Hare of the House, dipping the Hatter's stopped watch into his tea.
And you've got Barack the neutered Dormouse, asleep on the table, where Hare and Hatter, as Carroll wrote, "were using it as a cushion, resting their elbows on it, and talking over its head. ‘Very uncomfortable for the Dormouse,' thought Alice, ‘only, as it's asleep, I suppose it doesn't mind.'" You also suppose the Dormouse didn't mind when they tried stuffing him head-first into the teapot.
In our narrative, other Wonderland characters turn up, like Queen of Hearts Michelle Bachmann ("Off with their heads!") and that Cheshire Cat, Ronald Reagan, whose smile still lingers long after the rest of him is gone.
"It's the stupidest tea-party I ever was at in all my life!" said Alice as she fled the scene in disgust and began nibbling on the mushroom that would make her just a foot tall. "Now, I'll manage better this time."
Let's hope so, for what adventures still await! Despite her diminished stature (Who'd have thought it before she fell down that rabbit-hole in 2008?), the ceiling cramps her head. All is small now and getting smaller, except for the Big, who keep getting bigger.
Washington has become a world more topsy-turvy than even Lewis Carroll could conceive. Instead of constructing an economic policy, Congress deconstructs it. Instead of setting comprehensive goals for the betterment and prosperity of the country and then rationally determining how to pay for them, the Congress, pulling the President along by the nose, goes nuts over spending cuts, regardless of the merit of the program. The Big Picture has shrunk to the head of a pin. And like the Mad Hatter's watch, there is no future: "It's always six o'clock now," he tells Alice; "It's always tea-time, and we've no time to wash the things between whiles."
It's self-absorption dissolving into pettiness. The so-called "debates" endlessly swirling around the debt-ceiling issue were goofier than the conversation at the Hatter's party.
And all the while, the economy sputters, the poor and sick are pushed from the table while the fat lick up the butter. "The common good" are words as meaningless as a stanza from "Jabberwocky."
Oh, my fur and whiskers!
Politics is supposed to be the art of compromise, but the end result of the debt-ceiling debacle was the most artless compromise in memory. Actually, it wasn't compromise at all, it was capitulation. Imagine: Both houses of Congress, and the President of what used to be called the Greatest Nation in the World, held hostage by a handful of Republicans, most of them just halfway into their first term.
It's like freshman hazing in reverse, forcing the upperclassmen to scrub the Floor of the House on their knees while chanting "Freshmen rule! Freshmen rule!" It's like taking away the football from the varsity team and making them play Kick the Can.
We haven't seen a tea party this mad since Alice discovered Wonderland. Indeed, you wish Lewis Carroll were around to make sense of it. Nobody else can.
All his zany characters, and then some, are in the House of the March Hare, with its chimneys shaping into ears and its dome being thatched with fur. You've got the Tea Partiers gaggled at one corner of the otherwise empty table, crying to Alice the Minority Leader, "No room! No room!" You've got Eric "Mad Hatter" Cantor, spouting riddles no one can solve. ("Why is taxation not a deficit-reducer?" is even more inscrutable than "Why is a raven like a writing-desk?")
You've got John Boehner, the beleaguered and weepy Hare of the House, dipping the Hatter's stopped watch into his tea.
And you've got Barack the neutered Dormouse, asleep on the table, where Hare and Hatter, as Carroll wrote, "were using it as a cushion, resting their elbows on it, and talking over its head. ‘Very uncomfortable for the Dormouse,' thought Alice, ‘only, as it's asleep, I suppose it doesn't mind.'" You also suppose the Dormouse didn't mind when they tried stuffing him head-first into the teapot.
In our narrative, other Wonderland characters turn up, like Queen of Hearts Michelle Bachmann ("Off with their heads!") and that Cheshire Cat, Ronald Reagan, whose smile still lingers long after the rest of him is gone.
"It's the stupidest tea-party I ever was at in all my life!" said Alice as she fled the scene in disgust and began nibbling on the mushroom that would make her just a foot tall. "Now, I'll manage better this time."
Let's hope so, for what adventures still await! Despite her diminished stature (Who'd have thought it before she fell down that rabbit-hole in 2008?), the ceiling cramps her head. All is small now and getting smaller, except for the Big, who keep getting bigger.
Washington has become a world more topsy-turvy than even Lewis Carroll could conceive. Instead of constructing an economic policy, Congress deconstructs it. Instead of setting comprehensive goals for the betterment and prosperity of the country and then rationally determining how to pay for them, the Congress, pulling the President along by the nose, goes nuts over spending cuts, regardless of the merit of the program. The Big Picture has shrunk to the head of a pin. And like the Mad Hatter's watch, there is no future: "It's always six o'clock now," he tells Alice; "It's always tea-time, and we've no time to wash the things between whiles."
It's self-absorption dissolving into pettiness. The so-called "debates" endlessly swirling around the debt-ceiling issue were goofier than the conversation at the Hatter's party.
And all the while, the economy sputters, the poor and sick are pushed from the table while the fat lick up the butter. "The common good" are words as meaningless as a stanza from "Jabberwocky."
Oh, my fur and whiskers!
Tuesday, July 26, 2011
HANDLING THE HEAT
July 28, 2011
Here in New York, the heat wave finally broke on Monday, sending the temperature plummeting from Friday’s high of 104 degrees to a mere 83. It was time to resume the activities of daily living, like washing clothes and running the dryer, before the next debilitating wave hits.
I can’t bring myself to turn on the dryer with the thermometer in triple digits. Besides doing my small part to avert a city-wide power failure, it seems crazy to pump very hot air into very hot air. Riding on the elevated trains that emerge from underground in the Bronx, you still pass apartments with clothesline pulleys strung from one building to the next, shirts and skirts and underwear fluttering like international flags — and flags of surrender — in the breeze. Once symbols of tenement blight, these little solar-powered devices could make a comeback as a renewable energy source. Plus, your clothes smell so good when you pull them in, and no static cling. I may get one myself.
Heat brings out the New Yorker in New Yorkers. Another ancient summer tradition is the opening of fire hydrants for instant refreshment and water-sport. No matter that the little park right down the block has a delightful walk-under fountain spraying a cooling mist 24/7, and no matter that gushing hydrants discharge millions of gallons of water into the sewer and lower the water pressure, keeping both firefighters and people in upper-floor apartments from getting their own critical supply. Despite the threat of a thousand-dollar fine for tampering with hydrants — the law was enacted in the Giuliani days, part of his “quality of life” initiative — it is still common to see hydrants open full blast, kids with boogie boards surfing in the surge or deflecting it to douse passing cars. (Forget to close your windows and you’ve got a rolling swimming pool.)
When I moved to New York from drought-ridden Southern California in the early 1990’s, I was appalled by the waste of this precious element. In my first sweltering summer here, I was on Lafayette Street in Greenwich Village, where a stocky, bare-chested man with a can of Bud and a cigarette in one hand and a pipe-wrench in the other stood by a gushing hydrant. “Why are you wasting all this water?” I asked indignantly. “Because I want to,” he snarled. Welcome to New York.
Ever the Californian, I am still appalled, but I now think the better of openly challenging neighbors wielding wrenches. Instead, I call the city hot-line, and sooner or later some public employee will arrive to shut off the hydrant, fit it with a tamper-proof cap, and take the heat of hostility. That’s got to be the worst job in the world, and a futile one, too: A few minutes later, New York ingenuity successfully tampers with the tamper-proof cap, and the fun begins again.
In low-income areas like the South Bronx, where apartment air conditioning means one little window unit in the bedroom and one big electric bill at the end of the month, beating the heat becomes a community event. The spacious public parks are chockablock with people fully equipped for such occasions, lugging from their fourth-floor walk-ups barbecues, beach chairs, canopies, coolers, and recreation equipment. Dueling boom-boxes — rap and soul from one group, salsa and bachata from another, reggae from a third — all get along in a cacophonous melting-pot.
Also competing for the ear’s attention are the jingles of ice-cream trucks at streetside, one playing “The Entertainer,” another “Turkey in the Straw,” yet another the cloying Mister Softee theme. Many New Yorkers count the Mister Softee ditty as noise pollution because for some reason it keeps playing in their heads long after the truck has gone. In 2005, the City Council passed an ordinance permitting operators to play their jingles only when the truck is in motion — a measure that, like the hydrant law, is just laughed off.
Watching New Yorkers cope with oppressive heat is watching a wonderful cultural phenomenon — and the next opportunity arrives on Friday. Neighbors, get out your wrenches!
Here in New York, the heat wave finally broke on Monday, sending the temperature plummeting from Friday’s high of 104 degrees to a mere 83. It was time to resume the activities of daily living, like washing clothes and running the dryer, before the next debilitating wave hits.
I can’t bring myself to turn on the dryer with the thermometer in triple digits. Besides doing my small part to avert a city-wide power failure, it seems crazy to pump very hot air into very hot air. Riding on the elevated trains that emerge from underground in the Bronx, you still pass apartments with clothesline pulleys strung from one building to the next, shirts and skirts and underwear fluttering like international flags — and flags of surrender — in the breeze. Once symbols of tenement blight, these little solar-powered devices could make a comeback as a renewable energy source. Plus, your clothes smell so good when you pull them in, and no static cling. I may get one myself.
Heat brings out the New Yorker in New Yorkers. Another ancient summer tradition is the opening of fire hydrants for instant refreshment and water-sport. No matter that the little park right down the block has a delightful walk-under fountain spraying a cooling mist 24/7, and no matter that gushing hydrants discharge millions of gallons of water into the sewer and lower the water pressure, keeping both firefighters and people in upper-floor apartments from getting their own critical supply. Despite the threat of a thousand-dollar fine for tampering with hydrants — the law was enacted in the Giuliani days, part of his “quality of life” initiative — it is still common to see hydrants open full blast, kids with boogie boards surfing in the surge or deflecting it to douse passing cars. (Forget to close your windows and you’ve got a rolling swimming pool.)
When I moved to New York from drought-ridden Southern California in the early 1990’s, I was appalled by the waste of this precious element. In my first sweltering summer here, I was on Lafayette Street in Greenwich Village, where a stocky, bare-chested man with a can of Bud and a cigarette in one hand and a pipe-wrench in the other stood by a gushing hydrant. “Why are you wasting all this water?” I asked indignantly. “Because I want to,” he snarled. Welcome to New York.
Ever the Californian, I am still appalled, but I now think the better of openly challenging neighbors wielding wrenches. Instead, I call the city hot-line, and sooner or later some public employee will arrive to shut off the hydrant, fit it with a tamper-proof cap, and take the heat of hostility. That’s got to be the worst job in the world, and a futile one, too: A few minutes later, New York ingenuity successfully tampers with the tamper-proof cap, and the fun begins again.
In low-income areas like the South Bronx, where apartment air conditioning means one little window unit in the bedroom and one big electric bill at the end of the month, beating the heat becomes a community event. The spacious public parks are chockablock with people fully equipped for such occasions, lugging from their fourth-floor walk-ups barbecues, beach chairs, canopies, coolers, and recreation equipment. Dueling boom-boxes — rap and soul from one group, salsa and bachata from another, reggae from a third — all get along in a cacophonous melting-pot.
Also competing for the ear’s attention are the jingles of ice-cream trucks at streetside, one playing “The Entertainer,” another “Turkey in the Straw,” yet another the cloying Mister Softee theme. Many New Yorkers count the Mister Softee ditty as noise pollution because for some reason it keeps playing in their heads long after the truck has gone. In 2005, the City Council passed an ordinance permitting operators to play their jingles only when the truck is in motion — a measure that, like the hydrant law, is just laughed off.
Watching New Yorkers cope with oppressive heat is watching a wonderful cultural phenomenon — and the next opportunity arrives on Friday. Neighbors, get out your wrenches!
GOD, LOVE, AND THE MARRIAGE EQUALITY ACT
July 20, 2011
The lone Democrat in the New York State Senate to vote against the Marriage Equality Act on June 24 is from the South Bronx. Ruben Diaz, Sr. — Pentecostal minister, hot-headed demagogue, one of those colorful characters once common in New York politics, and in the still-common dynastic tradition, father of the current Bronx Borough President — took his parting shot during the floor debate before the vote: “God, not Albany, has settled the definition of marriage a long time ago.”
There were surely other legislators who secretly agreed with his premise, if not his rhetoric, and yet finally voted the other way, persuaded by the powerful gay-rights lobby, promises of political pull by the popular governor Andrew Cuomo, and the emotional pull of homosexual family members and friends. Brooklyn Democratic Senator Carl Kruger, for example, was ostracized by the gay nephew of his girlfriend for voting against a similar same-sex marriage bill two years ago. According to the New York Times, his colleague, Democratic Majority Leader John Sampson, told him, “When everything else is gone, all you have left is family.” This time he voted yes.
“I don’t need this,” Kruger told him. “It has gotten personal now.”
Personal indeed, and it goes right to the top. President Obama, long an advocate of civil unions and a critic of the Defense of Marriage Act, which prohibits federal benefits to same-sex couples, continues to hold the belief that the word “marriage” means a man-woman union. He now says that his views are “evolving,” though he refuses to explain how and why.
I think I can understand his dilemma; it is a conflict between the public and the personal. Like the president, I support the complete equality afforded by measures such as California’s domestic partnership law, and yet, presumably like the president, I personally believe that marriage connotes a heterosexual union. What I don’t support is what amounts to an official endorsement of any particular life-style, either opposite-sex or same-sex, the public approbation of an essentially private activity.
That’s why I’m in favor of disestablishing marriage, just as the First Amendment disestablished religion. A pioneering state like California could replace civil marriage with a universal domestic partnership contract open to any two consenting adults without regard to gender and without the implication of sexual relations. The question of what marriage is and who may participate in it would thus be left to individuals, religious bodies, and other social groups. The state’s only concerns would be the witnessing and disposition of the contract and the protection and encouragement of stable family relationships, however they are configured, through the rights and benefits secured by the contract.
Over the last fifty years, government’s involvement — intrusion, really — in the realm of personal relationships have steadily waned. As courts identified and refined the right to privacy, laws prohibiting all manner of consensual sexual relations both within and outside of marriage were struck down, the adverse legal consequences of out-of-wedlock birth were eliminated, the exemption for spousal rape was removed, and non-consummation as grounds for nullity was obviated by no-fault divorce.
Changing social mores have compelled states to accord varying degrees of legal status to forms of family configurations other than marriage. Depending on the jurisdiction, unmarried parents are now held to the same responsibilities of child support as married couples, adoption has been extended to single people and same-sex couples, and privileges similar or identical to those formerly reserved to the married are given to cohabiting widowed persons over age 62 (to preserve survivorship benefits), and even blood-relatives.
Today, the preferential legal status of marriage, however the term is construed, is de facto being done away with by modern family law; marriage now is widely treated as one form of protectable family relationship among others. So why not take the next step?
A state like California could easily become marriage-neutral by abolishing its marriage statutes and folding heterosexual unions into its existing domestic partnership law.
The advantages to this approach are many. First, it would make clear by terminology that government’s fundamental interest lies not in the presumed sexual activity of the partners but in nurturing and strengthening stable personal and family relationships. Second, it would obviate the valid argument made by gay-marriage advocates that equal but separate marriage and “civil union” laws create implicit class distinctions. Third, it would terminate government’s entanglement in the problems of definition. Finally, these contracts could also be opened to a wider range of committed couples, such as two celibate friends or unmarried siblings who share their lives and property and deserve the privileges of any married couple, gay or straight, but who would never want to be considered “married.”
In 1765 — simpler times, indeed — the English legal scholar William Blackstone wrote: “Our law considers marriage in no other light than as a civil contract. The holiness of the matrimonial state is left entirely to ecclesiastical law.”
In a closed-door meeting before the New York Senate vote, Governor Cuomo reportedly convinced wavering key Republicans with the exhortation, “Their love is worth the same as your love.”
Diaz based his argument on God; Cuomo, on love. I side with Blackstone. Neither legislatures nor courts should meddle in those holy realms.
The lone Democrat in the New York State Senate to vote against the Marriage Equality Act on June 24 is from the South Bronx. Ruben Diaz, Sr. — Pentecostal minister, hot-headed demagogue, one of those colorful characters once common in New York politics, and in the still-common dynastic tradition, father of the current Bronx Borough President — took his parting shot during the floor debate before the vote: “God, not Albany, has settled the definition of marriage a long time ago.”
There were surely other legislators who secretly agreed with his premise, if not his rhetoric, and yet finally voted the other way, persuaded by the powerful gay-rights lobby, promises of political pull by the popular governor Andrew Cuomo, and the emotional pull of homosexual family members and friends. Brooklyn Democratic Senator Carl Kruger, for example, was ostracized by the gay nephew of his girlfriend for voting against a similar same-sex marriage bill two years ago. According to the New York Times, his colleague, Democratic Majority Leader John Sampson, told him, “When everything else is gone, all you have left is family.” This time he voted yes.
“I don’t need this,” Kruger told him. “It has gotten personal now.”
Personal indeed, and it goes right to the top. President Obama, long an advocate of civil unions and a critic of the Defense of Marriage Act, which prohibits federal benefits to same-sex couples, continues to hold the belief that the word “marriage” means a man-woman union. He now says that his views are “evolving,” though he refuses to explain how and why.
I think I can understand his dilemma; it is a conflict between the public and the personal. Like the president, I support the complete equality afforded by measures such as California’s domestic partnership law, and yet, presumably like the president, I personally believe that marriage connotes a heterosexual union. What I don’t support is what amounts to an official endorsement of any particular life-style, either opposite-sex or same-sex, the public approbation of an essentially private activity.
That’s why I’m in favor of disestablishing marriage, just as the First Amendment disestablished religion. A pioneering state like California could replace civil marriage with a universal domestic partnership contract open to any two consenting adults without regard to gender and without the implication of sexual relations. The question of what marriage is and who may participate in it would thus be left to individuals, religious bodies, and other social groups. The state’s only concerns would be the witnessing and disposition of the contract and the protection and encouragement of stable family relationships, however they are configured, through the rights and benefits secured by the contract.
Over the last fifty years, government’s involvement — intrusion, really — in the realm of personal relationships have steadily waned. As courts identified and refined the right to privacy, laws prohibiting all manner of consensual sexual relations both within and outside of marriage were struck down, the adverse legal consequences of out-of-wedlock birth were eliminated, the exemption for spousal rape was removed, and non-consummation as grounds for nullity was obviated by no-fault divorce.
Changing social mores have compelled states to accord varying degrees of legal status to forms of family configurations other than marriage. Depending on the jurisdiction, unmarried parents are now held to the same responsibilities of child support as married couples, adoption has been extended to single people and same-sex couples, and privileges similar or identical to those formerly reserved to the married are given to cohabiting widowed persons over age 62 (to preserve survivorship benefits), and even blood-relatives.
Today, the preferential legal status of marriage, however the term is construed, is de facto being done away with by modern family law; marriage now is widely treated as one form of protectable family relationship among others. So why not take the next step?
A state like California could easily become marriage-neutral by abolishing its marriage statutes and folding heterosexual unions into its existing domestic partnership law.
The advantages to this approach are many. First, it would make clear by terminology that government’s fundamental interest lies not in the presumed sexual activity of the partners but in nurturing and strengthening stable personal and family relationships. Second, it would obviate the valid argument made by gay-marriage advocates that equal but separate marriage and “civil union” laws create implicit class distinctions. Third, it would terminate government’s entanglement in the problems of definition. Finally, these contracts could also be opened to a wider range of committed couples, such as two celibate friends or unmarried siblings who share their lives and property and deserve the privileges of any married couple, gay or straight, but who would never want to be considered “married.”
In 1765 — simpler times, indeed — the English legal scholar William Blackstone wrote: “Our law considers marriage in no other light than as a civil contract. The holiness of the matrimonial state is left entirely to ecclesiastical law.”
In a closed-door meeting before the New York Senate vote, Governor Cuomo reportedly convinced wavering key Republicans with the exhortation, “Their love is worth the same as your love.”
Diaz based his argument on God; Cuomo, on love. I side with Blackstone. Neither legislatures nor courts should meddle in those holy realms.
GLADNESS AND SADNESS FOR SOUTH BRONX CATHOLICS
June 21, 2011
It was a month of milestones for the Catholics of the South Bronx. On May 28, Rev. Thomas Fenlon, pastor of St. Augustine Church, celebrated 50 years as a priest. On June 3, Our Lady of Victory Church celebrated 100 years as a parish. On June 18, St. Augustine School graduated its 150th annual class. Happy occasions, each tinged with sadness and uncertainty.
Father Fenlon held his anniversary Mass in the historic Immaculate Conception chapel at the College of Mount Saint Vincent, on the Hudson River in the upscale Riverdale section of the Bronx. Over 800 people attended, including 150 relatives converging from all parts of the nation and the world. He rented buses to bring parishioners from churches where he’d served, in the Bronx, Harlem, and upstate Newburgh. After the two-hour ceremony, animated by St. Augustine School’s African dance troupe and the church’s Gospel Choir, he threw an outdoor catered reception with an ethnic balance of Latin and soul food, good wines and kegs of beer, stations serving ice cream and Italian ices, and even face-painting for the kids. The DJ played both bachatas and the Electric Slide. All this cost him plenty, but he spent gladly and lavishly, not for himself but for the people he loved through half a century of ministry among the poor.
He would have preferred to celebrate in his parish church, but the once-magnificent 115-year-old structure was shut two years ago as unsafe. The 300-member congregation now worships in the school auditorium, a contraction that may foreshadow its dissolution in the New York Archdiocese’s next round of parish closings coming up next year. Founded in 1849, when the area was mostly farmland, St. Augustine’s served the South Bronx through urban growth and urban decay; it may not be there to serve the new waves of immigrants coming to occupy the thousands of housing units going up just blocks away.
A sesquicentennial should be cause for rejoicing, but the graduation ceremony at St. Augustine School was cause for tears — the 150th class was also its last.
In the heyday of Catholic education throughout in the first half of the last century, up to a thousand students, first through eighth grades, packed the classrooms each year, drawing from the Irish, German, and Italian families that then characterized the neighborhood. As the demographics changed to largely non-Catholic African-Americans, the mission of the school broadened to serve not just Catholics but the whole community, a refuge of quality and discipline amidst the corruption and chaos of the public school system.
In a sense, the school was a victim of its own success. When charter schools, publicly financed yet independently run, began opening in the South Bronx a decade ago (many explicitly owing their educational philosophy of academic rigor, classroom order, and even uniforms, to the Catholic model — everything except the religion and the tuition) enrollment at St. Augustine’s began to erode; this year there were barely 200 students. Rather than committing to maintain the Catholic presence in the neighborhood through active recruitment and a sliding-scale tuition policy, the archdiocese evacuated.
In a last touch of irony, a charter school down the hill, with a surfeit of students and a dearth of space, will rent the building as a second campus.
The ceremony for the final 12 graduates was somber but inflected with that most absurd of the theological virtues, hope. “God has something in mind,” principal Cathryn Trapp told the disheartened handful of parents and parishioners in attendance. “God is working. We may have nothing, and yet we have it all.”
The centenary dinner for Our Lady of Victory, a parish less than a mile northwest of St. Augustine’s, was also bittersweet. Beneath the accolades and the merengue music was everybody’s realization that one hundred years marked only memory, not expectation. Like St. Augustine’s, this parish, with its charming little church on Webster Avenue that saw the transformation of its neighborhood from clusters of row houses and modest apartment buildings to massive public housing projects, became a satellite of a larger parish two years ago — a portent of impending demise.
When the South Bronx was at its worst, amidst the fires and the drugs and the violence that made it a worldwide symbol of urban desolation, the Catholic Church stood firm. Young priests, filled with the spirit of the civil rights movement and the Second Vatican Council’s liberating call for justice for the poor, spent their lives here, tirelessly preaching the Good News of human dignity and organizing the community at large to address issues of discrimination, housing, hunger, addiction, and guns. Catholic schools sheltered children from the streets and prepared them for good colleges and good careers. During that time, the archdiocese channeled contributions from its wealthy parishes into the Church’s ministry to the inner city.
Now these priests, after 50 years or more of service, are leaving the scene, with few to replace them. The financial lifeline once thrown to impoverished parishes and schools by the archdiocese is being hauled in, citing “fiscal prudence.” Milestones are now millstones. Just as the Bronx is springing back, the institution of the Catholic Church is beating a retreat.
But the remnant remains at work, braced by that absurd theological virtue of hope.
It was a month of milestones for the Catholics of the South Bronx. On May 28, Rev. Thomas Fenlon, pastor of St. Augustine Church, celebrated 50 years as a priest. On June 3, Our Lady of Victory Church celebrated 100 years as a parish. On June 18, St. Augustine School graduated its 150th annual class. Happy occasions, each tinged with sadness and uncertainty.
Father Fenlon held his anniversary Mass in the historic Immaculate Conception chapel at the College of Mount Saint Vincent, on the Hudson River in the upscale Riverdale section of the Bronx. Over 800 people attended, including 150 relatives converging from all parts of the nation and the world. He rented buses to bring parishioners from churches where he’d served, in the Bronx, Harlem, and upstate Newburgh. After the two-hour ceremony, animated by St. Augustine School’s African dance troupe and the church’s Gospel Choir, he threw an outdoor catered reception with an ethnic balance of Latin and soul food, good wines and kegs of beer, stations serving ice cream and Italian ices, and even face-painting for the kids. The DJ played both bachatas and the Electric Slide. All this cost him plenty, but he spent gladly and lavishly, not for himself but for the people he loved through half a century of ministry among the poor.
He would have preferred to celebrate in his parish church, but the once-magnificent 115-year-old structure was shut two years ago as unsafe. The 300-member congregation now worships in the school auditorium, a contraction that may foreshadow its dissolution in the New York Archdiocese’s next round of parish closings coming up next year. Founded in 1849, when the area was mostly farmland, St. Augustine’s served the South Bronx through urban growth and urban decay; it may not be there to serve the new waves of immigrants coming to occupy the thousands of housing units going up just blocks away.
A sesquicentennial should be cause for rejoicing, but the graduation ceremony at St. Augustine School was cause for tears — the 150th class was also its last.
In the heyday of Catholic education throughout in the first half of the last century, up to a thousand students, first through eighth grades, packed the classrooms each year, drawing from the Irish, German, and Italian families that then characterized the neighborhood. As the demographics changed to largely non-Catholic African-Americans, the mission of the school broadened to serve not just Catholics but the whole community, a refuge of quality and discipline amidst the corruption and chaos of the public school system.
In a sense, the school was a victim of its own success. When charter schools, publicly financed yet independently run, began opening in the South Bronx a decade ago (many explicitly owing their educational philosophy of academic rigor, classroom order, and even uniforms, to the Catholic model — everything except the religion and the tuition) enrollment at St. Augustine’s began to erode; this year there were barely 200 students. Rather than committing to maintain the Catholic presence in the neighborhood through active recruitment and a sliding-scale tuition policy, the archdiocese evacuated.
In a last touch of irony, a charter school down the hill, with a surfeit of students and a dearth of space, will rent the building as a second campus.
The ceremony for the final 12 graduates was somber but inflected with that most absurd of the theological virtues, hope. “God has something in mind,” principal Cathryn Trapp told the disheartened handful of parents and parishioners in attendance. “God is working. We may have nothing, and yet we have it all.”
The centenary dinner for Our Lady of Victory, a parish less than a mile northwest of St. Augustine’s, was also bittersweet. Beneath the accolades and the merengue music was everybody’s realization that one hundred years marked only memory, not expectation. Like St. Augustine’s, this parish, with its charming little church on Webster Avenue that saw the transformation of its neighborhood from clusters of row houses and modest apartment buildings to massive public housing projects, became a satellite of a larger parish two years ago — a portent of impending demise.
When the South Bronx was at its worst, amidst the fires and the drugs and the violence that made it a worldwide symbol of urban desolation, the Catholic Church stood firm. Young priests, filled with the spirit of the civil rights movement and the Second Vatican Council’s liberating call for justice for the poor, spent their lives here, tirelessly preaching the Good News of human dignity and organizing the community at large to address issues of discrimination, housing, hunger, addiction, and guns. Catholic schools sheltered children from the streets and prepared them for good colleges and good careers. During that time, the archdiocese channeled contributions from its wealthy parishes into the Church’s ministry to the inner city.
Now these priests, after 50 years or more of service, are leaving the scene, with few to replace them. The financial lifeline once thrown to impoverished parishes and schools by the archdiocese is being hauled in, citing “fiscal prudence.” Milestones are now millstones. Just as the Bronx is springing back, the institution of the Catholic Church is beating a retreat.
But the remnant remains at work, braced by that absurd theological virtue of hope.
REP. WEINER TRIPS UP
June 14, 2011
I met Anthony Weiner once. Well, I sort of met him. In 2005, when he was battling the Bronx’s native son, Fernando Ferrer, for the Democratic mayoral nomination, the Brooklyn/Queens Congressman made a brief foray into enemy territory to appear at a rally staged by South Bronx Churches, the local community-organizing arm of the Industrial Areas Foundation. He came in late and left early. Standard IAF practice is to allow politicians exactly three minutes to speak. Just as he was cranking up, a little Puerto Rican woman approached and tapped him on the shoulder: “Your time’s up,” she whispered. “I’m not used to shutting up so soon,” he laughed, and the crowd laughed with him. The IAF knew the value of Twittering long before Twitter existed. Weiner would later become adapt — or inept — with the Tweet.
He was then subjected to the standard IAF practice of demanding yes-or-no answers to the questions on their agenda: Do you support our proposals on education reform? housing for the homeless? gun control? Like almost everybody I’ve seen in this hot-seat, Weiner started off with, “I’ll answer your question, but first I’d like to say ...” — whereupon the leader would interrupt: “Just answer the question, Congressman: yes or no?”
At first baffled by the whole process, he learned quickly. He answered yes to everything, then excused himself: “I hate to go, but I’ve got another meeting in Brooklyn. You’re doing a great service to the community.” Exiting by a side aisle, he paused only to shake hands with people along the way, and grabbed mine for a New York second. So I sort of I met Anthony Weiner.
As far as I know, the Bronx never saw him again. Ferrer won the primary and Weiner went back to his job, and his other activities, in Washington.
The IAF likes to put politicians in their place as the servants, public servants, they ought to be — it’s good for them to experience a little embarrassment once in a while. Unlike many bigwigs that I’ve seen at these meetings, flush-faced and seething at the constrictions imposed on them, Weiner seemed to take it all in good humor, aware of the irony and also aware of the power of these usually powerless people to make or break him at the polling booth. I respected him for that.
While I never became a Friend or even a Follower of Weiner, I found his talk-show appearances refreshing — a guy with Brooklyn brashness who’d gleefully bash big oil, big ag, big tobacco, big everything except big government — an unapologetic liberal who dogged the right at every turn. He was often outlandish — I guess we should have suspected something right there — but some of his pranks bordered on genius. In 2009, in the midst of the health-care frenzy, he simultaneously introduced two bills, one to abolish Medicare and the other to extend Medicare to everyone. It was an unforgettable stroke of legislative irony; he designed those bills not for passage but to expose the absurd contradiction of supporting a single payer for the elderly and opposing it for the rest.
When the news broke last week of Weiner’s Twittering trysts, my first thought was: “Uh-oh, he’s a goner. Now all we have left is Dennis Kucinich.”
Thus far, Weiner has resisted the pressure from most of his party, including President Obama and House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi, to resign. After the customary rehab and the less-than-customary self-flagellation, he could hold on to his seat, hang low, so to speak, continue to cast votes toward the liberal cause, and let his term mercifully expire.
In any case, whether he quits or stays, he’s finished in politics. People will forgive adulterers — look at Bill Clinton and Newt Gingrich, though the fate of the latter remains to be seen — and they’ll sometimes even forgive paid sex — look at Eliot Spitzer, disgraced governor turned CNN commentator — but they’ll never forgive a pornophile, especially when the porn is of himself. A twit on a Tweet. That’s about as creepy as it gets.
But who knows? Weiner and Jon Stewart were college buddies. What a sidekick that guy would make!
I can see it now ...
I met Anthony Weiner once. Well, I sort of met him. In 2005, when he was battling the Bronx’s native son, Fernando Ferrer, for the Democratic mayoral nomination, the Brooklyn/Queens Congressman made a brief foray into enemy territory to appear at a rally staged by South Bronx Churches, the local community-organizing arm of the Industrial Areas Foundation. He came in late and left early. Standard IAF practice is to allow politicians exactly three minutes to speak. Just as he was cranking up, a little Puerto Rican woman approached and tapped him on the shoulder: “Your time’s up,” she whispered. “I’m not used to shutting up so soon,” he laughed, and the crowd laughed with him. The IAF knew the value of Twittering long before Twitter existed. Weiner would later become adapt — or inept — with the Tweet.
He was then subjected to the standard IAF practice of demanding yes-or-no answers to the questions on their agenda: Do you support our proposals on education reform? housing for the homeless? gun control? Like almost everybody I’ve seen in this hot-seat, Weiner started off with, “I’ll answer your question, but first I’d like to say ...” — whereupon the leader would interrupt: “Just answer the question, Congressman: yes or no?”
At first baffled by the whole process, he learned quickly. He answered yes to everything, then excused himself: “I hate to go, but I’ve got another meeting in Brooklyn. You’re doing a great service to the community.” Exiting by a side aisle, he paused only to shake hands with people along the way, and grabbed mine for a New York second. So I sort of I met Anthony Weiner.
As far as I know, the Bronx never saw him again. Ferrer won the primary and Weiner went back to his job, and his other activities, in Washington.
The IAF likes to put politicians in their place as the servants, public servants, they ought to be — it’s good for them to experience a little embarrassment once in a while. Unlike many bigwigs that I’ve seen at these meetings, flush-faced and seething at the constrictions imposed on them, Weiner seemed to take it all in good humor, aware of the irony and also aware of the power of these usually powerless people to make or break him at the polling booth. I respected him for that.
While I never became a Friend or even a Follower of Weiner, I found his talk-show appearances refreshing — a guy with Brooklyn brashness who’d gleefully bash big oil, big ag, big tobacco, big everything except big government — an unapologetic liberal who dogged the right at every turn. He was often outlandish — I guess we should have suspected something right there — but some of his pranks bordered on genius. In 2009, in the midst of the health-care frenzy, he simultaneously introduced two bills, one to abolish Medicare and the other to extend Medicare to everyone. It was an unforgettable stroke of legislative irony; he designed those bills not for passage but to expose the absurd contradiction of supporting a single payer for the elderly and opposing it for the rest.
When the news broke last week of Weiner’s Twittering trysts, my first thought was: “Uh-oh, he’s a goner. Now all we have left is Dennis Kucinich.”
Thus far, Weiner has resisted the pressure from most of his party, including President Obama and House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi, to resign. After the customary rehab and the less-than-customary self-flagellation, he could hold on to his seat, hang low, so to speak, continue to cast votes toward the liberal cause, and let his term mercifully expire.
In any case, whether he quits or stays, he’s finished in politics. People will forgive adulterers — look at Bill Clinton and Newt Gingrich, though the fate of the latter remains to be seen — and they’ll sometimes even forgive paid sex — look at Eliot Spitzer, disgraced governor turned CNN commentator — but they’ll never forgive a pornophile, especially when the porn is of himself. A twit on a Tweet. That’s about as creepy as it gets.
But who knows? Weiner and Jon Stewart were college buddies. What a sidekick that guy would make!
I can see it now ...
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