USE RELIGION TO FIGHT FOR THE RIGHT TO AN ABORTION

Since forever, the issue of abortion has puzzled me.  I know that it is contentious, to put it mildly.  But I have never heard antiabortionists answer the two big questions which puzzle me:  What is the problem?  And what gives them the right to meddle in another’s decision about a pregnancy?

 

Nothing about the theory or practice of abortion is a matter of domestic stability and well-being or national security.  If my neighbor has liposuction or an appendectomy to remove unwanted fat or a troublesome organ, how am I affected?  If my neighbor has an abortion, does the removal of an unwanted or troublesome zygote, embryo, or fetus affect me?  Shall I lose my home?  Will stock markets crash?  Will China attack Taiwan?

 

Antiabortionists assume their right to meddle because they believe that their religious convictions trump others’ constitutional rights.  By definition, this belief is contrary to a constitutional democracy of a diverse populace with a secular government.  To prevail, these religious autocrats seek to impose their will on all others by resorting to means which necessarily jeopardize this democracy.  Through elected representatives or current candidates, almost all Republicans acting as a party, they are developing and deploying anti-democratic means enabled by this Court to implement their views on this and other issues.

 

Accordingly, antiabortionists, especially the six conservative Catholic or Catholic-raised Supreme Court justices, have gone or are going to extreme lengths to end the Constitutional right to abortion.  Although a majority of Americans approve of abortion in cases of rape, incest, and risks to the woman’s health or life—and some in other or all cases—, a minority presses on to eliminate it as a right under state law or constitution in most or all cases.  In the process, they are making problems where none exists except in their minds.  Hindering, curtailing, or banning abortions has only harmful consequences, some to women, their partners, families, and friends; others to the quality of life of many Americans and possibly fatal to democracy.

 

The foundation of the antiabortion movement is reactionary religions which reject the modern world, science, dynamic change, and democracy.  It is no coincidence that, in mid 19^th century, the rise of modern medicine paralleled and may have urged two developments in religious doctrine and the law.  One was a shift in Catholic doctrine.  Until then, it followed Thomas Aquinas’s opinion that the unborn acquires a soul at “ensoulment,” or quickening (16 to 20 weeks into pregnancy).  Since then, it has been that the unborn acquires a soul at conception.  The other was the criminalization of abortion.  In all states, most restrictively in states with large Catholic populations, abortion, with varying exceptions for cases of rape, incest, or risks to the woman’s health of life, became illegal.

 

It is no coincidence that belief in the moment of conception as the beginning of life or personhood is the only belief which Justice Samuel Alito mentions in his opinion rationalizing the Court’s reversal of Roe v. Wade and Planned Parenthood v. Casey.  His exclusive mention of this belief points the motive for its decision: by denying that a right to an abortion is a Constitutional right, he supports the Catholic position that abortion murders a soul, and enables states to deny what the Court cannot.  In short, the Court’s decision imposes a religious doctrine dressed in judicial robes.

 

Nor is it a coincidence that this Court has adopted a reactionary judicial philosophy denoted as “originalism” which rationalizes an approach reverting to the past as the touchstone of judicial decisions.  Thus, it purports to interpret the Constitution as contemporaries would have understood it.  It presumes that it can ascertain the precise meaning of the text by invoking interpretations of other contemporary documents.  It posits that, if the text does not mention a right, it is not a Constitutional right.  Thus, unmentioned things like freedom, privacy, marriage, divorce, schools, hospitals, and many lesser things, mostly social, economic, and political arrangements inconceivable in 1787, lack an explicit Constitutional reference.  One of those things is abortion.

 

The fraudulence and falsity of the Court’s opinion in Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization must be understood in order to show its vulnerabilities to attack in an effort to restore the right to an abortion as a Constitutional right.

 

The first vulnerability is Alito’s argument from the silence of the Constitution on abortion: a right not mentioned in the Constitution is not a Constitutional right.  But its silence is not a denial of rights.  Two amendments in the Bill of Rights explicitly provide for just such unmentioned rights.  The Tenth Amendment—“The powers not delegated to the United States by the Constitution, nor prohibited by it to the States, are reserved to the States respectively, or to the people”—implies unnamed powers.  Closer to the issue of abortion, the Ninth Amendment—“The enumeration in the Constitution, of certain rights, shall not be construed to deny or disparage others retained by the people”—implies unnamed rights.  The Constitution does not imply that these unnamed powers or rights are limited to those which existed in 1787.

 

The second vulnerability is Alito’s fallback argument that any unmentioned power or right must have deep roots in American history, which the Court reads selectively to support its preferences.  His argument is hypocritical pontification for, most suspiciously, Alito omitted the history of abortion as an unqualified right existing in 1787 and continuing until about four score and seven years later, or about 1865; and as a qualified right thereafter.  In the 245 years after 1620, society tolerated but disapproved of abortion; it had no laws controlling or criminalizing it.  From 1865 to 1973, abortions were legal in some cases but not others in all states but one (PA) in which they were illegal in all cases.  Though unmentioned in the Constitution, abortion was common knowledge and practice in days of yore as an assumed right in 1787 and for decades thereafter.  History does not lie; on this issue, Alito lies by omission.

 

Vulnerable as its decision is, the Court is likely to double-down on other issues—same-sex marriage or sexual-relations, contraception, and inter-racial marriage—for the same motive, in similar judicial trappings, with biased interpretations of documents and biased selection or rejection of historical facts.  Extreme as this court is, it seems poised to render decisions which reinterpret the provisions of the Fourteenth Amendment to accord with its religious and associated conservative political predispositions.  Thus, some justices have stated doubts that this amendment implies substantive due process rights.  Such doubts are a-textual; section one reads: 

 

All persons born or naturalized in the United States and subject to the jurisdiction thereof, are citizens of the United States and of the State wherein they reside.  No state shall make or enforce any law which shall abridge the privileges or immunities of citizens of the United States; nor shall any State deprive any person of life, liberty, or property, without due process of law; nor deny to any person within its jurisdiction the equal protection of the laws.

 

In words which partly echo those of the Declaration of Independence, the Constitution asserts substantive as well as procedural rights.

 

On the issue of abortion, the Court’s third vulnerability is its insistence on and adherence to close textual reading, for it encounters trouble in the first three words of this amendment: “All persons born.”  Although adopted in 1868, at a time of agitation about abortion, the words preclude pre-natal life.  The only “persons” recognized as citizens with rights—“privileges and immunities”—are those “born” here or, obviously, elsewhere and later “naturalized” here.  A close textual reading makes clear that the Fourteenth Amendment explicitly precludes the idea that life or personhood begins before birth, not to mention at conception.

 

The Court’s greatest vulnerability and its most discrediting position is its biased inconsistency about the Constitution in matters of religion.  The first prohibitions of the First Amendment assert, “Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof.”  This Court selectively perceives infringements of religious expression.  It saw one when a Christian coach was punished for kneeling on an athletic field and reciting prayers in compulsory huddles, regardless of the religious convictions of his players.  It did not see one in Alito’s opinion stating only the Catholic and fundamentalist definition of the beginning of life at conception and ignoring the many different religious definitions of many Christians, most Muslims, and all Jews who believe that life begins at quickening or breach.  The Court, prejudiced against religious beliefs different from Catholic beliefs, has transformed itself into “an establishment of religion,” a Catholic one.  (Justice Harry Blackmun’s opinion was comprehensively insensitive to religious beliefs about when life begins; he dismissed them in favor of science and a stipulated legal trimestering of gestation.)

 

Now what?  What can be done?  Its ruling has shown the Court untethered from the text of the Constitution and from Court precedents.  It is likely to become increasingly dogmatic in congruency with Catholic desires to undo the modern state by starting with laws mainly concerned with sex and gender issues so important to many in Catholic and fundamentalist churches.

 

My advice is simple.  First, advocates of a woman’s Constitutional right to an abortion should de-emphasize or abandon a political position—my body, my choice—which divides opinion and reduces support.  Then they should embrace the First Amendment, which unites people because it prioritizes religious freedom which is both popular and indispensable to Constitutional democracy.  They should proclaim their fight for religious freedom, in the knowledge that the majority of Americans are neither Catholic nor fundamentalist, and do not want a minority to infringe upon their religious beliefs and practices.

 

Thus ready, they should attack the Court for betraying its obligation to defend the Constitution by ignoring the diversity of religious beliefs and practices about abortion.  They should attack the Court for its hypocrisy in feigning fidelity to the law as it fashions decisions to serve the Catholic faith.  They should attack the Court’s hypocrisy by exposing in lower courts its legal fictions and legal frauds.  They should challenge state restrictions on abortion on religious grounds by appealing to state and federal constitutions protecting religious freedom.

 

As the struggle for abortion rights based on religious rights succeeds, it may empower efforts to reform other Republican infringements on democratic values and practices which have been aggravated by antiabortionists on and off the Court.

THE FUTILITY OF POLICE REFORM IN LAS CRUCES

Recent police killings and judicial abominations have spurred the formation of a number of groups, pre-existing or impromptu, to address police reform in Las Cruces.  As I understand it, these groups include CAFé, Progressive Voters Alliance, Occupy, and, perhaps under the banner of the NAACP, a group of individuals including Bobbie Greene, Peter Goodman, and Earl Nissen, which I was invited to join but declined.

 

I attended one meeting each of two of these groups.  The unfolding of one meeting led me to write a letter of withdrawal as soon as I got home.  I wrote as follows:

 

I shall withdraw from [your organization’s] police reform effort.  I should explain why.  Given my different approach to problems of public policy, I think that I would interfere with your effort, which I nevertheless respect.  There are many ways to skin a cat, but yours is not mine, as mine is not yours.

 

I think that police reform requires some agreement on what the problems are and what the solutions are.  I doubt that everyone will or even can agree on them.  In a democracy, a majority, not a unity, decides.  To me, trying to reach consensus based on everyone understanding everyone else is not likely to be a productive way to go.

 

Whatever may be said about the police perspective on their performance, they are hired, trained, deployed, and paid as public servants.  So how they perform or do not perform on duty, not whether they are fine people or not off-duty, is what needs to be addressed.  Some of what they do on the job is constructive and non-controversial, but this work does not give rise to complaints or motivate the desire for police reform.  The complaints arise in areas of public safety—traffic stops, domestic disputes, disturbed individuals, drug raids, etc., not to mention gratuitous insult and abuse—and it is the obligation of the police to understand and respond appropriately in those areas.  It is not citizens who must understand the police; it is police who must understand citizens.  When police ask for understanding they are asking for extenuation or making excuses.

 

What do I need to understand about the Valenzuela chokehold or the Baca shooting that would change my mind about the appropriateness of the officers' conduct?  What do I need to know about an officer whom I flagged down who asked for my license and registration, and called in to records, before he said anything else?  What do I need to know about an officer who gives me five false code violations?  That his wife had a headache?  That he was constipated?

 

When I was in Georgia in the summer of 1964, I and a few friends, some white, some black, integrated two restaurants.  We did not know whether the police would be called or not.  If they had been called, I very much doubt that we would or even could have had an understanding and agreeable discussion to resolve the issue.  At about the same time, across the river in Alabama [Mississippi], three young men, two white (contemporary Cornellians of mine) and one black, registering voters were killed with police assistance.  So my experience is that cum-ba-ya or let's-all-get-together does not get much done.

 

Which is not to say that I deprecate what you are trying to do, only that what you are trying to do is not my style of engaging issues like police reform.

 

The third paragraph of this letter says almost all: my emphasis on problems versus theirs on decision-making processes—on substance versus style.

 

But the biggest problem facing such well-meaning individuals in or out of groups will be the interwoven opposition of the powers-that-be.  The Mayor, who shows himself increasing hostile to the down-and-out in need of social services and always militantly ultra-supportive of the police.  The members of City Council, who have little or no knowledge of government, policy development and implementation, and, most of all, doubtful integrity and dubious priorities.  Johanna Bencomo, who was for police reform, particularly a citizen review board, until the Mayor berated her for not respecting the police and she, too unliberated to defend herself—how dare you speak to me in that fashion, Mr. Mayor?—immediately abandoned her position and apologized that she, too, loves the police; and is trying to get back to the head of the line on police reform, where the microphone is.  Kasandra Gandara, who colludes with the City Attorney, Jennifer Vega[-Brown?], who will manipulate her puppets, including City Manager Ifo Pili and Chief of Police, Miguel Dominguez, to find ways to say “yes, yes” and mean “no, no.”

 

I am not unduly harsh.  These city officials do not want citizen participation in matters related to public safety.  The city government’s webpage lists one standing committee on this topic: the “Public Safety Select Committee …  shall be comprised of no more than three City Councilors [currently, Miyagishima, Gandara, and Abeyta], the City Manager or their designee, the LCPD Chief of Police, the LCFD Chief, The City Attorney, City staff designated by the City manager as needed and additional subject matter experts requested by the Committee as needed.”  No citizens wanted.  My suggestion: inclusion of a matching number of citizens on the Public Safety Select Committee selected by CAFé, PVA, and NAACP, and one each by the four non-member Councilors.

 

In these circumstances, short of revolution, a citizen review board is a virtual impossibility; short of transformation, even minor changes are highly improbable.  Any adopted will be quietly allowed to lapse without enforcement.  Goodman asked me for suggestions for smaller steps than a citizen review board, and I gave them;  I also wrote, “No matter what the policy or procedure, accountability depends on the honesty and truthfulness not only of those being held accountable, but also of those holding others accountable.”  As my experience with the LCPD about five phony charges demonstrates, honesty is in short supply on both sides of accountability as well as on the sidelines.

 

Reference my title: I hope that I am very, very wrong.

ABOVE ALL NOTIONS IS HUMANITY

[Introductory note: My blog today is a sermon given by my younger step-daughter, Claire Dietrich Ranna, at Christ Episcopal Church in Los Altos, CA.  She delivered it Saturday night at Congregation Beth Am during an interfaith liturgy marking the end of Roe v. Wade.  It has no title; I offer one which some of you may recognize as my play on Goldwyn Smith's “above all nations is humanity.”]

Many years ago, when my now husband and I were a new couple having a heated disagreement, he said, “You know, Claire, you can either choose to be right or to be kind.” You can probably guess why he said this, and it wasn’t because I’d just finished being excessively kind. Thankfully, I was able to take this feedback as he intended and not get all defensive and grouchy. I thought a lot over the next few days about how great “being right” can feel, even when what I feel “right” about is entirely subjective, a matter of my own opinion and expectations: the swell in my chest, the pride, the righteousness, the – ugh, I hated to admit it – sense of superiority. I noticed that when this less than lovely impulse came up in me, I tended to see the person I was in conflict with as slightly less human, their opinions slightly less complex and nuanced than my own. I tended to reduce them to an issue they were wrong about. When I chose to be right, I tended to see the other as wrong.

I was reminded of this recently while listening to a podcast featuring the Archbishop of Canterbury, the head of the worldwide Anglican Communion, of which the Episcopal Church is a part. The Most. Rev. Justin Welby, while talking about the grief he felt after the death of his young daughter many years earlier, noted that in matters of human suffering, theological responses tend to be pastorally inadequate, and pastoral ones tend to be theologically inadequate. In other words, even our most cogent and well-crafted ideas about complex human experiences will generally leave people going through said difficult experiences cold. What we all need in the wake of loss, heartbreak, betrayal, or disappointment, is not someone who clings to being right but someone who is willing to empathize with our experience and respond with kindness. Someone willing to wade into the murky waters of not knowing, not having it all figured out, because sometimes when it all falls apart nothing really does make sense. Someone who is willing to meet us where we are and to ask what we need, not tell us what to do.

There’s so much about the overturning of Roe v Wade that has shocked and disturbed me: the extremity of the decision, without exceptions for incest, rape, or the safety of the pregnant individual, a position which not long ago would have been considered extreme even by most conservatives; the incredible ignorance of so many in our country around the actual experience and risks of pregnancy, the pervasiveness of sexual violence and coercion in our country, the facts of miscarriage, the inaccessibility in many places of basic sex education, adequate medical care and contraception; the threats now posed to other basic and hard-won rights, such as same-sex marriage; I could go on and on. But I suppose the thing that distresses me most is the shockingly rigidity and lack of compassion amongst those who have sought to ban abortion, and who now celebrate its restriction in many states, most of whom are conservative Christians.

This group has developed a theology not uniformly shared by Episcopalians and members of most other mainline denominations, a theology only popularized with the rise of the Moral Majority – that “life begins at conception” – and decided that being right about this is more important than anything else. More important than understanding the lived experience of people who actually seek abortion, and the vastly different reasons they do. More important than the fundamental rights of girls and women and many trans people to self-determination and bodily autonomy. This group has decided, with dogged determination, that it is better to be right than to be kind.

I can’t exactly imagine why, but if I had to guess, I’d say it’s because kindness costs us something. Kindness costs us that sense of pride, self-righteousness, and superiority that being right all but guarantees. Kindness requires letting go of our sense of superiority. Kindness strips us of the illusion that we are in control of our lives, and that everyone else should somehow be, too. Kindness lifts the veil of privilege and reminds us, “You may not understand this, but perhaps you don’t have to.” Kindness puts us in touch with our own suffering, and the suffering of others, and, dang, it hurts sometimes. Kindness, unlike its limp and often cowering cousin - being nice - is courageous, it is compassionate, it is creative. It is, in the words of author George Saunders, “the only non-delusional response to the human condition.” Kindness knows that abortion access is not primarily a theological issue we can be right about but a pastoral concern that touches on the most personal and sacred aspects of what it is to be human. It is by affirming the goodness of every person’s body, respecting their choices, and honoring their experience that we (in the words of the Baptismal covenant) respect the dignity of every human being.

I cannot comprehend the cruelty, ignorance, and apathy that blinds people to this. Trying to imagine it leaves me feeling cold and hollow. But it is kindness – fierce kindness – the kindness that takes risks and speaks truth and listens well, the kindness that organizes and advocates and gives and votes and shows up, the kindness that brought us together tonight, that revives me and gives me hope for the work that is now before us. I know that there are as many courageous, creative, faithfulness responses to this most daunting moment as there are people present here tonight, and I pray, as we go forth from here, that this God of ours will not only make a way where none seems now to be, but will also keep us fiercely kind as we discover it. Amen.

[Conclusory note: I offer two supplementary comments in response to Claire's sermon.

In all of the commentary which I have read on the Dobbs v. Jackson Women's Health Organization decision and its consequences, I have read almost nothing about its consequences for the woman's partner, children, extended family, or friends.  Omitted are the painful and persistent consequences within the family of the woman's death or her permanent physical, emotional, or mental damage, not to mention the additional burdens--emotional, social, and economic--of an unwanted child.

In this pastoral context, I would urge that a test of a valid Christian theological position is a pastoral criterion: is it kind or loving first and foremost.

From a political point of view, the omission fails to recognize the broader circle of people adversely affected by the consequences of the Supreme Court's decision, and thus to rally them to efforts to restore abortion rights.  Although Alito's opinion is egregiously wrong, it plainly presumed that it was right and cared not that it was not only unkind and unloving, but also callously dismissive of pastoral consequences.]

IF "WE THE PEOPLE" "ARE CREATED EQUAL," WHY DO WE DESPISE EACH OTHER?

An old joke has it that the Lone Ranger and Tonto are pursuing a band of Indian horse thieves into a box canyon.  They see other Indians on the canyon rims; when they turn in their saddles, they see still other Indians behind them and rapidly approaching.  The Lone Ranger turns to Tonto and says, “looks like we’re surrounded, Tonto.”  Tonto responds, “What do you mean ‘we,’ white man?”

 

I told this old joke to introduce a blog years ago, to a different purpose.  I juxtapose it to a new joke, short, sweet, and straight from the Constitution of the United States; it goes, “We the People.”  (I am laughing as I write.).  When were we ever “we”?  From the beginning, we have been anything but “we.”  “We” have always been “us” and “them.”  That is the white man’s story, and a funny-peculiar one it is.

 

In his famous Gettysburg Address, Lincoln intoned mathematical nonsense.  He declared, “Four score and seven years ago our fathers brought forth on this continent, a new nation, conceived in Liberty, and dedicated to the proposition that “all men are created equal.”  When he said this, Lincoln was not only the President, but he also a lawyer; and lawyers are famous for trimming their claims to suit their case.  What the “fathers brought forth,” “conceived” and “dedicated” in July, 1776, was not what they delivered in September, 1787.  The Declaration of Independence states that principle that “all men are created equal”; mathematically, 1.0 = 1.0.  The Constitution states that slaves were to be counted as three-fifths, or 0.6, of a free—translate: white—person (and likely valued at much less).  I know nothing about mathematics in Lincoln’s day, but, in mine, 1.0 ≠ 0.6.  The Constitution’s “we” was not even “we white folk”; it excluded white men without sufficient property and all white women.

 

If one looks at behavior, not bombast, the nation has never agreed on the principle of human equality.  When the need to recruit soldiers was desperate, the slogan “all men are created equal” had a special appeal to those in society’s mid to low ranks: farmers, tradesmen, indentured servants, and impecunious or idle Whites.  That “Base,” especially in the South, did not like the idea that Blacks might be their equal; when they discovered that some people—those damn Yankees—really meant it, they resisted the New Political Math (1.0 = 1.0), which made most of them fighting mad: hence, the Civil War.

 

The Base and many more than the Base have a psychological need to claim their superiority to compensate for their sense of inferiority.  Notable example: Henry Adams, grandson and son of Presidents, who knew that, from his youth, he had never lived up to his and others’ expectations of him, was a virulent antisemite.  Whites have relied most on a sense of racial superiority (1.0 > 0.6), but bigotry knows no bounds and extends to others different in all of those ways now itemized in the inventory of identity politics.  Thus, after the Civil War, although its emphasis was on Blacks, the nascent Ku Klux Klan also attacked Catholics and Jews.  Today, non-Hispanic White, homophobic, xenophobic, Christian nationalists declare their superiority to all kinds of minorities.  They hate them all, usually those close at hand more than others farther afield.

 

For that psychological need, members of despised minorities often hate members of other despised minorities, as they try to leverage a sense of superiority to others.  Item: Black antisemitism, founded on the presumed superiority of Christianity to Judaism, is an instance of one minority trying to raise its self-esteem by scorning another minority.  Narratives of inter-minority rivalries or conflicts—e.g., Irish versus Jews in Brooklyn—are too many to list, much less to detail.

 

Most people by nature or by nurture are disposed to need a sense of superiority, with birthright ways in which they differ serving as discriminators of bigotry.  The multitude of minorities, including intersectional ones, likely impedes respect or, at a minimum, toleration.  Too many differences can be overwhelming and make adjustments difficult.

 

America’s multi-dimensional—race, gender, religion, ethnicity, nationality—diversity is unmatched in any other country because no other country has America's dynamically compounding, evolving demography.  Whites from northwest Europe (aka, WASPs) dominated America politically and culturally until the mid-twentieth century.  Their gradual decline began between 1880 and 1920, when millions of Whites immigrated from southern and eastern Europe.  These White immigrants from abroad also came into conflict with Black migrants from the South, to produce various racial-ethnic reactions after the turn of the century.  The NAACP, founded in 1909 mostly by Whites, many Jewish, gradually eliminated them and discouraged White membership.  The KKK, its revival triggered in 1915 by The Birth of a Nation, rampaged in the South, Midwest, and Great Plains in the 20s, 30s, and 40s.  Meanwhile, the romantic states-rights myth of The War between the States, the heroic cult of Robert E. Lee, and the glory of a Lost Cause loomed large in American culture to promote acculturation of the new arrivals.  Only lately has Lee received his due in historical criticism; a recent biographer has said that writing about a hero is easy, about a “traitor,” hard.  Since the Second World War, after a small, brief spurt of refugees from Europe, Blacks rallied in the Civil Rights movement, and more numerous immigrants from Central and South America, and Asia have earned a place in American society.  Not that all Whites have welcomed them.  The Confederate Flag, symbolizing White racism and rebellion against the federal government struggling to advance civic equality, figures prominently in conservative gatherings, marches, and mayhem.  Conservative extremists want to start a race war, a White “Us” against a Black, Brown, Yellow, or Red “Them” (also Jews).

 

Differences of identity are not the only prompts to dissention; differences in ideology are, too, including matters of sexual and social issues (LGBTQ, gender orientation and identity, abortion, contraception, same-sex relationships, inter-racial marriage) and causes (civil rights, environment, nuclear power, climate change, tribal relations)  As a consultant, I observed many military and corporate officers skeptical about some of these issues mainly because they were scornful of “hippies” and “tree-huggers.”  At the higher level of today’s Supreme Court, the conservative Catholic judges are motivated by their malice toward liberals as much as by any ideology.

 

Today, the choice seems to be authoritarian rule by a minority of White Christian bigots or democratic rule by a mixed majority of bigots more or less willing to live and let others live.  The growing attention to, resistance to or insistence on, and controversy about the rights of a larger number of minority groups please or irritate, mollify or infuriate, large numbers of Americans.  Traditional targets of past abuses remain targets of present abuses.  For example, racists, and only racists, reject the inclusion of Black history in American History curriculums (“CRT”)—their point being to teach that Blacks are a population apart from “Americans”; Senator Mitch McConnell made that point explicit in talking about the ratio of Black voters to “American” voters.  LGBTQ people, especially trans-gender people, are being targeted by legislative restrictions.  When the Supreme Court hears cases involving such legislation, plaintiffs argue for the rights of these groups under the Constitution.  They should argue instead for their rights as citizens under the equal protection clause of its Fourteenth Amendment.  They may be able to mitigate social and political friction by stressing, not identity-based group rights, but individual citizen rights.  The less thinking in terms of groups, the more thinking in terms of citizens—you know, people like those whom you know—, the better the chances of survival of a pluralistic democratic society.

 

America is exceptional in the diversity of its population, much of it now hysterical in its fears of “others,” people not like “us.”  The more dilute the mixture, as in rural areas, the greater the bigotry; the more concentrated the mixture, as in urban areas, the less the bigotry.  The various maps of America follow the distribution of bigotry: red v. blue states, poor states v. rich states, less educated v. more educated states, and on and on.  Lincoln would remind us that a nation divided cannot long stand.  In the end, until “we” become better at recognizing others as “us,” we are not likely to do well as U.S.

 

 

[A personal note, with a warning.  My sister is married to a woman with whom she had been in a lesbian relationship for three decades before the law allowed them to wed.  Two of my closest male friends of many years are gay and now married.  Their situation today is under threat from possible Supreme Court opinions or possible state legislation which may unleash the terrors of vigilantism to enforce the laws.  All four were under less threat when they were “in” before they came “out”; their relationships were known by few and unknown or ignored by others.  But the formality of marriage has publicized their relationships, identified them in terms of their sexual orientations, and put them at risk from homophobic vigilante violence because they had trusted the enlightened laws of recent years now likely to be superseded by bedimmed laws of an earlier barbarism.  The policy questions about anti-LGBTQ laws are what public problems do they solve and what public good do they achieve.  The answers seem to be none and none, except for giving a religiously militant minority the force of law to coerce others to live as they do.  The practical question is what are cities, counties, and states going to do to protect their citizens.]

LAS CRUCES SHOWS ITSELF SMALL

On Monday, 27 June, Akron, Ohio, police shot an unarmed Black man, Jayland Walker, who was fleeing from them after a traffic stop for a minor violation.  Officers fired about 90 shots and hit the man about 60 times.  (They claimed that Walker had fired at them from his car and reported finding a gun in it—likely, a lie and a throw-down.). Today, Akron announced that officers—estimated to be eight in number—had been put on leave.  More news, much of it outrageous, is expected later today.

 

According to USA Today (2 July),

 

The Akron Police Department is expected to provide details of the shooting, including body camera footage, at the Sunday news conference alongside the city’s mayor. The footage will also be released at that time.

 

Akron Police Chief Steve Mylett told the Akron Beacon Journal, part of the USA TODAY Network, that the department will release all body camera footage of the shooting rather than just the three videos required by law. He added that the footage will be shown to Walker's family before it's released to the public.

 

Let’s do a simple comparison.

 

1.    Akron is a city of over 200,000; Las Cruces, over 100,000.

 

2.    Akron officers acted in response to a minor traffic violation; Las Cruces officer acted on a request for medical assistance.

 

3.    Akron Police Chief Mylett says that the police department “will release all body camera footage,” more than the law requires, and within a week of the incident; Las Cruces Police Chief Dominguez kept quiet, initiated a PR edited version of abridged footage, and released it over a week after the incident of an LCPD officer killing Sra. Amelia Baca.  (The complete footage became available weeks later in response to my IPRA request.)

 

4.    Akron’s Mayor will attend the news conference at which details about the incident will be presented by the Police Chief; Las Cruces’s Mayor has been either MIA or AWOL, and he and the Police Chief have held no public news conference.  (Mayor Pro Tem Kasandra Gandara did not fill in for the Mayor; no member of City Council has said a word about the incident.)

 

5.    Akron witnessed major protests of the killing; Las Cruces witnessed virtually nothing.

 

Let’s draw a simple conclusion.  Akron is big time; Las Cruces is chicken shit.