MyQuest | my thoughts on life's journey

Krauthammer on Obama's marriage contortion

Conservative Charles Krauthammer has a good Washington Post piece on Obama's marriage equality arguments.  Krauthammer says that there are two main arguments for it, one based on empathy and one based on rights.  The President initially adopted the former, but has moved to the language of the latter.  The latter position then makes it untenable to allow states to decide for themselves (which remains the president's position) and paints opponents as bigots (a politically difficult position).

Krauthammer is wrong on his facts in the piece in his claim (and oft-repeated by the other side, though erroneous) that marriage has always been heterosexual in every society and through all time.  There have been culturally, legally, and religiously accepted same-sex relationships as much historical and anthropological research demonstrates.

This is What Feminism Looks Like

An excellent article in the Washington Post on how the dated right wing attack on feminism began to backfire in 2012 and feminists are now on the offense.

Too Many Meetings

Yestrday I attended a training session put on by the Omaha Community Foundation on the non-profit boards of the future.  It examined current trends and predicted the changes that are ahead.  Not too much that was new or interesting in the presentation, though it did affirm the governance changes we've already made at First Central (smaller, nimbler, more focused on strategy and values questions).  

One piece that did interest me was the conversation about generational difference.  He said that if you are having difficulty recruiting as many Gen-Xers as you did Boomers for your organizations, it makes sense because there are half as many Xers as Boomers.  Boards and organizations should be preparing for that decline in population as Xers move into the age group that is most likely to be sitting on boards.  

The moment that thrilled me was when he said that having regular, in-person monthly meetings was considered a thing of the past and a waste of time for most Xers.  Score!  That's what I've been saying a lot.

Xers will want more decision-making to be done quickly, by smaller groups, through social networking, e-mail, and phone calls.  And in-person meetings need to be left for the big picture items that require deliberation.

He warned that you'll have difficulty recruiting younger people for involvement if you don't make those changes.

"The Middle" has moved

A few weeks ago during the public debate over the Equal Employment Ordinance, Councilman Franklin Thompson said he wished that the conversation was being had "in the middle."

I think that is precisely where the conversation was being had.  The opposition did represent a fringe, minority position, as was evidenced in all the polling.  But the proponents did not represent a radical leftist side of the community (those folk do exist).  The Equal Omaha Coalition was broad and composed of mostly moderate people representing traditional institutions -- business, church, non-profit organizations.  

The way media and public hearings operate is they falsely make it look like there are only two sides to issues, when there are often many different sides, and they also falsely make it look as if the divide is 50/50.  Whereas in this case over 70% of Omaha residents supported doing something to end workplace discrimination against LGBT persons and over 60% supported this particular ordinance.  That is as reflective of the middle as almost anything could be.

Part of this is a dramatic shift that has finally occurred on LGBT issues, and this shift has largely occurred within the last few years.  It used to be that when I worked on these sorts of issues, there was lots of talk about how to speak to the "movable middle."  Now that language isn't used much anymore.  There is general acknowledgement nationally (and locally) that the middle has moved and largely moved in favor of the LGBT community.

At the vote, Councilman Thompson offered an amendment that would have scaled back the ordinance.  He thought this was a compromise.  For the majority, it was too little and unacceptable.  It was still too much for the opposition.  This was a failure to understand the current state of where the middle is.

And this reflects a much wider shift, I think.  I was a Republican most of my adult life, but shifted in the Aughts because of the increasingly extreme right positions of the GOP.  It does seem to me that today most folk who would be considered moderate operate within the Democratic sphere.  That the GOP considers someone as conservative as President Obama to be a liberal socialist shows more about how far outside the center they now operate.

 

Clinton: Extremists always want to control women

An article on Hillary's speech.

Gbowee: American women need to get angry

Meryl on Hillary

The Caging of America

Today I read the very disturbing piece "The Caging of America" by Adam Gopnik in the January 30 issue of The New Yorker.

Here are some choice excerpts:

For most privileged, professional people, the experience of confinement is a mere brush, encountered after a kid’s arrest, say. For a great many poor people in America, particularly poor black men, prison is a destination that braids through an ordinary life, much as high school and college do for rich white ones. More than half of all black men without a high-school diploma go to prison at some time in their lives. Mass incarceration on a scale almost unexampled in human history is a fundamental fact of our country today—perhaps the fundamental fact, as slavery was the fundamental fact of 1850. In truth, there are more black men in the grip of the criminal-justice system—in prison, on probation, or on parole—than were in slavery then. Over all, there are now more people under “correctional supervision” in America—more than six million—than were in the Gulag Archipelago under Stalin at its height. That city of the confined and the controlled, Lockuptown, is now the second largest in the United States.

The accelerating rate of incarceration over the past few decades is just as startling as the number of people jailed: in 1980, there were about two hundred and twenty people incarcerated for every hundred thousand Americans; by 2010, the number had more than tripled, to seven hundred and thirty-one. No other country even approaches that. In the past two decades, the money that states spend on prisons has risen at six times the rate of spending on higher education. 

The scale and the brutality of our prisons are the moral scandal of American life.

White supremacy is the real principle, this thesis holds, and racial domination the real end. In response to the apparent triumphs of the sixties, mass imprisonment became a way of reimposing Jim Crow. Blacks are now incarcerated seven times as often as whites. “The system of mass incarceration works to trap African Americans in a virtual (and literal) cage,” the legal scholar Michelle Alexander writes. Young black men pass quickly from a period of police harassment into a period of “formal control” (i.e., actual imprisonment) and then are doomed for life to a system of “invisible control.” Prevented from voting, legally discriminated against for the rest of their lives, most will cycle back through the prison system. The system, in this view, is not really broken; it is doing what it was designed to do. Alexander’s grim conclusion: “If mass incarceration is considered as a system of social control—specifically, racial control—then the system is a fantastic success.”

No more chilling document exists in recent American life than the 2005 annual report of the biggest of these firms, the Corrections Corporation of America. Here the company (which spends millions lobbying legislators) is obliged to caution its investors about the risk that somehow, somewhere, someone might turn off the spigot of convicted men:

Our growth is generally dependent upon our ability to obtain new contracts to develop and manage new correctional and detention facilities. . . . The demand for our facilities and services could be adversely affected by the relaxation of enforcement efforts, leniency in conviction and sentencing practices or through the decriminalization of certain activities that are currently proscribed by our criminal laws. For instance, any changes with respect to drugs and controlled substances or illegal immigration could affect the number of persons arrested, convicted, and sentenced, thereby potentially reducing demand for correctional facilities to house them.

Brecht could hardly have imagined such a document: a capitalist enterprise that feeds on the misery of man trying as hard as it can to be sure that nothing is done to decrease that misery.

 

Pleased with Haley Barbour

I want to go on the record for how pleased I am with Haley Barbour and this issue of clemency and pardons.  Even a very conservative leader understands that the purpose of our corrections system is not supposed to be locking someone away forever but giving them a chance for redemption and transformation.  He writes today in the Washington Post:

In Mississippi, the constitutional power of pardon is based on our Christian belief in repentance, forgiveness and redemption — a second chance for those who are rehabilitated and who redeem themselves. Other great religions have similar tenets; so does the U.S. Constitution.

Mississippi spends about $350 million a year on our corrections system, much of it aimed at rehabilitating those who went wrong. Regrettably there are bad actors who will never be rehabilitated, but many who go to prison can be helped. Our state recidivism rate is just above 30 percent, far below the national average.

For some who are rehabilitated and redeem themselves, the governor is the only person who can give them a second chance. I am very comfortable giving such people that opportunity.

 

Nebraska & the death penalty

Nebraksa, embarassingly for a "civilized' state, still has legal capital punishment.  In recent years, nationally, the drugs used (and first introduced in Oklahoma) and the methods used have come under fire.  Here in Nebraska it seems that the state may have improperly acquired the drugs we intend to use to kill people.