jron

As I’ve said many times, the ONLY reason a judge or a justice would call themselves and “Originalist” or “Constitutionalist” is because that theory does not respect precedent. Ignoring precedent turns our entire system of laws on its head.

Everything, every law EVER passed by Congress, is up for repeal if the Supreme Court rules that ObamaCare’s Medicaid expansion doesn’t comply with the Commerce Clause. They will be re-defining past decisions in order to reverse a Congressional act.

Frankly, that may be the point: Conservative politicians have argued for decades that Social Security and our entire social safety net have critical unconstitutional provisions. Despite their claims, this had been considered “settled law” for decades.

The Federalist Society was one of the original Social Security opponents. Alito, Thomas, Roberts and Scalia have all been members at one point or another. If you think the ruling on ObamaCare will be about healthcare reform alone, you are wildly mistaken.

Adding to what Blumenthal, et al. are saying: I think they understate the case a bit, or at least it could be stated more forcefully and clearly, that SCOTUS would do itself and the country serious damage if it overturned the mandate.

The thing is, as of the time the law was passed, *everyone* across the political spectrum thought this thing was constitutional. The Heritage Foundation started it, the D’s finished it, and the whole way down no one thought it ran afoul of the Constitution (save for people considered fringe at the time).

What this says is that Congress and the entire country were relying on the precedents SCOTUS set to pass the law—and they spent almost two years and untold legislative resources doing it. That’s the whole point of stare decisis, allowing for predictability with respect to what the law allows. Stare decisis is what makes sure the courts don’t act arbitrarily by constraining them to fit within precedent.

Acting in ignorance or with disregard for precedent (and precedent’s practical attendants, like reasonable beliefs in the public about what the law is) undermines rule of law, makes it impossible to pass laws confident of their legality, etc. It is, in a word, arbitrary. It’s the kind of thing they do in developing countries.

If SCOTUS ditches stare decisis here, sure their credibility will take a hit, but more importantly: we, as a polity and individuals, would have no reason to think we could pass any major regulatory legislation (unless, of course, we took the political commitments of the justices as our guide). SCOTUS would be potentially freezing the statutory law in place. What is Congress supposed to do with its time if everything it thought it knew about the law gets chucked out the window? How does it pass legislation? How does it change *existing* legislation? Are only Republican Congresses allowed to pass laws?

Stare decisis and all the reasons we follow precedent command that the mandate passes. I’ve already gotten overly maudlin, but if the mandate is overturned, we’re ruled by men, not laws.

psychotherapy:

“In my decades of practice as a psychotherapist, this is the insight that has inspired me most:

Our deepest wounds surround our greatest gifts.

I’ve found that the very qualities we’re most ashamed of, the ones we keep trying to reshape or hide, are in fact the key to finding real love. I call them core gifts.

It’s so easy to get lost in the quest for self-improvement. Every billboard seduces us with the vision of a happier, more successful life. I’m suggesting an opposite road to happiness. If we can name our own awkward, ardent gifts, and extricate them from the shame and wounds that keep them buried, we’ll find ourselves on a bullet train to deep, surprising, life-changing intimacy.

Over the years, I realized that the characteristics of my clients which I found most inspiring, most essentially them, were the ones which frequently caused them the most suffering. 

Some clients would complain of feeling like they were “too much”; too intense, too angry, or too demanding. From my therapist’s chair, I would see a passion so powerful that it frightened people away.

Other clients said they felt that they felt like they were “not enough”; too weak, too quiet, too ineffective. I would find a quality of humility and grace in them which would not let them assert themselves as others did.

Clients would describe lives devastated by codependency, and I would see an immense generosity with no healthy limits.

Again and again, where my clients saw their greatest wounds, I also saw their most defining gifts!

Cervantes said that reading a translation is like viewing a tapestry from the back. That’s what it’s like when we try to understand our deepest struggles without honoring the gifts that fuel them.

When we understand our lives through the lens of our gifts it’s as if we step out from behind the tapestry and really see it for the first time. All of a sudden, things make sense. We see the real picture, the moving, human story of what matters most to us. We begin to understand that our biggest mistakes, our most self-sabotaging behaviors were simply convulsive, unskilled attempts to express the deepest parts of ourselves…”

If I were to write this today, instead of a couple weeks ago, I might not use such a minor event as driving on the highway to make my point. Trayvon Williams’ story makes this small point seem almost irrelevant, but I still think it’s important, because it’s about profiling, and how in a small way it benefits some people.

I want to understand why the privileges many of us have—the ones we cannot see, that we take for granted—are so unwillingly shared. My theory is that it stems from a fear of vengeance, unfounded, but one this country has clung to for centuries.

theamericanbear:

It’s often forgotten that one of the main catalysts for the rise of the Christian Right was not school prayer or abortion but the defense of Southern private schools that were created in response to desegregation. By 1970, 400,000 white children were attending these “segregation academies.” States like Mississippi gave students tuition grants, and until the Nixon administration overturned the practice, the IRS gave the donors to these schools tax exemptions. And it was none other than Richard Viguerie, founder of the New Right and pioneer of its use of direct-mail tactics, who said that the attack on these public subsidies by the Civil Rights Movement and liberal courts “was the spark that ignited the religious right’s involvement in real politics.”

According to historian Joseph Crespino […] the rise of segregation academies “was often timed exactly with the desegregation of formerly all-white public schools.” Even so, their advocates claimed to be defending religious minorities—and religious beliefs—rather than white supremacy. (Initially nonsectarian, most of these schools became evangelical over time.) Their cause, in other words, was freedom, not inequality—not the freedom of whites to associate with other whites (and thereby lord their status and power over blacks), as the previous generation of massive resisters had foolishly and openly admitted, but the freedom of believers to practice their own embattled religion. It was a shrewd transposition. In one fell swoop, the heirs of slaveholders became the descendants of persecuted Baptists, and Jim Crow a heresy the First Amendment was meant to protect.

So it is today. Rather than openly pursue their agenda of restricting the rights of women, the GOP claims to be defending the rights of religious dissenters. Instead of powerful employers—for that is what many of these Catholic hospitals and universities are—we have persecuted sects.

Knowing the history of the rise of the Christian Right doesn’t resolve this debate, but it certainly does make you look twice, doesn’t it?

Read all of this →

The idealized conservative family is structured around a strict father who is the natural leader of the family, who is assumed to know right from wrong, whose authority is absolute and unchallengeable, who is masculine, makes decisions about reproduction, and who sets the rules — in short, the Decider. Children must be taught right from wrong through strict discipline, which is required to be moral. This maps onto the nation. To be prosperous in a free market, one must be fiscally disciplined. If you are not prosperous, you must not be disciplined, and if you are not disciplined, you cannot be moral, and so you deserve your poverty.

When this idealized family model is projected onto various governing institutions, we get conservative versions of them: conservative religion with a strict father God; a view of the market as Decider with no external authority over the market from government, unions, or the courts; and strictness in other institutions, like education, prisons, businesses, sports teams, romantic relationships, and the world community. Control over reproduction ought to be in the hands of male authorities.

For conservatives, democracy is about liberty, individual responsibility and self-reliance — the freedom to seek one’s own self-interest with minimal or no commitment to the interests of others. This implies a minimal public and a maximal private.

We can now see why the Santorum Strategy is so concerned with family values. Strict father family values are the model for radical conservative values. Conservative populism — in which poor conservatives vote against their financial interests — depends on those poor conservatives having strict father family values, defining themselves in terms of those values, and voting on the basis of those values, thus selecting strict fathers as their political leaders.

This is a fascinating analysis. I’d like to step back to that family structure:

When women have power, including the power to have children or not, they are in direct conflict with that conservative structure. My own belief is that a man’s insistence on retaining that power results from a lack of maturity, and a fear of irrelevance, one that almost all men are born to overcome. (You can see how strongly most disagree with me there.)

Every man must, at one point in his life, either confront those fears and accept women as potential equal partners, or remain stunted and immature. For some men, like Santorum, the struggle to maintain control over women is a deliberate choice. For others, like many in the Catholic hierarchy, their choices of lifestyle allow them to avoid ever confronting those fears of inadequacy and irrelevance.

For these men, women that pursue their sexual desires will always be considered promiscuous or sluts. They are more likely to pursue ever-younger or less experienced partners. We see them on the national stage every day. Santorum himself has perhaps been forced to mature to some extent, since that doesn’t describe him and his wife; still, his entire worldview is informed by that need for male dominance and control.

It’s a familiar conservative position that Lakoff does a good job of articulating how the personal ties directly to the public.

Wealthy people in this country have no problem with hiring people to follow them around all day, to be at their beck and call, often for low wages. It could be a butler, a caddy, a personal driver or even a personal assistant.

I guess that’s why the rich are different. Apparently others seem to think doing that, even if the person that’s hired badly needs the cash, makes you an asshole.

Or maybe it’s just that we don’t want to actually interact with homeless people. Pay them at least the minimum wage and this idea sounds great. It makes the homeless get noticed, and it makes people uncomfortable. We should be uncomfortable by the fact that people are homeless, and even hipsters should see them.

The problem I’m seeing here, in seriousness, is that they called the workers volunteers and suggested they hustle for tips. And that’s a pretty big problem. That really is exploitation, and it’s not legal.

Update: I see they charge $2/15min, which is $8/hr. If four people use their service at once, it’s $32/hr. They keep the money. How is this worse than paying someone to wear a sandwich board, hand out flyers, or drive them somewhere in a taxi? This is an exchange of money for labor, a pretty common thing in a capitalist society. Their t-shirts are demeaning somehow? The big telcos don’t get to charge exorbitant roaming fees?

The homeless are especially vulnerable in lots of ways, but this “controversy” is so paternalistic that it’s nonsensical. This sounds like a good program.\

Here’s a better article on it.

inothernews:

MARKETING PERSON:  This is, like totally defensible, right?

PEOPLE WITH COMMON SENSE:  It’s not.

MARKETING:  But it’s a honest day’s work for an honest day’s pay.

COMMON SENSE:  No.  It’s exploiting those who are less fortunate than the rest of us.

MARKETING:  But —

COMMON SENSE:  No.  Stop being a fucking asshole.

MARKETING: How else would we get Wi-Fi to the masses?

COMMON SENSE:  I thought I said to stop being an asshole.

Hey tumblr friends, I’ve got another new article up today at the Good Men Project. This one on race, yesterday’s was on gender.

(I’m trying to pick topics that people don’t get emotional about…but that doesn’t seem to be working out too well so far…)

Check it out, let me know what you think!

Hey tumblr friends, I’ve got a new article up at the Good Men Project.

Check it out, let me know what you think!

For example, most of my conservative friends are convinced that they have a biblical mandate to outlaw abortion and gay marriage, even though abortion is only mentioned once in Scripture, and the reference is — oddly — the Prophet Jeremiah cursing the man at his mother’s side for not aborting him! (Jeremiah 20:14-18). And gay marriage was hardly an issue on the radar in biblical times. The Laws of Leviticus prescribe a massive redistribution of wealth every 50 years by canceling people’s debts and restoring property to original owners, yet many Christians are convinced — right or wrong — that justice for the poor is a matter of individual charity alone, and that anyone who suggests otherwise is duped by the devil. And while we’re talking about what’s biblical and what’s not biblical, why isn’t anyone suggesting that America as a nation love its enemies and turn the other cheek?