Archive for the 'Politics' Category

A long way from the summit: some thoughts on feminism, women in politics, and the new Leslie Sanchez book

Published
by
Hugo Schwyzer
on November 03, 2009
in Books, Feminism and Politics
. 4 Comments

It’s been a year since the most exciting election in my memory (and, according to my septuagenerian mother, a certified political junkie, of hers as well.) The books and documentaries about the 2008 presidential campaign have arrived full force in the market place. One focuses on the trio of women who helped define this extraordinary moment in very recent history: You’ve Come a Long Way, Maybe by Leslie Sanchez, a Republican activist and CNN contributor. Sanchez looks at the way the media and the nation itself responded to Hillary Clinton, Sarah Palin, and Michelle Obama — and what those responses say about the state of feminism at the tail end of the first decade of the 21st century.

(Other feminist bloggers have already reviewed YCALWM, including Clarissa, Amelia at Equal Writes, and Stacyx.)

As a registered Republican and liberal feminist who longs to see a return to progressive values within the GOP (the party of Millicent Fenwick, a political hero of mine), I’ve admired Leslie Sanchez as a sensible voice for inclusion and moderation within a party that has far too few such voices. Hers is a welcome perspective, and the fairness with which she treats both Clinton and Palin is perhaps the book’s strongest suit.

Sanchez, no supporter of Hillary, explores the pivotal question of why so many younger women saw a vote for Barack Obama as a far more revolutionary act than a vote for the first of their sex to have a serious shot at winning the presidency. She suggests that Clinton tied herself too closely to older white feminists, commonly identified with the Second Wave, and lost a generational connection with younger voters. Sanchez is right about this, I think; there’s no question that the gap between Second and Third Wavers (represented by women over and under 45) about Clinton was a significant one, much covered in the press and lamented in the feminist blogosphere. But Sanchez, whose feminist credentials are slight at best, is too dismissive when she talks about the “brashness and tired agendas of the women’s rights advocates (backing Clinton”. It wasn’t the agenda that was wrong — it was the generational disconnect that doomed the junior senator from New York. Continue reading ‘A long way from the summit: some thoughts on feminism, women in politics, and the new Leslie Sanchez book’

“I adore you; you confound me”: of old friends, Facebook, and ideological differences

Published
by
Hugo Schwyzer
on November 02, 2009
in Facebook, Friendship and Politics
. 8 Comments

When I first went on Facebook a few years ago, most of my friends were my students and “youth group kids”; I was the oldest person I knew on the site. Today, a third of my 1700-odd friends and contacts on FB are my age or older, and I’ve found it a particularly useful tool for connecting with old acquaintances from my childhood and adolescence. I suspect my 25th high school reunion, coming up next year, will be planned using Facebook.

On Facebook, I often post links to news stories and opinion pieces which reflect my views on gender, sexuality, faith, animal rights and so forth. My friends are able to comment on the stories. Since my friends — and I use that noun in its traditional sense — run the gamut politically, sexually, and religiously, the debates are quite heated. And things have gotten particularly intense since “Leigh” started commenting. Leigh is a conservative Republican through and through, and not afraid to “mix it up” with my many liberal buddies on Facebook. Some folks have written to me in wonder, expressing disbelief that someone like Leigh and I could be friends.

I’m well aware that the capacity to be friends with folks who hold radically divergent views is a virtue made possible by privilege. For example, I have friends who are strongly opposed to marriage equality for gays and lesbians; they fight against a cause I champion. But because I’m a man married to a woman, their views (while exasperating and troubling) don’t represent a direct threat to my happiness. If I were a man who longed to marry another man but couldn’t, I might be less cheerful about opening my Facebook page, my heart, and my home to folks whose views I consider a real threat to my happiness. My extended family has been one that has been fortunate enough to embrace civility, even cordiality, towards one’s ideological opponents as a virtue. White folks in the middle and upper-middle classes have the luxury of seeing political disagreements as fascinating topics for a rousing argument rather than life and death. That cheerful willingness not only to overlook, but even celebrate those disagreements was something I was raised to believe was a sign of wisdom, of a capacity to put friendship and family over partisanship or faith. I still believe that, but acknowledge that that capacity has as much to do with race and class as it does with virtue.

In any event, while I do moderate fairly heavily here on the blog, where folks I don’t know can and do comment, a more free-wheeling atmosphere prevails on my Facebook page, where Leigh has crossed verbal swords with more than one of my other friends.

Leigh (not her real name) and I went to high school together. We were particularly close our junior year, when we were lab partners in Richard Fletcher’s legendary Wildlfe and Ecology course. Leigh and I talked about everything together at 16, and did our best to stay in touch in the years that followed. Our lives, as it turned out, followed somewhat similar trajectories: we were both divorced multiple times, we both struggled early and often with addiction to alcohol and drugs. And we both were fortunate enough to get sober relatively young; Leigh and I each have “clean time” measured in double-digit years. In sobriety, we both became marathon runners and endurance athletes; unbeknownst to the other, we each ran our personal best times the same year and at more or less the same pace. And in our journey towards sobriety, we both became Christians, born again as adults.

Leigh now lives in the mountains, in a small and isolated — albeit very beautiful — community. She’s a first-rate outdoorswoman, single, still an athlete despite battles against rheumatoid arthritis. And she’s also become, in no small part as a result of her experiences as well as her upbringing, very right-wing. When we write to each other, as we do fairly regularly on Facebook, we enjoy our shared reminiscences immensely. It’s so good to have friends who’ve known you for so long, longer than spouses and colleagues and the like. Without the entangled intimacy of family, but with the perspective of decades, old acquaintances remind us of how far we’ve traveled, of obstacles overcome , and of our own impetuous, often foolish, but still loveable youthful selves. But Leigh and I also have spoken of faith, sobriety, running — and, at least since last year’s election, a great deal about politics. When it comes to the former things, we are of one mind; on the latter, we could not disagree more. Continue reading ‘“I adore you; you confound me”: of old friends, Facebook, and ideological differences’

Empty reservoirs, empty coffers, more men on campus

Published
by
Hugo Schwyzer
on September 03, 2009
in California, Money, Pasadena City College and Politics
. 6 Comments

Since I came to Pasadena City College in 1993, I’ve never seen such a bleak start to a new academic year as I’ve witnessed this week. This lovely foothill city remains shrouded in smoke, as the Station Fire continues to smolder, threatening the gorgeous canyons, cliffs and fauna of the nearby San Gabriels. On campus, it’s difficult to breathe and the stench of burnt material wafts through air conditioning vents and offices. After getting into the low 100s Monday and Tuesday, we might only see mid-90s today. The toxicity of the atmosphere matches the frustration and anxiety here at school.

Public community colleges, dependent on plunging state revenues, cut their course offerings and delay hiring new faculty in a recession. At precisely the same time, as unemployment rises, demand for classes grows as more and folks seek retraining. In a booming economy, our enrollment always drops (this actually became a bit of a problem around 1999-2000); in a slowing economy, the opposite effect happens. It’s not just unemployed folks, either. Many high school graduates who might have chosen to enter a healthy job market have decided to focus on their education for the time being, with plans to drop out or take a break as soon as hiring prospects improve. This means that invariably, increased demand coincides with falling resources. (Much, I suppose, like food banks.)

We don’t have the updated demographics from our admissions office, but here’s something many of my colleagues and I have noticed: we have far more men in our classes than usual. PCC is majority female, and my survey classes average about a 60-40 woman-to-man ratio in a normal year; my gender studies classes tend to have a much lower percentage of lads than that. But looking at my rosters, all four sections of my Western Civ survey courses have more male than female students — something that hasn’t happened before in all the years I’ve been here. The percentage of guys in the hallways seems higher as well, and the colleagues I’ve chatted with say they’ve noticed a similar shift.

Most evidence suggests that more men than women have lost jobs in the current economic slowdown. While this doesn’t mean that we’ve come close to achieving the vital feminist goal of pay equity, it does mean that layoffis in traditionally female-dominated fields (like health care and education) have been less draconian than in male-dominated fields such as manufacturing, construction, and sales. This may well-explain why after years of a slow but steady rise in the ratio of women to men, the situation may well be reversing itself. One wonders if that’s true at more selective institutions.

In any case, I have never had to say “no” to as many students who wish to add my classes; my wait lists, which usually average 10-20 aspirants, now average twice that number. Everyone seems to have a real, desperation-tinged tale to tell about why they need the class; I’m familiar with the appeals, but sense a different level of urgency — and in some, a heartbreaking sense of despair — that I’ve never seen before.

Five generations of my family have graduated from California public colleges and universities. Three generations have taught at one level or another in the post-secondary education system. But not in living memory has the situation been this dire, not in living memory have the barriers to achievement been this high. The rungs are being sawed off the ladder into the middle class. It’s heartbreaking.

But I’ll teach with my customary over-caffeinated energy, crowding as many students as I safely can into the rooms, and to the best of my most imperfect ability, offer inspiration and encouragment.

My prayers this week have a hydrological theme; rain for our mountains and hillsides and depleted reservoirs, and mighty streams of revenue for our depleted state coffers.

Teddy Kennedy, 1932-2009

Published
by
Hugo Schwyzer
on August 26, 2009
in Christianity and Politics
. 4 Comments

I was always fond of Ted Kennedy, who died last night at age 77 after a long and brave struggle with brain cancer. When I was 13, I had a “Kennedy ‘80″ bumpersticker on my Schwinn bicycle, and walked precincts for him before the Democratic primary. I was hopeful he would run again in 1984 or ‘88, and saddened that he chose not to. I followed his senate career with interest, noting in particular his brave and proud commitment to liberal political values during that lamentable era when “liberal” became a curse word. (Teddy never eschewed that word, never insisted on being called a “New Democrat” or a “progressive”; he was a liberal and proud of it.)

Kennedy fought to create a more inclusive America, a greener America, a fundamentally more equitable America. I looked up his lifetime voting ratings from organizations who share the values I embrace: NARAL, the League of Conservation Voters, the Human Rights Campaign. No other senator has had such a consistently progressive voting record over the course of many decades. And certainly, no other senator fought as hard for health care reform as did he. It is to be hoped that the senate he loved will pass a health care reform bill of which Teddy would be proud.

Much has been made of his personal life, which was beset by turmoil (much of it of his own making.) The best comment I’ve read on that comes from Kennedy’s fellow Catholic, arch-conservative blogger Elizabeth Scalia. While some voices on the right have been venomous in their condemnation of the late senator, Scalia is more balanced:

God knows more, and sees more, than the rest of us, because eventually we’ll all need to count on his mercy, as we face his justice. For all that we know of Kennedy, there is much we do not know. A family member who works with the very poor once told me that when he was in a real fix and unable to find help for, for instance, a sick child in need of surgery, a phone call to Kennedy’s office would set the “Irish Mafia” of professional people -doctors, lawyers, pilots and such- into brisk motion. I think an examination of the life of every “great” person (and I mean “great” in terms of power and influence) will expose deep flaws and surprising episodes of generosity.

As I wrote here, “the quiet altruism of a public man is always overshadowed by the noise of his sins,” and, “Is it arrogance and entitlement that keeps a public man of public failings turning, and turning again, to the Mass, the sacraments, and the tribe, or is it a kind of humility, a declaration of need that supersedes riches and power and all the consolations of the world?”

Kennedy went to Mass as often as he could, and was frequently a daily communicant. His Christianity was not merely cultural, or political — it was his sustenance and his strength. Indeed, it would not be wrong to call Ted Kennedy among the most deeply faithful of senators. Scalia finds his generosity “surprising”, perhaps because her politics are so diametrically opposed to Kennedy’s, or perhaps because in her understanding of moral anthropology, sin is our default mode. There is a tendency on the right to see the faith of those on the left as superficial; the cognitive dissonance that would arise from acknowledging that someone can be both deeply faithful to Christ and deeply committed to progressive politics and sexual freedom seems too much for many conservatives to bear.

Ted Kennedy was many things, among them a man of profound faith in God and His Church and a man profoundly committed to “building the Kingdom” here on earth. He has earned the famous benedictory verse from Matthew 25:21, so often recited at funerals and inscribed on memorials, “well done, good and faithful servant.”

Sonia’s choice: of David Brooks, Barack Obama, the Supreme Court nominee and male privilege

Published
by
Hugo Schwyzer
on July 14, 2009
in Marriage, Parenting, Politics and Working
. 47 Comments

I have mixed feelings about David Brooks, the erstwhile conservative columnist for the New York Times. And I have mixed feelings about his column this morning about Sonia Sotomayor. Brooks, noting the oft-retold story of Sotomayor’s rise from humble origins to a Supreme Court nomination:

It’s the upward mobility story — about a person who worked hard and contributes profoundly to society, but who also sacrificed things along the way.

As you read the profiles, you can almost draw a map of her relationships during each stage in her life. In some areas, her relationships are thick and fulfilling, but in others, there are blank spaces….

As an adult, the profiles describe her as upbeat and social, leading walks to Brooklyn, hosting poker parties, serving as godmother to many children. Yet over the years, she has been remarkably honest about the costs of her workaholism.

Her marriage broke up after two years. She was quoted as saying, “I cannot attribute that divorce to work, but certainly the fact that I was leaving my home at 7 and getting back at 10 o’clock was not of assistance in recognizing the problems developing in my marriage.”

Later, during a swearing-in ceremony in 1998, she referred to her then-fiancé, “The professional success I had achieved before Peter did nothing to bring me genuine personal happiness.” She addressed him, saying that he had filled “voids of emptiness that existed before you. … You have altered my life so profoundly that many of my closest friends forget just how emotionally withdrawn I was before I met you.”

That relationship ended after eight years, and her biographers paint a picture of a life now that is frantically busy, fulfilling and often aloof. “You make play dates with her months and months in advance because of her schedule,” a friend of hers told The Times.

Brooks’ point is a fair one: we live in a closer approximation of a meritocracy than at any time before, where a Latina from the Bronx can, through hard work and brains, rise to the top. This is a good thing. But as we have opened the doors of the Ivy League universities to the Obamas and the Sotomayors, we’ve also created a culture of exhausting workaholism which leaves little room for balance or enduring intimate relationships. When only a member of the male WASP elite could get into Harvard and climb to a Supreme Court nomination, the chances were good he would have a wife who sublimated her own ambitions to his. (In a not-so-distant past, he would probably be able to afford servants, too.) Men of that world surely worked hard, but it was the labor of others that allowed them to enjoy leisure, marry, and have children while climbing into the rarified air at the very top of the social ladder. As the sons and daughters of the lower middle class have, like Sonia, made it to the top, they have found it far more challenging to “have it all”. The old saying that a woman of color would have to “work twice as hard and be twice as good to be taken half as seriously” still carries the sting of truth, and Brooks points out the cost of this.

Where I take issue with Brooks is with his suggestion that this burden falls equally on men and women:

This isn’t the old story of a career woman trying to balance work and family. This is the story of pressures that affect men as well as women (men are just more likely to make fools of themselves in response, as the news of the last few years indicates). It’s the story of people in a meritocracy that gets more purified and competitive by the year, with the time demands growing more and more insistent.

His parenthetical point is well taken, but it seems false to suggest that men have the same trouble striking a work-life balance, or finding partners who will be patient with their workaholism. Think of Sotomayor’s fellow baby boomer and fellow first-generation Ivy League lawyer, Barack Obama. The Supreme Court nominee edited the Yale Law Journal; the president of the United States was president of the Harvard Law Review. Both were pioneers. Barack Obama married a woman with a marvelous education, and that woman chose, in the end, to sublimate her career to his. In the end, the future president did not have to choose between his public ambitions and his private longings. By all accounts a devoted husband and a wonderful father, Barack Obama is not unlike other men of his and Sotomayor’s generation: hardworking, tremendously ambitious, and able to find a brilliant and devoted wife who, despite her own considerable professional achievements will, when the chips are down, put her aspirations aside to support her spouse. Continue reading ‘Sonia’s choice: of David Brooks, Barack Obama, the Supreme Court nominee and male privilege’

Sarah Palin, liberal culture warrior

Published
by
Hugo Schwyzer
on July 06, 2009
in Feminism and Politics
. 23 Comments

Sarah Palin’s surprise Friday announcement of her impending resignation proved to be a central topic of conversation among my nearest and dearest as we gathered for the Independence Day weekend. My large extended family includes members at virtually every point on the political spectrum, though most do tend to occupy the center. And among those of the blood and their guests, the Alaska governor had her vehement supporters and her equally vehement detractors.

I’ve always been ambivalent about Palin. I wrote two posts last year, well before the election: Shattering the glass ceiling of complementarianism: some thoughts on Sarah Palin, John Knox, and the difficult position of the Christian social conservative, and a few weeks later, “Backwoods Barbie” and white rural feminism: of Dolly Parton, 9 to 5, and Sarah Palin. In the first post, written the week she was selected as the GOP VP nominee, I wrote:

If you believe that women should submit to men, shouldn’t have teaching authority over men and so forth, then you are going to have a hard time accepting Sarah Palin as vice-president. To be a complementarian, after all, is to embrace the idea that men and women were created for distinct roles. Palin, who seems eager to court Hillary Clinton voters, sends a message with her life and her career that neither her sex nor her status as a mother of five should serve as a barrier to holding what could quickly become the most powerful post in the world.

That’s what excited me about Palin. I found her politics crudely reactionary, and still do. But I was and am troubled by the way in which some of my fellow progressives have failed to recognize that, in many ways, Palin’s popularity with the “base” reflects a radical cultural shift among our conservative brothers and sisters: with some notable and defiantly troglodytic exceptions, most on the right were and are quite comfortable with the idea of this woman, a mother of five, serving as president. This reflects nothing less than the happy truth that, for the most part, we on the left have won and are continuing to win the culture war. A generation ago, far more pastors and conservative pundits would have railed against a mother of young children pursuing a very public career outside the home. Her ambition would have been decried; her husband Todd’s primary role as caregiver to the younger daughters (Willow and Piper) would have been blasted as a tragic refusal to submit to God’s plan for the human household. And though some on the very fringes of the far right did indeed make noises to that effect, I was pleased that a clear majority of conservative voters repudiated those traditionalist sentiments. Continue reading ‘Sarah Palin, liberal culture warrior’

A note on harmonious disagreement, “commitment within relativism”, and the feminist sex wars

Published
by
Hugo Schwyzer
on July 01, 2009
in Feminism, Feminist Pedagogy, Friendship and Politics
. 17 Comments

It might surprise some readers that the students in my women’s studies classes are as politically and religiously diverse as the students in my other general education courses. The widely-held stereotype that feminist-themed courses only appeal to those on the left-hand side of the spectrum has not proven true, at least not for me here at Pasadena City College. (And is it possible that this fall I will begin my seventeenth year of teaching here? Where does the time go?) Though my women’s history classes do tend to attract slightly higher numbers of white students, and correspondingly lower numbers of students of color compared to the college average, those students who do take the class and submit journals and participate in discussions do run the full gamut.

Creating opportunities for honest, non-condemnatory and respectful dialogue isn’t particularly easy, particularly when the issues we discuss (like abortion rights, or the merits/drawbacks to abstinence, or the intersectionality of race and gender) are so potentially explosive. As diverse as my students are, most come from backgrounds where women are conciliators and peacemakers; many come from the “If you can’t say something nice, don’t say anything at all” school. And as a result, while we sometimes have very charged discussions in class in which emotions run high, my students tell me that outside of school, they tend to seek out friendships with those who are ideologically like-minded. The young woman committed to abstinence until marriage, for example, seems to find it hard to form a honest frienship (rather than a mere civil acquaintanceship) with the young woman who volunteers as a sex educator and talks openly about the physical aspects of the relationship she has with her boy — or girl — friends.

Labels like “prude” and “slut” have genuine power to wound. (Some women, of course, are unfortunate enough to be on the receiving end of both.) Those on opposite sides of the “abstinence divide” frequently imagine that it’s harder to be wherever they are; those who advocate for or live by a more progressive sexual ethic often carry the scars from words like “slut” or “whore” or even the surprisingly not-yet-dated “tramp.” Those who remain virgins (or who become born-again virgins) insist that theirs is the tougher cross to bear, that living in a sexually permissive environment where the pressure to fit in is enormous requires courage and resilience. There is an element, I note of the old “suffering Olympics” problem, in which various constituencies compete for the title of “most maligned” and “most deserving of sympathy.” Continue reading ‘A note on harmonious disagreement, “commitment within relativism”, and the feminist sex wars’

Of hypocrisy and hairshirts and John Ensign: a reply to K-Lo

Published
by
Hugo Schwyzer
on June 23, 2009
in Christianity, Infidelity, Politics and Sexual ethics and transformation
. 14 Comments

Kathryn Jean Lopez, who will soon be leaving the National Review Online for other, yet-to-be-named pastures, has a piece up this week about John Ensign (the latest in a long line of GOP senators whose public pronouncements proved to be wildly at odds with his private predilections) and the nature of hypocrisy.

We on the left, you see, frustrate K-Lo with our suggestion that Ensign’s infidelities undermine the case for the traditional and limited marriage franchise, a case near and dear to both the senator and the arch-conservative pundit. K-Lo wants us to know that Ensign’s inability or unwillingness to remain faithful is a private failing that ought to have no bearing on the public discussion about the meaning of marriage. She writes:

A politician’s failings do not render the beliefs to which he subscribes morally impotent. Facts remain. Marriage is a cornerstone. Under a bastardized and unfortunately widespread understanding of hypocrisy, it is “hypocritical” for someone who is not a perfect person to ever make a statement grounded in conscience, morality, or natural law. Presumably, then, all Christians should throw out their Book. The Bible is and always has been directed to sinners. And, save for the star of the show, the preaching comes from sinners, too. Christ warned Peter in Gethsemane, “Watch and pray that you may not undergo the test. The spirit is willing but the flesh is weak.” In Romans, Paul said: “What I do, I do not understand. For I do not do what I want, but I do what I hate.” Men (and women) believing something and falling short has a long history.

I agree with all but her third sentence in that paragraph. The history of marriage, as any scholar will tell you, is less cornerstone than constantly shifting sand. And cripes, enough already with the idolatry of marriage; calling it the “cornerstone” — a term with Christological significance — is sloppily inaccurate at best and blasphemous at worst.

K-Lo is right that a politician’s failings do not make the beliefs to which he subscribes morally impotent. For example, think of Barack Obama’s struggle with smoking. As someone who has proved supremely self-controlled in so many areas of life, it is striking — and humanizing — that he has been unable to kick the nicotine habit entirely. But his own addiction doesn’t mean that he can’t hold a strong position in favor of regulating tobacco; indeed, his sense of his own weakness gives strength to the argument that this is a dangerous substance deserving of greater regulation. He has pointedly not called for a ban on smoking either.

But while a politician’s failings do not mean he forfeits a right to speak out on issues, his failings aren’t incidental to his politics. K-Lo is wrong to suggest that Ensign’s fall from grace is completely unrelated to his views on marriage and sexual matters. It is axiomatic, after all, that we rail and splutter with the greatest indignation against those things we loathe inside ourselves. Those who combine great political power with an acute consciousness of personal sinfulness are particularly dangerous because of the overwhelming temptation to displace their own shame on to others. Private spiritual frailty is turned into an all-too-public club with which to beat those who, in the eyes of a guilt-ridden senator, live openly at odds with traditional morality; the zeal with which he wields that club is fueled by his own awareness of how far he has fallen from the mark. The flame of self-reproach kindles the fire to burn the heretics; the Inquisitor usually wears a hair-shirt.

Self-reproach is not only a right, it is a responsibility; people — especially, in our culture, men — could do with a good deal more self-examination. If we don’t like what we find, we need to go to therapy or confession or a Twelve Step program to heal and to grow. What we don’t get to do is to externalize that self-reproach into a sanctimonious defense of the traditional values we ourselves lack the capacity to follow. This doesn’t mean that the privately virtuous have more of a right to be judgmental, of course. But as most of us have come to find, those whose private virtue is deep and genuine are, as a rule, particularly disinclined to condemning others. And as the cases of Larry Craig, John Ensign, David Vitter or any in the legion of powerful men whose public commitment to biblical values was radically at odds with their intimate lives have shown, the reverse is true as well.

The faithful remnant rises: a moment of opportunity for progressive Republicans?

Published
by
Hugo Schwyzer
on June 16, 2009
in Politics and Progressive Republicans
. 9 Comments

In February, I put up a post called The quixotic faithful remnant: on being a happy liberal Republican in which I explained my commitment to the tiny but still potentially relevant left-wing of the Grand Old Party. Lately, I’ve encountered a number of fellow progressive Republicans through social networking sites like Facebook. As the battle rages on for the heart and soul of the Republican Party, the widespread assumption is that the struggle is primarily between those on the center-right and those on the far right. But this ignores the reality that there remain — particularly on the West Coast and in the Northeast — a large number of socially liberal, environmentally concerned, fiscally responsible folk who continue to identify with the GOP.

The fact is that on a great many issues, particularly around the environment, gay rights, and reproductive health, large contingents of the Democratic majority in Congress are well to the right of center. Indeed, until Arlen Specter rather cravenly switched parties this spring, Pennsylvania had the distinction of having as its two senators a pro-choice Republican (Specter) and a pro-life Democrat (Bob Casey, Jr.) While it would be a stretch to call Sen. Specter a feminist (we remember his shameful behavior during the Anita Hill/Clarence Thomas hearings), his record on reproductive rights as a Republican was substantially better than his Democratic counterpart. We see the same thing in the House: Shelley Capito, a fine moderate Republican congresswoman from West Virginia is well to the left of her Democratic counterpart from Ohio, Marcy Kaptur, on virtually all reproductive rights issues. Put simply, the Democrats became a majority party once again by actively recruiting socially conservative but economically populist candidates to run in swing states. (Think Heath Shuler, Jon Tester, Jim Webb, the aforementioned Casey, and so on.) From the standpoint of those who see women’s right to choose as a central issue, this is immensely troubling.

And what of President Obama himself? I continue to have reasonably high regard for him, but am more than a little disappointed by some of his decisions in the three critical areas of women’s rights, gay and lesbian inclusion, and environmental protection. And it occurs to me that progressive Republicans can make a case for criticizing the president by challenging him from his left. Below the fold are three issues where prominent Republicans are to the president’s left. Continue reading ‘The faithful remnant rises: a moment of opportunity for progressive Republicans?’

On liberals, conservatives, and the dangers of disgust

Published
by
Hugo Schwyzer
on May 28, 2009
in Faith, Favorite Posts 2009, Hygiene and Politics
. 22 Comments

I’m a big Nicholas Kristof fan, and very much enjoyed his piece in this morning’s grey lady: Would You Slap Your Father? If So, You’re a Liberal . Kristof writes about the phenomenon of disgust, its evolutionary role in protecting us from harm, and its usefulness as a predictor of political views. An excerpt:

…conservatives are more likely than liberals to sense contamination or perceive disgust. People who would be disgusted to find that they had accidentally sipped from an acquaintance’s drink are more likely to identify as conservatives.

The upshot is that liberals and conservatives don’t just think differently, they also feel differently. This may even be a result, in part, of divergent neural responses.

I’m not a neurologist or an evolutionary biologist (though my contempt for the usefulness of the latter profession as having much to contribute to the study of contemporary gender roles knows almost no bounds). I’m intrigued by the notion that disgust manifests differently in folks who lean right as opposed to those who lean left. And it occurs to me that one of the things that is essential to my own liberalism is a sense that disgust is, more often than not, a moral failing to be overcome rather than a righteous response to the genuinely contemptible. Continue reading ‘On liberals, conservatives, and the dangers of disgust’

Of little girls and liberal goals: daddies, daughters, and left-wing politics

Published
by
Hugo Schwyzer
on May 20, 2009
in Parenting and Politics
. 3 Comments

There’s been a lot of research done over the years on the impact that becoming a parent has on one’s political preference. The common wisdom has generally been that becoming a parent, particularly to a daughter or daughters, would push that parent rightward in his or her politics. Indeed, back in my own youth, I heard some variation on this line from several sources: “What’s the definition of a conservative? A former liberal with a teenage daughter.” It “sounded” right, and not being a parent (but being quite left-wing), I was prepared, however reluctantly, to believe it might be so.

My student Hilary sends me a link, however, to this post at the wonderful FiveThirtyEight: Having Daughters Rather than Sons Makes You More Liberal. 538 provides a link to a PDF file of a forthcoming paper which summarizes a number of recent studies, all of which indicate that the presence of daughters in father’s lives (more so than in mother’s) tends to move men leftwards. This trend is true in both the UK and the USA (the two nations studied), and true both for ordinary voters as well as for politicians. For example, the study cites the work of economist Ebonya Washington:

By collecting data on the voting records of US congressmen, Washington… provides persuasive evidence that congressmen with female children
tend to vote liberally on reproductive rights issues such as teen access to
contraceptives. (She also) argues for a wider result, namely,
that the congressmen vote more liberally on a range of issues such as working families
flexibility and tax-free education. Her data — compiled partly but not wholly
from voting record scores compiled by the three interest groups of the National Organization of Women, the American Association of University Women, and the
National Right to Life Coalition — cover a cross-section of 828 members of four
congresses of the US House of Representatives for the years 1997 to 2004. As her
final sentence puts it: “Not only should we consider the influence that parents have on
children’s behavior, but we should acknowledge that influence may flow from child to
parent”.

Read the whole study, the comments at 538, and check out the fun graphs and charts. A statistician’s delight!

I argued in March that “strong public institutions which offer alternatives to traditional family structures and allow for maximum personal autonomy and responsible self-expression are a key way to promote a feminist vision on a macro-economic level.” That was and is my view, but it’s interesting to see that having daughters seems to lead other men (politicians and ordinary voters alike) towards that same position. It’s not the case that those who have girls are automatically more liberal; it’s difficult to argue that on most issues, Dick Cheney was somehow made more progressive by having two daughters and no sons! One shudders to think how much more extreme he might have been had he had “Larry” and “Mark” instead of Liz and Mary. (It’s worth noting that his nuanced and moderate position on gay marriage, rare for a right-wing Republican, was certainly influenced by having a lesbian daughter.) Continue reading ‘Of little girls and liberal goals: daddies, daughters, and left-wing politics’

Barack Obama, Isaiah Berlin, and the wisdom of honoring irreconcilables

Published
by
Hugo Schwyzer
on May 18, 2009
in Abortion and Politics
. 24 Comments

We were in the Bay Area until yesterday afternoon, and stayed at our host’s home in San Francisco long enough to catch President Obama’s remarkable — and controversial — commencement address at Notre Dame.

I have not hesitated to be critical of the new president when I think criticism is warranted; his refusal to embrace the cause of marriage equality, and his administration’s reluctance to use its powers to protect grey wolves and polar bears have been serious disappointments. But it is in the nature of leaders to disappoint their most ardent followers, and I accept that. It is in the light of these recent disappointments that I watched Obama give his speech to the Notre Dame community, and I was as impressed as ever with his seriousness, his thoughtfulness, and his commitment to changing the tone of contemporary discourse.

The full transcript of the address is here. There is much within his talk that others are discussing, but I wanted to note my favorite bit. Referencing our long and seemingly never-ending public fights over abortion and other divisive social issues (such as same-sex marriage) the president said:

Now, understand — understand, Class of 2009, I do not suggest that the debate surrounding abortion can or should go away. Because no matter how much we may want to fudge it — indeed, while we know that the views of most Americans on the subject are complex and even contradictory — the fact is that at some level, the views of the two camps are irreconcilable. Each side will continue to make its case to the public with passion and conviction. But surely we can do so without reducing those with differing views to caricature.

Bold emphasis mine.

I liked that very much, largely because most politicians on left and right (and, I confess, this blogger) tend towards a crude but honest triumphalism. We sing “We Shall Overcome”, and quote (or misquote) Dr. King’s line about the long arc of history curving towards justice. In the animal rights world, many of us are confident that we will reach a point where eating the flesh of other sentient beings is as abhorrent as eating the flesh of our own children. My pro-life friends speak constantly of a coming moral awakening; my gay activist friends expect — within their lifetimes — to see all opposition to same-sex marriage fade away. To some extent, staying involved in any kind of activism requires this faith that your cause will triumph someday. Who among us — across the political spectrum — doesn’t thrill to King’s sentiment in that final speech of his in Memphis, when he tells us he has seen the promised land from the mountaintop? Like MLK, many of us know (or fear, or suspect) that the promised land (the end of abortion, universal acceptance of gay marriage, the end of animal agriculture) will not be reached in our lifetimes. But the bittersweet sense that we, like Moses, will not live to enter what has so long been sought often gives rise to sweeping denunciations of those who are impeding the path of progress. And it was to that triumphalist worldview that President Obama so capably addressed himself yesterday. Continue reading ‘Barack Obama, Isaiah Berlin, and the wisdom of honoring irreconcilables’

Shame and scandal: an evangelical reflection on the torture poll

Published
by
Hugo Schwyzer
on May 06, 2009
in Christianity, Politics and Torture
. 57 Comments

I like polls. I follow polls. Last year, like millions of Americans, I was almost obsessed with polls, and developed a massive man-crush on Nate Silver of the top-notch polling site, FiveThirtyEight. I like it when polls tell me things I suspect are true, or want to be true, such as the recent poll from ABC demonstrating that a narrow plurality of Americans support marriage equality.

But I have never been as distressed by a poll as I was by the much-discussed, much-lamented one released last week by the Pew Forum. The Religious Dimensions of the Torture Debate made it very clear that church-going Christians in general, and white evangelicals in particular, are much more inclined to see torture as at least sometimes both necessary and justified than are their secular counterparts. It wasn’t that I didn’t think that the poll could be true; indeed, I understand all too well the political and theological heresies which are rife in the American church and which encourage this abhorrent and biblically indefensible notion to flourish. (Is Mel Gibson’s snuff film about our Savior to blame? Is it that most folks completely misunderstand — and many pastors misrepresent — atonement theory?) It’s that on an emotional level, I didn’t want it to be true.

As a self-described progressive evangelical, my views on many issues diverge from most who describe themselves as “deeply religious” or “born-again.” I support marriage equality for all; I am prayerfully, at times reluctantly, firmly pro-choice. I believe that wise stewardship over creation means understanding that all of creation — and not merely human beings — are endowed by their Creator with inalienable rights. My veganism and my feminism, far from existing uneasily alongside my Christian faith, are indeed rooted in my own understanding of Jesus and His call upon my heart. I expect to have arguments about sexual ethics with my more conservative fellow Christians. I expect to engage in the old “complemetarian versus egalitarian” debate about gender roles. But I never seriously expected to need to explain to a fellow Christian that torturing another human being was fundamentally incompatible with our faith.

(Before going further, let me recommend Mercer University professor and Christian ethicist David Gushee’s very fine post about the poll.) Continue reading ‘Shame and scandal: an evangelical reflection on the torture poll’

Sins of Malice, Sins of Passion: of Jerry Falwell and Marilyn Chambers

Published
by
Hugo Schwyzer
on April 16, 2009
in Christianity, Politics and Porn
. 10 Comments

Conservative Catholic blogger Francis Beckwith is annoyed with what he sees as a media double standard in the coverage of the passings of porn star Marilyn Chambers (who died this past week) and conservative Christian activist and preacher Jerry Falwell, who died in 2007. Beckwith:

…the Rev. Falwell founded a university, started a social movement of great influence, pastored a church of several thousand for several decades, led many, many people to Christ, and as far as we know was a loving and devoted husband and father. (He was a person that even Larry Flynt called “friend”!) On the other hand, Ms. Chambers, who died young (as is the case with virtually everyone in her “profession”), is portrayed as a cultural trailblazer who enlightened our culture to the “blessings” of anonymous, promiscuous, widely diverse, and videotaped, copulation. For this reason, you will hear no lamenting of the innumerable lives on which her example made chic the infliction of countless miseries. You will not hear of the unborn children killed, the addictions borne and nurtured, the marriages decimated, the offspring abandoned, the spouses betrayed, or even the diseases contracted—spiritual, mental and physical—that her “trailblazing” facilitated.

We live in an age in which we know precisely what recycle bin our newsprint and soda bottles belong. But we have no idea what a human being is, what it’s supposed to do, or who or what it is permissible to sleep with. So, this is the lesson of our time: the “good” man is the one who treats his garbage with greater care than his own soul. This is why, for our cultural gatekeepers, Ms. Chambers is an icon and the Rev. Falwell did not die soon enough.

It wouldn’t have occurred to me to compare Falwell and Chambers, but I’m struck by Beckwith’s little post. Though it’s an obvious strawman to suggest that the left was uniform in its glee when Falwell passed (I was rather charitable, myself, or so I thought), it’s certainly true that many progressives were not overtaxed with grief when the founder of the Moral Majority gave up the ghost. It is also true that without bestowing upon Marilyn Chambers any particular degree of veneration, those of us fascinated by recent cultural history note her central role in elevating adult movie actresses to the status of pop icons. And we can disagree, as we do, about the degree to which pornography is responsible for the litany of ills which Beckwith, channeling Chesterton, provides.

Both Falwell and Chambers came to prominence in the second half of the 1970s; they became household names in the Carter Administration. Falwell was the ardent culture warrior, while Chambers was a symbol — at least for folks like the stout Baptist preacher — of the moral decay against which a coalition of indignant Christians ought to stand. But in one sense, a genuinely Catholic one, it may well be right to speak more gently of Chambers than of Falwell. Continue reading ‘Sins of Malice, Sins of Passion: of Jerry Falwell and Marilyn Chambers’

Rights and Sacrifice: more in response to Maggie Gallagher

Published
by
Hugo Schwyzer
on April 02, 2009
in Divorce, Marriage and Politics
. 53 Comments

I want to return to the same Maggie Gallagher piece I wrote about yesterday. Gallagher, in making the case for what she calls a “marriage culture” (which she defines, oddly, as a culture which seeks to limit rather than expand the marriage franchise) suggests that what she calls “sacrifice” is at the very heart of what marriage is. And as it turns out, I think she’s right — at least, if we understand the real meaning of the word.

Gallagher writes:

These decisions are being made every day: Sacrifice or immediate gratification? The audacity of hope or the audacity of fidelity? Grownups have to choose. A marriage culture consists of offering a provisional answer to grownups about how they should choose. Marriage as an individual right offers no cultural basis for helping people answer the questions that matter most.

She’s a bit muddled there, but her last line makes good sense to me, though I stand on the opposite side. Rights don’t exist in order to provide a cultural basis for helping people grow; rights exist so that people may live their lives with the maximum degree of freedom possible without impinging too grossly on the rights of others. Marriage can be a vehicle for personal growth and transformation for some, but it is not the only such catalyst for individual change and happiness. When marriage is defined as a right rather than an expectation, and when that right is granted regardless of the reproductive potential of the persons involved, then we are all liberated. And while Gallagher thinks that all we’re liberated from by altering the definition of marriage is the duty to do hard things, I think we’re liberated from a very particular kind of idolatry.

Marriage advocates like Gallagher fantastically overestimate the power of this one particular institution to glue society together. Like a moonstruck teenager who thinks that life will be perfect when she finds true love, Gallagher thinks that the sooner we’re all in sacrificial heterosexual marriages, the more robust and joyful our common life will be. And the danger is that her very own enthusiasm for the institution undermines the long-term viability of traditional marriage. Raise young people with a reverence for marriage, combine that reverence with a denunciation of divorce as invariably selfish, and wham — you get falling marriage rates. You make an icon out of marriage, and you leave a generation of young people concluding that it either isn’t worth all of that “sacrifice”, or that they had better wait until they’re damn good and ready before dipping a toe into the nuptial pond.

Gallagher makes marriage sound like the Marines: “we’re looking for a few good straight couples”. Some young folks love the idea of joining the Marines — but most aren’t interested. We’re already seeing the signs that Gallagher’s efforts are paying off: the divorce rate, according to most sociologists, has begun to decline slightly. But it is only declining because fewer people are getting married in the first place. And contrary to what Gallagher might think, the increased accessibility of divorce and the drive for gay marriage is not the reason why so many young folks are delaying marriage (or giving up on the idea altogether.) It’s that the vision of marriage as a unique vehicle for human happiness seems more like a quaint romantic fantasy — and that the hard labor of commitment doesn’t seem very appealing. This doesn’t mean young people are lazy or afraid; it simply means that modern marriage doesn’t stand up particularly well to a cost-benefit analysis. (This is why, of course, so many social conservatives are desperate to preach abstinence — the more they can create the sense that orgasms are only licit after marriage, the greater the appeal of getting hitched.) Continue reading ‘Rights and Sacrifice: more in response to Maggie Gallagher’