You got your chocolate in my peanut butter!

It's an otherwise busy week in which I won't get much done, so I might as well let this go; it may be the last thing I post for a week, and in part it's inspired by this post at Thought Criminal, if only because the worship of science one sees on the intertubes is a truly appalling thing.

The latest consideration at Salon is whether Nietzsche predicted the correct cosmological theory (although I think the Father of the Ubermensch is just click bait in the headline).   I won't even comment on how much Western science is a construct of a certain culture with normative values that aren't necessarily handed down from Nature anymore than Moses got the law verbatim from the hand of God on Sinai (so it's no surprise the Big Bang Theory sounds vaguely Christian, or the alternative model is distinctly Hindu).  Indeed, the very idea that science is not a pure construct of truth akin to the gospel according to fundamentalists has prompted some really ludicrous comments, viz:

When involved in a discussion of cutting-edge astrophysics, introducing Hindu or Buddhist cosmologies makes as much sense as introducing Creationism when discussing evolution.  It isn't science, so it belongs elsewhere. 

Go wherever you want with that, but my first thought was that science is heilege, holy, and so must remain pure and apart from anything that is not science, such as philosophy (don't tell this commenter that science IS a philosophy, he'll burn you at the stake as a heretic!) or religion.  The latter clearly have no place in the discussion of the holy of holies.  It shouldn't even be allowed on the grounds of the temple.

Seriously, these guys are as bad as the fundamentalists they caricature.

"I'm not sure what it means...."

Because sometimes you need a buddy....

This is fascinating.  It may even make me change my attitude toward Burwell.  Then again, it ends here:

What remains, as Clifford Geertz reminds us, is for us to work on creating new fictions together, political, legal and religious:

The primary question . . . now that nobody is leaving anybody else alone and isn’t ever going to, is not whether everything is going to come seamlessly together or whether, contrariwise, we are all going to persist sequestered in our separate prejudices. It is whether human beings are going to be able . . . to imagine principled lives they can practicably lead.

Judges cannot do this work.

Which kind of undermines Burwell, and certainly undermines any possible legislative or even legal solution to the conundrum of what is called in the article "Big 'R' religion."

I cannot summarize the argument; it's too subtle for that, I'd do it damage.  I can focus on a few key points, by drawing out quotes:

You cannot both celebrate religious freedom and deny it to those whose religion you don’t like. Human history supports the idea that religion, small “r” religion, is a nearly ubiquitous and perhaps necessary part of human culture. Big “R” Religion, on the other hand, the Religion that is protected in constitutions and human rights law under liberal political theory, is not. Big “R” Religion is a modern invention, an invention designed to separate good religion from bad religion, orthodoxy from heresy — an invention whose legal and political use has arguably reached the end of its useful life.

That lays the groundwork, though I must say not as clearly as I would like.  The distinction between "Big 'R' Religion" and "small 'r' religion" is never as clear as it could be, but the distinction lies here:

That American religion is involved in business and obsessed with sex is not news. What is surprising is that those who object to this kind of religion continue to hold on to a faith in the idea that religious freedom means protection only for the kind of religion they like, the private, individualized, progressive kind.

There:  religion that is "private, individualized, and progressive" is acceptable; religion that is not, needs to go back to church and remain private and individualized, even if it can't (or won't) be progressive.  In the extreme formulations usually encountered in comments, all religion must be private and individualized, and no religion can claim to be progressive, because it is an offense against reason.

But this is the heart of the matter; and here, I think, the argument becomes almost unassailable:

The notion that religion exists and can be regulated without being defined is a fiction at the heart of religious freedom protection. Legal fictions — such as the idea that corporations are persons — are, of course, necessary to law. For legal scholars as diverse as Henry Maine and Lon Fuller, the capacity of legal language to finesse the facts could be understood as making legal flexibility and progress possible. The startling unbelievability of legal fictions can also focus our attention on the limits of legal language in a salutary way. Yet legal fictions can be stretched too far. They can become nothing more than lies.

Fictions, despite the more literal minded atheists and logical positivists one encounters on-line, are necessary to human existence.  But we don't need to go far afield to establish this:

Religion also specializes in fiction. It is not just the corporation that has fictional legal personality. So does the church. Justice Ginsburg objects to free exercise protection being extended to “artificial entities,” referring to corporations, but religious freedom is all about protecting artificial identities. The church is an imagined artificial entity; so are gods and demons. The church is the body of Christ in orthodox Christian theology; like the sovereign, it is the quintessential legal fiction, as we learn from Ernst H. Kantorowicz in “The King’s Two Bodies

We need fictions to live. But when the church and the state went their separate ways — when the church was disestablished — the intimate articulation of political, legal and religious fictions lost their logic on a national scale. They no longer recognize one another. The legal and religious fictions of religious freedom have become lies designed to extend the life of the impossible idea that church and state can still work together after disestablishment. There is no neutral place from which to distinguish the religious from the non-religious. There is no shared understanding of what religion, big “R” Religion, is. Let’s stop talking about big “R” Religion.

I've left out most of the discussion of Burwell and the dissent in the Wheaton College temporary injunction order.  The critiques of Ginsberg and Sotomayor are insightful, and perhaps decisive.  I haven't decided yet.

But this is definitely food for thought.....

MORE COWBELL!!!!

It seems the President, in Poe's felicitous phrase, is trying to out-Herod Herod.  According to Salon, Obama has done nothing but increase enforcement of immigration laws, with the result that " net migration from our southern neighbor [Mexico] has fallen to zero.  Of course, you wouldn't know that, from the fear mongering about how overrun our borders are now.

And the current crisis, the result of a law dating back to 2008, which was meant to be humane:

 a 2008 law passed under George W. Bush requires that children from non-bordering countries be handed over to the Department of Health and Human Services for care and then go before a judge. The reasoning behind this is that, unlike with Mexican children who can be handed over safely to officials from their home country at the border, that isn’t possible with kids who hail from farther away.

Has prompted this response from the Administration:  "Obama was asking for the authority to treat kids from Central America the same as those from neighboring countries."

Fortunately, that didn't go anywhere.  But still, the children must go:

the White House announced it was asking Congress for $3.7 billion for more border patrol agents, immigration judges, detention facilities, and aerial surveillance. “It is a priority for us to make sure that it is both clear to people in the country that we will remove children,” said a White House official. “And that we in fact do that much more swiftly and efficiently than we are doing now.”

I could wish that Obama remembered his UCC roots (such as they apparently were; or were not); and that Jeremiah Wright were keeping good on his promise to tell the President when he was wrong:

On Tuesday, dozens of congregations from the Southern California Nevada Conference of the UCC will be represented in a faith-based delegation that will travel to Naval Base Ventura County in Oxnard, Calif., that is currently housing hundreds of migrant children. Organized by the National Day Laborer Organizing Network and the United Methodist Church, the group will seek entrance into the naval base to ensure transparency and oversight at the facility, assess its conditions, and advocate for the children being held inside.

"Once we hear back from the delegation in Ventura, we will know more about the need is there and how we can assist," said Keith Clark, executive associate conference minister of the Southern California Nevada Conference. "It's a situation where we will have to assess what is being done and how we can help with the immediate situation. I'm sure there will also be advocacy for the broader issues involved."

"We are called to care for the least of these and called to greet and care for the immigrant as well," Clark said. "It's the responsibility of the faith community and the UCC to meet the needs of these strangers who have come into our midst, and to help communities understand how we can have a loving response to those who are seeking our help."

As Auden said, may we, like them, show an affirming flame.

FOOD FIGHT!!!!!

This is sure to provoke much flinging of poo:

If your idea of God is not one that most theistic traditions would recognize, you’re not talking about God (at most, the New Atheists’ arguments are relevant to the low-hanging god of fundamentalism and deism). But even more damning is that such atheists appear ignorant of atheism as well. 

Not to mention the review uses words like "ontic" and "ontology," which I'm not even sure Richard Dawkins knows how to use correctly (much less Pharyngula, or the "atheists" hanging out at Salon who get in a lather if you call them "neo-Atheists."  Like they'd know what a real atheist, like Bertrand Russell, was.)

And this, I thought, was the "money shot:"

What Spencer recounts is the true history of atheism, which

had only a limited amount to do with reason and even less with science. The creation myth in which a few brave souls forged weapons made of a previously unknown material, to which the religious were relentlessly opposed, is an invention of the later nineteenth century, albeit one with ongoing popular appeal. In reality … modern atheism was primarily a political and social cause, its development in Europe having rather more to do with the (ab)use of theologically legitimized political authority than it does with developments in science or philosophy.

As I've said before (I'm sure), the arguments always (even in theological circles) have more to do with power than with theology, or, more broadly, religion.  And when you don't even know what religion or theology are, how can you be arguing about anything else but power?

Well, and just to enjoy the clarity of thought in this review:

To paraphrase the Scottish philosopher Alasdair MacIntyre, our moral vocabulary has lost the contexts from which its significance derived, and no amount of Dawkins-style hand-waving about altruistic genes will make the problem go away. (Indeed, the ridiculous belief that our genes determine everything about human behavior and culture is a symptom of this very problem.) 

Or this quote from John Gray:

Driven to the margins of a culture in which science claims authority over all of human knowledge, [religious believers] have had to cultivate a capacity for doubt. In contrast, secular believers—held fast by the conventional wisdom of the time—are in the grip of unexamined dogmas.

I don't quite agree with the predicate, but I'll accept it arguendo for the sake of the conclusion.

I will say no more except that it is a refreshingly intelligent discussion, if brief and centered on a book I don't plan to read (life's too short), for the internet.  And I'll stay away from the 1.6K (as I write) comments there, especially if the top comment (excerpted in a side bar) is any indication ("The author commits the same fallacy as Pascal--conflating 'God' and 'religion' with his particular brand of Christianity."  That isn't, by the way, the problem with Pascal's wager.)   It's a comment that perfectly reflects the last words of the review:  “Everyone is talking past each other and no one seems to be elevating the conversation to where it could and should be.”

Pascal's wager?  Seriously?  Feh!

Even the clowns in the comments at Religion Dispatches should take heed.*

*I like RD, but they draw their share of ignorance, too.

Christmas in July--for lawyers

Mmmmm....cooked goose!

I don't mean to make a fetish of the "corporate veil" problem that I think Burwell sets up, but I've noted more and more references to that problem lately.

NTodd caught one, at dKos:

Because corporations exist in order to put up a barrier between a business and its owners, that means that the religious liberty of the owners cannot be violated by anything the corporation is compelled, by law, to do. Business owners want to benefit from the doctrine of corporate separateness when creditors want their money, and start acting like Paulie from "Goodfellas" (i.e., "$@*% you, pay me!"). When that happens, the owners want to be able to throw up their hands and say, "Sorry, that's not me, that's the business." Piercing that corporate veil is supposed to be difficult. But all of a sudden, the Roberts Five is agreeing with business owners who want to turn around and say—when it comes to their interpretation of religion—that the business  the owners. They can't have it both ways.

I'm not a legal genius or a constitutional scholar, and I'm certainly not the only person to make this argument, as you can see above. But it is such a Captain Obvious point that the only explanation that fits is that Roberts Five simply doesn't care. I used the word farce. I stand by it.

And I found another this morning, which indicates corporate lawyers are aware of the risk, too:

Hobby Lobby and Conestoga each asserts that the religious values of its present controlling shareholders should pass through to the corporation itself. This Court should reject any such “values pass-through” concept. To do otherwise would run contrary to established principles of corporate law.

The essence of a corporation is its “separateness” from its shareholders. It is a distinct legal entity, with its own rights and obligations, different from the rights and obligations of its shareholders. This Court has repeatedly recognized this separateness.

The outline of the argument in that brief is telling.  Sections include:

B)  The Corporation's separate existence protects its shareholders from liability for corporate debts, thereby investment, innovation, and job creation

C)  The Corporation's separate existence permits a business to operate notwithstanding the death of disability of its founders or changes in share ownership, thereby promoting stability and predictability in business operations

True, these read like GOP talking points, but they are also valid issues in corporate law.  My favorite, however, points to the very uncertain legal future created by Burwell, a future the Court can't hope to control:

D)  The separation between a corporation and its shareholders is a principle not only of corporate law, but also of agency law and of criminal law.

The law is a web; touch one strand, and you tremble them all.

It is, however, the penultimate section that sums up  the argument of this brief, and points to the problem the Court created:

E)  This Court should not allow Hobby Lobby and Conestoga to selectively disregard the corporate veil that separates them from their shareholders. 

The Court might argue that it precisely did allow a narrow, selective reverse piercing of the corporate veil to allow Hobby Lobby to have the religious beliefs of its owners; but as the brief clearly points out, sauce for the goose is sauce for the gander.

So now the question is:  in the case of the closely held corporation, is that corporate goose cooked?

"I do not think that word means what you think it means."

Freedom's just another word for fireworks on the 4th!

 As long as no one has a religious objection....

I saw this, but didn't have a link to the opinion.  Now, via NTodd, I do:

RFRA requires Wheaton to show that the accommodation process “substantially burden[s] [its] exercise of religion.” “Congress no doubt meant the modifier ‘substantially’ to carry weight…”

[...]

Let me be absolutely clear: I do not doubt that Wheaton genuinely believes that signing the self-certification form is contrary to its religious beliefs. But thinking one’s religious beliefs are substantially burdened—no matter how sincere or genuine that belief may be—does not make it so.

An analogy used by the Seventh Circuit may help to explain why Wheaton’s complicity theory cannot be legally sound:

“Suppose it is wartime, there is a draft, and a Quaker is called up. Many Quakers are pacifists, and their pacifism is a tenet of their religion. Suppose the Quaker who’s been called up tells the selective service system that he’s a conscientious objector. The selective service officer to whom he makes this pitch accepts the sincerity of his refusal to bear arms and excuses him. But as the Quaker leaves the selective service office, he’s told: ‘you know this means we’ll have to draft someone in place of you’—and the Quaker replies indignantly that if the government does that, it will be violating his religious beliefs. Because his religion teaches that no one should bear arms, drafting another person in his place would make him responsible for the military activities of his replacement, and by doing so would substantially burden his own sincere religious beliefs. Would this mean that by exempting him the government had forced him to ‘trigger’ the drafting of a replacement who was not a conscientious objector, and that the Religious Freedom Restoration Act would require a draft exemption for both the Quaker and his non‐Quaker replacement?”

Here, similarly, the filing of the self-certification form merely indicates to the third-party administrator that a religious nonprofit has chosen to invoke the religious accommodation. If a religious nonprofit chooses not to pay for contraceptive services, it is true that someone else may have a legal obligation to pay for them, just as someone may have to go to war in place of the conscientious objector. But the obligation to provide contraceptive services, like the obligation to serve in the Armed Forces, arises not from the filing of the form but from the underlying law and regulations.It may be that what troubles Wheaton is that it must participate in any process the end result of which might be the provision of contraceptives to its employees. But that is far from a substantial burden on its free exercise of religion.

"Substantial burden" is the test established by the Court for these cases in 1962, reaffirmed in 1972, and codified by RFRA.  But now, with Burwell, cases under RFRA need meet only an alleged burden, to be a substantial burden.

Which means the Court has just elevated RFRA above even the 1st Amendment.

This is a worse outcome than I had realized.   Effectively, any claim of mere inconvenience of religious beliefs, a claim which must be taken at face value by the court, under RFRA now means thecorporation making the claim is absolved of all responsibilities under the law complained of.  I am sympathetic to rick's arguments in comments below that some balance is needed; but I don't think Burwell is that balance, at all.

BTW:  Happy Birthday to my grate gud frend, rick!

"....makes the world go around...."

Last in a series, I promise; at this point I'm just cleaning off the desk, so to speak.

I'm still ruminating on this, but it strikes me that the issue here (in Burwell) is the question of agency*:  at what point is my money no longer "my money," and the use of it no longer under my control, or even my responsibility?

An employer provides insurance as an employment benefit, which means it is no different than the agreed upon salary the employee accepts to do the job.  By offering insurance, the employer agrees to pay for that insurance as a part of the employee's compensation, just as the employer agrees to pay a wage on a set schedule.  Indeed, in Texas, if an employer does not pay on the agreed schedule that employer is in violation of state law.  The property interest of the employee in at least their wages is protected by law.  And, of course, the use of those wages by the employee (provided the use is legal) is left entirely to the employee.

The government says that the insurance policy so provided cannot be worthless, that it must make certain basic provisions.  It does not dictate the size of the deductible, for example, but it does dictate what will be covered so all have basic medical care available to them.  Of course, given the expense of healthcare it could legitimately be a moral issue as to whether an insurance deductible is fair, or not (because a high deductible can still effectively exclude you from some healthcare.  I just bought some relatively inexpensive drugs which, were it not for the program at my pharmacy reducing the cost to $20.00, would have cost me $140.00.  I have a deductible I never reach because aside from two minor chronic health issues controlled by generic drugs, I don't spend enough on healthcare in any one year.  If not for that pharmacy program, I might find my healthcare far more expensive, and if I were a bit poorer....)

Now comes Hobby Lobby, which objects that the insurance policy it buys means the insurance company must provide coverage for contraceptive care to the insured.  The money leaves Hobby Lobby, goes to the insurance company, and MAY be used to buy contraceptives (it doesn't have to be, of course), and Hobby Lobby says that's a violation of its religious feelings.

Okay, the money leaves the employers hands and goes directly to the employee, who uses it to buy alcohol, which may also be a violation of the employer's religious feelings.  Or, more to the point, the employee MAY buy alcohol with that money.  In either case we tell the employer:  tough.  It's no longer your money.

Why is it still the employer's money when it gets to the insurance company?**

*Not that the majority opinion wanted to address that issue in any way, shape, or form.  They clearly and tacitly left all questions of agency in the hands of the corporate owners, and allowed for no autonomy of the employees, who can make their own decisions about whether or not to use contraceptives.  The Court might as well have complained that Hobby Lobby exists in a world where contraceptives are available and where employees might purchase such things with the money Hobby Lobby "gives" them (because compensation belongs to the employer even after it is earned, in the logic of the majority opinion).

**The answer is:  because this case is not about contraceptives or religious beliefs, or even about money.  It is about opposition to the ACA.  If there is a moral issue with contraceptives, there isn't a valid legal one:

Today's opinion reflects not a principled judgment about the meaning of RFRA but the Republican majority's policy opposition to the ACA, and its failure to take the rights and interests of the women employees affected by its decision seriously. That these justices may not apply the same logic when the mandate is for something other than contraception isn't much of a defense of their holding.  

And that it isn't about "religious beliefs" is clear from the special privilege religious beliefs held by the owners of closely-held corporations suddenly get at law, a privilege offered to no other group in America:

I agree that on the question of whether there is any conflict between religious practice and a statute, the courts should be deferential to an individual’s characterization of their beliefs. The legal standard, however, is not whether there is “any” conflict. It’s whether there is a substantial conflict. Courts do not have to be deferential on this question, and indeed since the finding of a substantial burden triggers the rare use of heightened scrutiny they can’t be deferential.  And for the reasons Edwards explains, this is pretty much the definition of a de minimis burden: the Gilardis are not required to use contraception, required to promote the use of contraception, or denied the right to publicly oppose the use of contraception. Being required to offer insurance plans that cover contraception may constitute a burden, but it’s not the “substantial” one Sherbert requires. In Sherbert and Yoder, there was a clear, direct burden involved, not an incidental one.

The idea that an irrefutable bare assertion of conflict with religious belief, no matter how trivial, is sufficient to make any state action subject to strict scrutiny is absurd. It’s an obviously unworkable standard, it’s not what the Court said in Sherbert, and it’s not the policy enacted by Congress, which also requires a “substantial” burden. The backdoor attempt to subject all regulations to strict scrutiny does, however, show what’s going on here: this case is about opposition to the ACA, not religious freedom.

Congratulations, you closely held corporations! The Kingdom of Heaven is yours, too!

God's domain belongs to the closely-held corporation! And it can treat you the way it wants!

There is some concern, well-placed I'm afraid, that Burwell v Hobby Lobby has erased the distinction between churches and for-profit corporations.  I'm not sure where that leads us legally, but it confirms a trend socially that I've noticed since my first church.

Fresh out of seminary and anxious for a placement, I interviewed with and accepted a call to a church which included a discussion I only later realized was an offer to "hire" me (rather than "call," which implies a wholly different relationship) on a commission basis.  It wasn't subtle or hidden; I just didn't want to pay attention at the time.  A member of the search committee made the offer:  I could draw a small salary, and increase it as I increased the membership of the church.  He made it as an offer in my best interest, an incentive for me to draw more members to the church, to put seats in the pews, to increase the income of the congregation, in short.  He was quite explicit on the point:  as I drew more paying members to the church, I could increase my salary based on the increased church income.  I could draw directly from the income brought by those new members, to feather my nest; he wouldn't mind a bit.

No one else at that interview disagreed with his offer.

To understand how appalling that is, you have to understand that pastors are called to pulpits.  They are called as servants of God, and absent an episcopalian structure (bishops who assign priests/pastors to pulpits), the arrangement is between the pastor and the congregation (this is the norm for congregational polities like Baptists and the UCC, or for presbyterial polities like the Presbyterian church.)  The pastor comes to be a servant to the congregation, but also to be a representative of the larger church (a distinction usually clearer in episcopalian polities, but not necessarily all that clear).  The pastor is not "hired" by the church to do a "job," such as increase membership.  That is a job a club might hire someone for, or any business; but a church is not a business, and is not supposed to act like one.

In my experience, a lot of lay people don't understand that distinction anymore.  The minister is an employee, the job of the minister is to draw the crowds like Joel Osteen does, and the business of the church is to put as many paying butts in the pews as possible, provided only that the newcomers all get along with "us."  Did Burwell add fuel to that fire?  Inadvertently, yes.  Is the Supreme Court influenced by this "business" attitude? Well, one would think not, as the majority of the court is Roman Catholic, and Alito is Catholic.  But then I've seen a clergy cast out of his church to serve the business interests of very wealthy people (I can't say much particular about it) by the authority who is supposed to protect him, and had the same experience myself.  That churches are run like businesses, and that there are certain people you just don't cross, is not a new or unusual insight.

Still, I come from a denomination with the tradition of "Herr Pastor," a pastoral figure who you didn't cross.  I knew one such pastor, in his retirement; and the authority and respect he expected just from his position was a thing of the far past.  On the other hand, I served a church which never kept a pastor for more than 3 years, on average; and I know churches who regularly keep pastors for decades; so every rule is subject to exception.

But there is a growing literature among pastors of "Clergy killer" congregations, and one central point of the strife is the congregation that wants to be like a "mega-church," and mega-churches are businesses first and churches second.  They don't challenge their members, they appeal to them.

Well, that's another topic, and I've done it to death by now.

Are churches merely businesses?  No.  Are they more and more treated as such?  Yes:

As a scholar of religious history, I observe the way that faith intersects with culture. I study and publish on megachurches and my interpretation of this week's events is informed not only by my experiences as an employee at Hobby Lobby but also my knowledge of recent religious trends. My biggest question after hearing the decision was not about the particular opinions or practical repercussions (which are significant and have far-reaching and dangerous consequences). Instead, my first thought was: "What is it about our cultural fabric that enables us to attribute religious rights to a corporate entity?" In the United States we have increasingly associated Christianity with capitalism and the consequences affect both corporations and churches. It's a comfortable relationship and seemingly natural since so much of our history is built on those two forces. But it's also scary.

And why is that scary?

Megachurches advertise on television, billboards, the Internet. They have coffee shops and gift stores. Some feature go-cart tracks, game centers, even oil changes. Many are run by pastors that also serve as CEOs. So when Hobby Lobby seeks similar religious rights as these very corporate churches, we have to reconsider our definition of religious organizations and maybe even say "why not?" We have normalized corporate Christianity to the point that the Supreme Court deems it natural for businesses to hold "sincere" religious beliefs. The religious landscape in the United States, including our familiarity with megachurches and celebrity pastors, certainly contributes to the acceptance of the church/company conundrum.

The "why not" can be answered, however, with the real costs of the decision. Women's reproductive rights are compromised. The religious freedom of employees for these corporations is compromised. The sanctity of our religious institutions is also compromised. To protect religious pluralism and freedom of the individual we need clear demarcations between what is spiritual and what is economical. Otherwise, we sacrifice the soul of American religion and all that makes it good and why I study it on the altar of industry. I can't get those three months at Hobby Lobby back (or the praise muzak out of my head) but I can see more clearly the dangers of allowing corporate Christianity to become the norm. Without clear boundaries, we risk distorting the very idea of religious freedom and the rich, diverse religious culture that makes us who we are.

The slippery slope of unintended consequences, in other words.  And a result which has less to do simply with five men on the Supreme Court, and perhaps a bit more to do with the zeitgeist.

I'm forced at this point to ask what sound like silly questions, but are actually perfectly legitimate; such as this one:

How can a corporation be "Christian"?

Is it "Christian" because it objects to certain forms of birth control?  Or is it Christian because it sells all it owns and gives that money to the poor, and becomes a disciple of Christ?  Is it Christian because it has moral objections to government policy?  Or is it Christian because it only owns one coat, having given the second coat to someone with no coat at all?  Or because it visited the imprisoned, gave food to the hungry, shelter to the homeless, prayed without ceasing?

These are not frivolous questions.  "Religion is responsibility, or it is nothing at all."  And Christianity is all about responsibility.  It is about making the first last and the last first.  It is about seeing the arrogant put to rout and exalting the lowly; it is about inviting everyone into the basiliea tou theou.  It is about proclaiming release to the captive and restoring sight to the blind.    It is about responsibility towards others, which is to say responsibility (in the Christian sense, at least; which is all the Court really addressed in Burwell) towards God.  And that responsibility requires you to humble yourself to others, not to put yourself above them; because God is not on that throne with the ruler; God is in the street with the ptochoi.

Being Christian is not about making a return on investment, or a profit on what the people need (regard, as a simple object lesson, the cleansing of the Temple), or providing a dividend for shareholders.  Mind, none of the things business requires are necessarily antithetical to Christianity, but to conflate Christianity with business, to say a business can be Christian, is to drain the concept of Christianity of all meaning.

A business can be run by Christians, who try to the best of their understanding to live out their Christianity as business owners; but the business itself is not "Christian."  It is not the 'body of Christ,' it is not a charity, it is not guided by the principles of Matthew 25, and does not expect to be judged a sheep or a goat.

Who, after all, gets to decide what businesses are "Christian," what religious beliefs are "sincerely held"?  The Court expressly refused in Burwell to enter into the guessing game that even God won't enter into.

Will this Supreme Court ruling move churches closer to being businesses?  Not directly, I don't think.  I don't foresee a suit getting to any court challenging a church on the grounds it should be a business; although there may be some interesting challenges as to why churches enjoy tax exempt status and for-profit businesses don't, with much jumping through hoops to make some very legalistic distinctions.  A lot of the analysis in Burwell argues there is no difference between a for-profit corporation and a non-profit one; but that latter status is the primary legal basis for tax-exempt status for churches and charities.  If the logic of Burwell starts to erode that distinction, the case could have some very strange and sad consequences, indeed.

All About Eve

So now Burwell is all about recreational sex and "consequence free sex."   But only where women are concerned.

According to Eric Erickson:  "My religion trumps your 'right' to employer subsidized consequence free sex."

During a Monday interview with Sen. Mike Lee (R-UT), conservative radio host Andrew Wilkow said that the Supreme Court decided "whether or not a person who runs a business should be forced to provide something that is largely for recreational behavior, if it goes against their religious beliefs."

"Yea, that’s right, that’s right," Lee responded.

So I guess they both agree employee provided health insurance should not also cover Viagra and vasectomies, right?   Or is "consequence free" man sex somehow different from female sex?  And what is the difference, since the last time I checked, it takes two parties to have sex.  Is the consequence of sex still really all on the women?  Are we still blaming Eve?

Really?

The More Things Change, Dept.

When George Wallace declared "Segregation now; segregation tomorrow, segregation forever!", no white church that I know of in Alabama rose up to oppose his statements as being in violation of their religious beliefs.

Indeed, if Dr. Martin Luther King's Letter from Birmingham Jail is accurate, the churches in Alabama mostly rose up to oppose the actions of Dr. King and the civil rights marchers.

So this is a curious request:

Just one day after the Supreme Court’s decision in Burwell v. Hobby Lobby Stores, Inc., 14 faith leaders have written a letter to President Obama, asking him to include a religious exemption in his planned executive order barring hiring discrimination based on sexual orientation by federal contractors.

If you were to change that exemption from sexual orientation to race, no one today would put their hand to it.  Oh, they might have done in 1964; but not 50 years later.

What a difference a half-century makes.....

Welcome to the Monkeyhouse

The value of the internet is that you can get information like this (originally on Religion Dispatches, where the comments were much less illiterate and ignorant, although they are now closed) or a trove of information like Early Christian Writings.

But the comments at that Salon placement of an otherwise interesting and scholarly article (well, not in the sense it deserves publication in a journal of scholarship, but the data and reasoning are perfectly sound) will convince you that most of the people on the internet are monkeys flinging poo; because they don't know what else to do.  They certainly don't know how to respond to that article for what it contains.

It's depressing.  Really.  When I reflect on the expectations that television would prove a tool for education, v. what it has become, I'm not really surprised.

But still; it's depressing.

Really.

Mr. Plow will gladly take your money....

Mr. Plow will gladly take your money while still refusing to shovel your driveway.

NTodd (no surprise) is right, this is important:

Your employer does not receive any tax benefits for compensating you with Hummel figurines or automobiles instead of wages. It does, however, get tax benefits for compensating you with health insurance instead of wages. (It would be nice if health insurance were decoupled from employment entirely, but needless to say this isn’t the alternative preferred by conservatives like McArdle.) Because of this, the insurance provided in lieu of wages actually has to cover things. After the ACA was enacted, contraception for women became one of those things. Women compensated by employers, in other words, have a statutory right to have contraception covered if they choose to use it. This is not, as McArdle suggests, a “side payment.” It’s part of an employee’s compensation package. What Hobby Lobby wants is to pocket the tax benefits for compensating their employees in health insurance but not to provide the full benefits to their female employees. (Mr. Plow remains very influential among contemporary Republicans.)

So, in other words, critics of the decision are correct to note that yesterday’s opinion denies employees something they’re entitled to.

This is a problem lawyers grapple with all the time (and not always successfully):  the entirety of society and the laws which create it and support it and benefit it, are a complex web:  touch any one strand, and you tremble the whole.  This is why courts are advised to be circumspect and rule only on the facts before them; because the consequences of dramatic shifts in law (Corporations have religious rights!) can have consequences not even contemplated by the Court in its opinion (yes, what Ginsburg was warning against).

So, here, I'm left wondering what "religious principle" allows the five owners of Hobby Lobby to trump the property interests of their some 3000 employees, and decide there are certain things they are no longer entitled to as compensation (which wasn't a problem until it was a problem), even as they keep the tax benefits of providing compensation they are withholding.  I understand the First Amendment (which doesn't apply here) provides for freedom of religion; but doesn't that freedom end at my nose?  Especially since Hobby Lobby is a business, not an eleemosynary institution.  I understand excluding churches and even church-related operations from this provision of law; but one definition of those churches which supposedly distinguishes them from for-profit corporations is that designation:  "For-profit."

Of course, now the Court has waved away that distinction, so what distinction is left?  I wonder if that won't become a pertinent question.

Until it does, isn't the immediate question:  have the employees earned this compensation, over the question:  what form do my morals allow this compensation to take?

Cheer up, it could be worse!

Because:  why not?

No.  Burwell v. Hobby Lobby did not shift the tectonic plates of America, nor shatter the foundations of religion.

Get some perspective, people.

The court noted that there are ways to provide contraceptive coverage that allow employers to protect their delicate monies (it's money that matters!) from the corruption of buying such a sinful thing as certain contraceptive products (Hobby Lobby didn't object to contraceptives in general, just to four its owners completely misunderstand.  But hey, that's religious belief!  Right?  That sound you hear is Aquinas, spinning in his grave....).

It does privilege certain religious beliefs above others; and that's the problem with the ruling.  But it doesn't, by itself, "hurt" religious believers, especially Christians who might, for a variety of reasons, be critical of the ruling (I agree with the statement at TP that a "business" cannot be "Christian," any more than a nation can.  It's a pity Alito was not a student of Reinhold Niebuhr, I suppose.)

And as long as I'm picking on reactions to this holding, Eric Posner is just dead wrong.  Justice Ginsburg's dissent is a better response to him than anything I can write, though, so I'll leave Posner at that.  He misreads the dissent so badly I suspect he got the Cliff Notes version of it, rather than read the original.

This is, in the end, a bad interpretation of a bad statute.  It can be fixed, provided we get a Congress ready, willing, and able to do so.  All that needs to be done is to clarify the definition of "person" in RFRA.  Of course, as of today Congress isn't even ready, willing, and able to respond to the crisis along our Mexican border, so I hold no hope at all they will respond to this, except to cheer it in their ignorance.

Besides, consider the holding and the dicta quoted from Alito's opinion in the post below.  Corporations enjoy the legal fiction of not being their owners, for tax as well as liability purposes.  "Pierce" that "corporate veil," as the lawyers say, and the owners are suddenly liable for what that corporation has done.  This often happens with closely held corporations, never with publicly owned ones (or almost never).  But this opinion says closely-held corporations aren't corporations at all, but the owners.  And if that opinion can be applied to publicly held corporations (and why not, the dissent says?  Because Alito says you shouldn't?), then corporations cease to exist.

There will probably be a great deal more to this opinion than Alito and the majority meant there to be.  If you doubt it, consider how many courts have used Scalia's dissent to hold that there is no justification for states to refuse to recognize same-sex marriages.

So, be careful what you ask for.  As things now stand, Hobby Lobby no longer exists as a corporation; it is so identified, by this opinion, with the personal interests of its owners that it might as well be a partnership.  It is dubious how many closely held corporations, like Dell or Whole Foods or Koch Industries, are going to identify with the religious beliefs, if any, of their owners; but it is clear from this opinion that any distinction between the owners and their corporation, is an easily erasable one, if not entirely non-existent now.

And that may be the real impact of this decision.

Meanwhile, back with the 1%

I dunno; because this opinion belongs in a comic book?

By now tout le monde knows that the Supremes have ruled in Burwell (nee Sebelius) v. Hobby Lobby, and the opinion stinks.

I agree with the dissent, but I hold out two carrots of hope.  One, a comment at the SCOTUSBLOG live blog of the opinion, which mentioned that Obama can make an administrative change to accommodate the Court's claim that the government can pay for contraceptive coverage for closely-held corporations which object to such coverage on religious grounds.  Whether this is right or not, I don't know; and I can't now find that liveblog anymore, so maybe I'm just crazy.

Second:  this opinion is based on RFRA, not on the 1st Amendment; and it seems to have nothing to do with Citizens United or corporations being people, and everything to do with a misreading of the Dictionary Act and RFRA, which misreading the dissent takes apart (and I leave it to those interested to read the dissent, which is worth reading even if it is written for lawyers).

As the dissent point out, the complainants actually have no Constitutional argument; that argument is precluded by Employment Div. v. Smith.  Therefore they had to bring a statutory argument, which is why they relied on RFRA.

My hope based on this second fact: that RFRA was passed in response to Employment Div. v. Smith (as the dissent helpfully points out); and insofar as the Supremes have misread RFRA (a bad statute in any case, IMHO), it can amend RFRA to correct the Court's error (a simple change would be to exclude corporations from the statute's coverage by clarifying that only "natural persons" have a protection for their "free exercise of religion.")  Again, the dissent does a thorough job of eviscerating the majority opinion on this point.

This is, in other words, soluble without a Constitutional Amendment; whether it can be corrected in the current political climate, is another matter.  But at least the White House is willing to try....

Adding:  I've found what I think is the most offensive language in the majority opinion, a phrase that echoes Mitt Romney's "Corporations are people, too, my friend!"  And frankly, given the history of corporate law, it's a been breathtaking in its dissolution of the "corporate veil:"

Corporations, "separate and apart from" the human beings who own, run, and are employed by them,  cannot do anything at all.

But the corporation is merely the people who own it; it is not the employees who work for it, who must submit to the religious opinions of the owners; at least until the government steps in and provides for them what the owners find unconscionable to provide on their own.

The Thing Stands Mute

The problem here is, you have to do extensive reading.

I don't mean that as a "problem" which is too great a burden; I just mean it's a cheat, to use hyperlinks to direct you to outside reading, and then expect you to return and read a commentary on what you've just read.  But when I read this transcript the first time through, my first impulse was to annotate large sections of it for response.  I come by it via the Thought Criminal, who does a nice job of summing up who is there:  Michael Ruse, a philosopher of science specializing, as he says, in biology; and Jim Bradley, an emeritus professor at Calvin College, a mathematician who admits to a religious conversion experience.  I was not as familiar with Ruse as TC is, but I found this longer essay by him which was interesting but not as incisive as I might have wished.  Still, there are two choices in this kind of matter:  don the apparel and speak in the vocabulary of the professional philosopher, or write for a popular audience and actually be understood.  William Tsutsui, an economist known as "Dr. Godzilla" for his enthusiasm for the fictional monster, mentioned yesterday to NPR that his family members are basically the ones who've read his academic tomes, but millions pay attention to his use of Godzilla and his thoughts about the creature.  Mr. Ruse faces the same problem, and his essay is not published in an academic journal (which would have to stoop to consider the arguments of Richard Dawkins on God and faith, so there's that, too.)

As I say, fairness should require that I post at least excerpts of the transcript and the essay, to support my argument.  It's something I teach my composition students every semester; still, I'm not going to do it now.

For one thing, I'll end up belaboring arguments I've made many times by now, and who wants to suffer through an old man's inability to remember what he said last year, or even last week, or his willingness to say it all again?  For another thing, it is as much what is not said at these two links that I am interested in.  Ruse is right, the "Humanism" championed by Dawkins and the other New Atheists is put forward with a religious fervor that makes it a replacement religion; and he marshals examples I was unaware of in support of his thesis.  I'm interested in the sociological reasons for that, a topic he barely touches on and he never mentions sociology in his analysis  It's that lacuna that is most interesting to me.

In other words, it's the dogs not barking in these discussions that I'm interested in.  Those dogs aren't barking because they know their masters and fall silent in the night, but because they are not present at all.  Maybe the analogy is that some groups are cats in this discussion, and are never part of the pack in the first place.  So it isn't the dogs that don't bark; it's the dogs that aren't even there.

I read the entire transcript at On Being longing for a theologian to be a part of the discussion.  Maybe that would create too great a risk of jargon, of a conversation that only dogs and philosophers could hear, but what I got instead as a philosopher trying to keep his comments comprehensible, and a mathematician trying to defend a Sunday school version of Christianity in the presence of a philosopher of science.  And both were talking about theology with no more knowledge of the subject than I have of statistics or the human genome.

Perhaps for balance next time we could have a high school science teacher discuss religion with a theologian.....

There is more to "religion" than popularized ideas about Christianity, just as there is more to Islam than the "Islamic Caliphate" announced this weekend by ISIS.  Somehow I don't think the world's 1.8 billion Muslims, the majority of whom live in Asia, are going to feel themselves in thrall to this "Islamic Caliphate" any time soon, though I expect lots of words spilled in America over this new Muslim threat and hegemony.  No more then, does even kindly Jim Bradley speak for Christianity in his attempts to reconcile the nature of God (the subject of theology) to the nature of the world as understood scientifically and more particularly through certain fields of mathematics.  Michael Ruse gets off a nicely self-deprecating joke about philosophers in a dark room looking for a black hat that isn't there, and theologians being the ones who find the hat (which either means they are delusional, or there is something there only theology can grasp); but at no point in the discussion do either of them even make a clear distinction between science and the philosophy of science (there is a mention of it) which would clarify theory from practice, a distinction as important to the lay believer in the pew and the theologian.  Indeed, science can have a philosophy, but theology can, apparently, only be what Sunday school teaches:  Jesus loves me, this I know, for the Bible tells me so.

That's about as theological and spiritual as the discussion gets.  And the philosopher's discussion of religion and science in his essay is even emptier of content.

Which again, I suppose, is supposed to be acceptable because these are public, "popular" fora, not  academic ones.  Nor are they necessarily religious ones, although by today's standards it is if only because religion is mentioned but not disparagingly.  The only discussions of religion and atheism I can come up with are "popular" ones like the debate between Dawkins and Rowan Williams that Mr. Ruse mentions in his essay.  I find such discussions about as useful as the debate between the late Christopher Hitchen and Chris Hedges.  It was the Romans who revered rhetoric, because they appreciated the power of panem et circenses.  The Greeks were rightly more dubious of the power of the well-turned phrase that charmed the hoi polloi but did not lead to wisdom.  If Socrates got one thing right, it was understanding that the road to wisdom began with understanding that everything you know is wrong. Rhetoric that wins debates rests on appealing to the audience's desire not to learn anything else, at all, except how wise they already are.

Of course, there's a reason serious theologians and religious thinkers don't stoop to engage the likes of Richard Dawkins, and it has to do with the sage advice against wrestling with pigs.

I mentioned sociology above, not because I'm trained in sociology, but because I was taught some of its principles and read some texts in sociology in seminary.  One of the common jibes against Christianity (Ruse mentions it in his essay) is the distinction made among believers:  Is a Mormon a Christian?, the usual formulation goes.

Well, is a sociologist a scientist? Is an anthropologist? Richard Dawkins makes much of behavior and genetics; has he studied psychology, sociology, or anthropology, all of which are fields that attempt the scientific study of behavior.  Dawkins refuses to make himself conversant in the ideas of theology, his bete noir; but Dom Crossan, the Biblical scholar, is conversant in both the fields of anthropology and archaeology, and brings both to bear in his studies of the life and times of Jesus of Nazareth and Paul of Tarsus, as well as in scriptural studies.  Professor Dawkins can't be bothered with such scrupulous scholarship; he prefers the popular attention of selfish genes and God delusions.

Why is it that a seminary graduate is more conversant with terms from sociology than a philosopher of science?  Why is it no one except seminarians and their professors recognize the importance of sociology in this discussion of human behavior?  Why do so many "scientists" and even philosophers of science act and speak as if science were limited to only the most popular fields of the day (in the 19th century it was chemistry; in the early 20th century it was nuclear physics, which gave way to genetics, which has given way to biology in general, each of which was/is, in its time, the standard by which "truth" was/is judged.  And yet atheists accuse believers of being unreliable as to the basis for the "truth" of their assertions.....)

Even as we need more cross-disciplinary discussions, we have fewer and fewer of them.  C.P. Snow lamented the rise of "two cultures," but there is really only one culture now, and there only has been the one since the 19th century.  The humanities and the liberal arts (which include theology and philosophy) have never really had a chance in the face of rampant empiricism and its insistence that "truth" is based on chemistry; or physics; or genetics; or biology; or computer science; or....

I think the true lament is that we grow narrower and narrower, insisting not that we can see the world in a grain of sand, but that the grain of sand IS the world.

Stop that world; I want to get off.

The Thing Speaks for Itself

Never argue with a fool....

Katrina Van den Heuvel v. Bill Kristol:

“A Million Iraqis have been displaced," Heuvel said. "What we have done to that country is a crime.” 

“What we have done to that country?” Kristol hit back. “President Bush made mistakes, he was punished for those mistakes electorally as he should have been in 2006, and perhaps in 2008. He also had the courage to order the surge in 2007, which made up for those mistakes, and left things peaceful.”

Yes, punishment has been handed out.  What more could we expect?

And I still stand by the Lancet study that at least 655,000, or 2.5% of the population of Iraq, was killed due to our invasion and subsequent war.

Can't make an omelet without breaking a few eggs, right, Bill?  Besides, Bush was punished at the polls for that; twice.

I'll retire to Bedlam.

"Where's my hasenpfeffer?!"

I grew up on Looney Tunes.  Born 10 years after the last of the best of them were made, mostly what I got from them were cultural references to Hollywood and popular music and World War II that played out before me like a time capsule.  I remember there was a lot of violence in them, but we didn't call it violence then, we called it "cartoons."

I learned what anvils were; and shotguns; TNT and gremlins; Hollywood tag lines from the '40's and even a song debuted by Doris Day in 1947 ("It's Magic.")

I even remember being dropped off at a movie theater for kids in a shopping mall in Dallas, a small room with concrete floors and wooden benches that ran cartoons and Li'l Rascals shorts on a continuous loop from a movie projector about 20 feet away from the screen.  I mean, I grew up saturated with that stuff (there's no small amount of "violence" in the Li'l Rascals, either.)

Now Slate tells me we wouldn't tolerate that level of violence in cartoons today.  Perhaps not.  It has all moved to adult fare.  As much as I liked No Country for Old Men and admired the film made of it, the violence in it is the violence of a cartoon.  The villain in the story, a man more sociopathic and endowed with superhuman powers than any traditional version of Satan (or than Milton's supreme version, for that matter), engages in violence that is rivaled only by Bugs Bunny.  It is absurd violence; it is outrageous violence; because like a cartoon, it is violence without consequence.  It is the kind of violence which would chill the most hardened community into quaking terror, that would be blared across local TV news and certainly get the attention of an entire state.  And yet, in the story, nobody seems to know its going on, even when it happens in motel rooms and on city streets.  The violence never produces community outrage, it just produces the lone presence of Tommy Lee Jones.

No, the characters don't jump up and reanimate themselves, as the characters do in cartoons, but they might as well.  Death seems to matter only to the few characters who actually have names in the film.  The rest of the world might just as well have been raptured, leaving the audience in hell on earth.

Stanley Kubrick, I now learn, filmed McCarthy's Blood Meridian just before the director died.  Apparently it's violent enough to make Quentin Tarantino reconsider watching it (and speaking of a director who engages in cartoon violence....).  It is certainly not a movie for children (is any Kubrick movie?).  So clearly what has happened is we've removed the cartoon violence for our children (even the most action-oriented superhero cartoons are anodyne fare compared to a Looney Tunes offering), but we've kept it for ourselves.

Which is kinda funny, really.

The men who made the Looney Tunes cartoons that are the most famous, said they were mostly trying to entertain themselves.  Is that how we explain our movies now, even as we make sure our cartoons teach our children more approved lessons?

Do as I say, not as I do.  Is that the basis for our relationship to children in our culture, now?

O, Freedom

I was 9 years old during the Summer of Freedom in Mississippi.  I might have learned the mnemonic to spell the state's name by then ("M-I-crooked letter-crooked letter-I-crooked letter crooked letter-I-humpback humpback-I"), but I probably connected it to the river, not the state.  I couldn't, in other words, have found Mississippi on a map.

I do remember that the greatest underlying fear of my childhood was violence.  Not violence from criminals, as I saw on TV every night (or "secret agents"), but from Southern rednecks (another term I didn't learn until I was older than 9).  I still remember a vague, insistent fear of violence in rural settings, on back roads, in the "wrong part of town," and the violence was always connected to white men.  I never really feared black men; I had a fear of white men.

A completely irrational fear, based on nothing at all.  Nothing tangible, anyway.  Vietnam was not yet on the nightly news every evening  The death counts and body bags and film of men firing automatic weapons in the jungle somewhere were not yet daily fare.  But I'm pretty sure my fear was already implanted before that, and it had a locus:  it was white men; it was Southern white men.

The kind of people I knew, though I didn't realize how much was not like them until the race riot at my high school.  The kind of people I lived around daily, who never did me a moment's harm; never made a threat to me; never so much as raised their voices to me.  Still, I had an undercurrent of fear, and it was attached to the violence possible from Southern men.

I finally figured out where that fear came from, last night, watching PBS.  Watching the old news reels, the old TV clips, listening to the descriptions of violence, I remembered the very real violence that seemed to be all around me in my childhood.  I remembered the tension, even though I didn't live in Mississippi or in any place touched by protests or changes in the law until 1970, when the public schools I attended were finally integrated.  Mostly, I found the source of my fear, a fear I'd long ago forgotten, but which came back like a demanding memory as I watched history unfold again.

Perhaps we would do well to recall the violence attendant upon the efforts to register blacks to vote in Mississippi.  Registration before the county clerk required an essay exam on the Mississippi constitution, one designed for blacks to fail, one they would fail because the white county clerk said so, because in Mississippi that county clerk's word was law on the matter.  Lists of those who had tried to register would run in local newspapers, simply to intimidate them into not trying again.  Volunteers during Freedom Summer bypassed the clerks by taking forms to blacks and returning the forms en masse, with no way for the clerk to determine who on the form was white, who was black.

And today, our Jubilee having been declared by the Supreme Court, states once again challenge voting registration by private groups.  They have learned from Mississippi 50 years ago.  Have we?

Three volunteers died that summer; it was violence meant to intimidate, though I'm sure it was more immediately violence against "outsiders."  It was people in Mississippi upset that their status quo was being challenged.  It was also, in so many ways, a huge mistake.  Murder is never justified, but the deaths of those three spurred people across Mississippi, especially the African Americans, to support the effort to register voters, to rise up, to not take it anymore.

People died for the right to vote; and it was within my lifetime.  It wasn't near to me or known to me at the time, but I felt the effects of it, I still carry memories of the fear of it.  I learned in my bones what a fearsome place the world could be, even though it never touched me directly.  I learned that such things must not be accepted or tacitly approved or ignored.  I daresay I learned that lesson better than Chief Justice John Roberts did.  I doubt he's learned that lesson at all.

Equity and equality under the law and equal access to all the rights of citizenship are the birthright of all Americans.  We still haven't lived that out, though we praise ourselves thinking we have always done so.  People died for that simple idea, because the evil truth prevails that people don't matter, only ideas and things matter.  We cannot destroy that evil, we can only oppose it, unflinchingly, with open eyes and open hearts, to the end of our days.

We can only insist that ideas don't matter, and things don't matter, until first people matter.  It is a simple thing:  when people matter, ideas and things take their right relationship with us.  When people matter, all things shall be well, and all manner of thing shall be well.

And the fire and the rose will be one.

The Wild Goose Chase

So Bill Maher talked to Jon Stewart last night (I was going to say "betrayed his stupidity again," but that would tip my hand too early).  I didn't catch it all (I seldom watch Jon's interviews), but I did tune in just in time to hear Maher lament that an avowed atheist can't win a public election in America (well, probably not for federal office, but in all of America?  I doubt it.) and that Atheists were the largest minority group in the country.

Well, I guess if you mean 2.4% of the population is the largest possible grouping of like-minded people in the country, you could be right.

I'm relying on that Pew post for my information here, because it seems the most credible source of information.  For one thing, as Pew notes:

Some adults who describe themselves as atheists also say they believe in God or a universal spirit, according to Pew Research Center surveys. At the same time, some people who identify with a religion (e.g., say they are Protestant, Catholic or Jewish) say they do not believe in God.

And dig into the numbers in that report:  no small number of self-identified atheists either believe in the existence of God, or consider spirituality to be harmonious with their atheism.  So we could first argue over definitions, before we get down to arguing over how many atheists there are.  Maybe we could start a "No true Scotsman" argument for atheists and see how that goes.  (There seems to be a lively example of this in the comments at Pew, but I didn't go to deeply into them there.)  But if we start whittling away "true atheists" from those who betray some acceptance of spirituality, the percentage of the population who are atheists is only going to go down.

On the other hand, they already have churches; why deny them the other pleasures of religious belief?

Maher likes to bring the stupid when it comes to discussions of religion, so this really didn't surprise me.  I am amused by his self-satisfied claim that Obama is "a drop-dead atheist."  Presumably that's based on the same discernment displayed by Sam Harris as to "true" and "false" Christians.  Either way, his claim about atheists being a large minority in America is as egregious an example of having your own facts as anything spouted in FauxNews.  I suppose the difference is, Maher is just a comedian, and "The Daily Show" is just a fake news show.

In the end, it really doesn't matter.  As with most issues of facts and figures, your first response should  always be to consider the source.

Where have all the flowers gone?

We are fifty years after "Freedom Summer" in Mississippi this summer.  And the Roberts court has declared, as Charlie Pierce likes to call it, the "Jubilee" when it comes to voting rights.  People died in Mississippi in 1964 and after, to secure voting rights.  The Roberts court has declared all of that of no value or account, and declared we are free of the need to worry about voting rights anymore.

It is 60 years gone since Brown v. Board of Education, still regarded as one of the landmark Supreme Court rulings on par with Marbury v. Madison or Roe v. Wade.  Brown is one of a handful of cases almost everyone knows by name, even if they don't quite know what the holding was.  All they know is, it was right.

That ruling, too, has been gutted by the Court since, and laid to rest by the Roberts court, with the Chief Justice intoning the tautology: "The way to stop discrimination on the basis of race is to stop discriminating on the basis of race."  Of course, Brown didn't try to stop discrimination on the basis of race; it tried to eliminate the heinous practice of separate but equal, which always means separate and unequal.  No matter; 60 years later, Brown is as dead as if it had never been decided.  As Pedro Noguero told Chris Hayes, "We've pretty much come to accept de facto segregation as being the norm."

But we comfort ourselves with knowing the Court did the right thing in 1954, and we live on as a nation under that now hollowed out and meaningless ruling.

This is not to damn the Roberts court, though I have nothing good to say about its rulings.  Much of what that Court has done is merely tip over the rotted trees destroyed by the Berger and Rehnquist courts.  No, the Roberts court is not to blame here.  It is our modern "liberal" faith in the courts that has failed us.

The Warren Court was the aberration, the exception that proves the rule.  Baby Boomers grew up with that court's rulings:  Miranda; Gideon; Brown; the school prayer cases (if I named them, would you know them?); Roe; and the opinions, especially of Justice Douglas, that erected the "wall" between church and state.  The rulings we thought were inviolate, that established the Court as the bulwark between tyranny and the people, between injustice and justice.  Those rulings are crumbling like sand castles as the tide comes in.  4th Amendment cases I learned about in law school 30 years ago are so changed now I don't pretend to know anything about that area of the law.  The 2nd Amendment has been read almost beyond recognition now, and bizarre concepts of constitutional law embodied in Bush v. Gore or the ACA ruling rival Roe v. Wade for shaky legal foundations and rule by judicial fiat.  Even Miranda stands shakily, honored more on TV than in the courtroom.

It is not all doom and gloom; not even the Roberts court has returned us wholesale to the laissez-faire days of the Gilded Age.  But the idea that, once the Court does the right thing, all things shall be well and all manner of thing shall be well, should certainly be dead and buried now under the landslide of history.  60 years later, Brown v. Board of Education is a hollow memorial to an American ideal more honored in the breach than in the keeping.  50 years later, the people who died to bring voting rights to the entire country, to every city and township, mean as little to us as the deaths of soldiers in the war with Mexico in the 19th century.

Long time passing, but it's gone.