Vol. 2 No. 4 August 2003

Uncommon Denominator

The Newsletter of the Commonweal Institute

http://www.commonwealinstitute.org/

“The great enemy of clear language is insincerity.”

– George Orwell

CONTENTS

Talking Points: Fund our schools!

Wit and Wisdom: “White House Releases Redacted Version of Constitution”

Eye on the Right: In heteronormativity we trust?

Featured Article: Rich Lowry on W.’s religiosity

Check It Out: Donald Rumsfeld, poet

Happenings: Presentation on electronic voting

Endorsements: Robert Reich

Get Involved: Spread the word; become a contributor

TALKING POINTS

Back when American conservatives took fiscal responsibility seriously (i.e., the early 1990s), they floated the idea of a constitutional amendment banning unfunded federal mandates (see “Eye on the Right” below). How the tables have turned! Today, the No Child Left Behind Act, which embodies the conservative approach to educational reform, is under legal attack for failing to provide any money for the requirements it imposes on states and school districts, at a time when local budgets are stretched to the breaking point.

In July, the National Educational Association filed suit, citing a General Accounting Office study that found that states could spend upwards of $5 billion in order to implement the Act’s testing provisions – not to mention the money they would have to shell out to comply with its school voucher and teacher qualification provisions. These necessary expenditures, the suit holds, would run contrary to language in the Act that reads: “Nothing in this Act shall be construed to authorize an officer or employee of the Federal Government to . . . mandate a State or any subdivision thereof to spend any funds or incur any costs not paid for under this Act.”

In a response to the challenge notable for its blend of hostility and silliness, Secretary of Education Rod Paige declared: “We’ve assembled a coalition of the willing to help the kids who need it most; the NEA wants to assemble a coalition of the whining to hold kids back.”

To understand what’s going on in this dispute, we should look at the bigger picture. The two pillars of the conservative approach to educational reform are: 1) school vouchers, and 2) measurable standards for students and teachers. Conspicuously absent in this approach is a commitment to providing schools with the resources they need to improve. That absence is not an oversight. What it reflects is a consistent effort on the part of the hard right to undermine public education. Let us consider how vouchers and standards fit into this effort.

Euphemistically termed “school choice,” vouchers are held up as a means of helping kids in “failing” schools (which often are not failing at all) to be able to afford private schools. As most Americans seem to recognize, fortunately, the policy runs into a serious problem when it comes to real-world application – namely, only some of the kids at a given school would be able to receive vouchers. And how would this be decided? Well, since vouchers would cover only a portion of private school tuition, they would only help those families who can already afford most of the cost. That means they wouldn’t go to the students “who need it most,” as Paige would have us believe. Moreover, the money earmarked for vouchers would not be spent on actually improving public schools, where the poorest kids would remain. But improving public education is exactly what the hard right does not what to have happen. In a new report titled “The Voucher Veneer: The Deeper Agenda to Privatize Public Education,” People for the American Way shows how “a network of Religious Right groups, free-market economists, ultraconservative columnists and others . . . are using vouchers as a vehicle to achieve their ultimate goal of privatizing most or all of the public educational system.”

(Meanwhile, even as conservatives talk about helping students afford private education, the administration is making it harder for college students to receive adequate financial aid. The New York Times reported on July 18 that the Congressional Research Service has calculated that the Department of Education’s new financial aid formula will reduce the Pell grant program, the nation’s largest, by $270 million, with 84,000 students unable to receive any award at all. Simultaneously, the right’s successful campaign to starve government of resources has produced budget deficits that in many states – California, Texas, Florida, and others – are leading to steep increases in public college tuition. So once again, we find that the young people who need help the most are getting left behind.)

As for standards, they seem hard to argue with: Nobody’s opposed to quality, after all. The problem with the conservative idea of standards, however, is that an all-sticks-no-carrots approach will produce the very problems it’s ostensibly meant to address (emphasis on the word “ostensibly”). What does one do with those students or teachers or schools that don’t measure up? It’s not enough to simply preach at them; adequate resources need to be provided to make sure that they can measure up. But again, that’s not part of the conservative agenda. Combine standards with a refusal to fund public education, and you get “failing” public schools, and thus an excuse to promote educational privatization. Another article in the Times, from July 31, shows how the consequences are already being felt by students themselves; it reveals that “growing numbers of students – most of them struggling academically – are being pushed out of New York City’s school system and classified under bureaucratic categories that hide their failure to graduate. . . . Those students represent the unintended consequence of the effort to hold schools accountable for raising standards.” The point here, however, is that that consequence might not be entirely unintended.

Democracy depends on education, and not just for those who can afford it. Public education serves the interests of all Americans, and it can’t be done on the cheap. Of course, conservatives repeat the mantra that we shouldn’t “throw money at the schools.” (They don’t want to throw money at poor folks or the environment or health care, either, but seem much less strict when it comes to throwing money at the wealthy individuals and companies that bankroll their political power.) Nobody committed to public education is talking about wasting money; the idea is to invest in our schools and our children so that we can all reap the rewards down the road. Unaffordable? Hardly. We can’t afford not to.

WIT AND WISDOM

White House Releases Redacted Version of Constitution

“The White House today released an edited version of the U.S. Constitution minus twenty-eight pages that were deemed ‘too sensitive’ to be shared with the American public.

The altered document was ‘hand-redacted’ by Attorney General John Ashcroft using a Marks-a-Lot™ magic marker, the White House said, with the goal of removing the ninety-four percent of the original document that could have adversely impacted national security.”

– parody from the Borowitz Report. Read more.

EYE ON THE RIGHT

Every so often, conservative activists, both in and out of government, work themselves into a lather about some new proposal for amending the Constitution. Given that the the fundamental law of the land has only been changed once in the last 30 years, the amendment bandwagon usually ends up broken down by the side of the road, but it does represent a useful way of drawing attention to a particular cause and thereby of mobilizing political support to achieve specific short-term aims. The latest cause célèbre is an effort in the House of Representatives, introduced in May, to get a constitutional ban on gay marriage. While the proposal has little chance of succeeding, its supporters (from both sides of the aisle, we should note) are fully in earnest, and so the arguments against such an amendment need a full airing.

A little history is in order. Since 1787 there have been 27 constitutional amendments, and they have occurred – with the inevitable occasional exception – in four roughly defined phases:

The first phase encompassed the 15 years following ratification, and saw the passage of the Bill of Rights and two amendments regarding judicial powers and the manner of electing the President and Vice President.

The second phase commenced after the Civil War and included the three big amendments that sought to heal the nation’s racial wounds: the Thirteenth (outlawing slavery), the Fourteenth (guaranteeing due process and equal rights under the law), and the Fifteenth (extending voting rights to all races).

From 1909 to 1919, the country saw a curious hodgepodge involving income taxes, the election of senators, alcohol, and female suffrage. Prohibition (the Eighteenth Amendment) was the first and only attempt to constitutionally regulate citizens’ behavior (the Bill of Rights applies strictly to governmental powers).

During the remainder of the twentieth century, the Constitution was amended seven times, and the changes were all technical and procedural: specifying the starting dates for federal terms, repealing Prohibition, limiting Presidents to two terms, barring the poll tax, specifying lines of secession, allowing residents of Washington D.C. to vote in presidential elections, and lowering the voting age to eighteen years.

In what might be considered an abortive fifth phase, Congressional Republicans, after the election of Bill Clinton in 1992, began pursuing constitutional amendments as the best way of forwarding their political agenda. The reasoning was simple: since the Supreme Court cannot, by definition, rule constitutional amendments unconstitutional, policies that would be challengeable under the current system, such as school prayer, would attain inviolate status.

Their proposals fell into two broad categories: restrictions on the federal government and legislated morality. They included, in the first category, the line-item veto, term limits, and a ban on unfunded federal mandates, and in the second category, legalized school prayer and prohibitions on abortion and flag desecration. In an interview with The Washington Post, Sen. Hank Brown (R-Colo.) said the campaign stemmed “from a conviction that things have gone seriously awry in the country and that basic reform is necessary.” He added, “This is not business as usual. It comes from a conviction by many Americans that the future of the country is at stake.”

Well, maybe. But the principal feature that differentiates those proposed amendments from existing ones is a preoccupation with social morality and economic procedure. Neither of these concerns entails the sort of bedrock governmental issues that deserves inclusion in the Constitution. The framers deliberately made the Constitution a difficult document to amend, stipulating that changes could only be passed with a two-thirds vote of both houses of Congress and ratification by three-fourths of the states. They recognized the need for gradual change over time, but wisely sought to hinder the manipulation of the Constitution for more local and temporal interests.

Which brings us to the proposed constitutional ban on gay marriage. If Americans want to prevent gay marriage, they have the ability, under the current system, to legislate such matters without resorting to the “nuclear option” of constitutional amendment. Indeed, we already have the 1996 Defense of Marriage Act, along with similar laws in 37 states. What lawmakers and their constituents shouldn’t do, however, is operate under the illusion that their personal beliefs are worthy of inclusion in the nation’s charter. And they shouldn’t forget that the only time social morality was written into the Constitution, with Prohibition, the result was disastrous social policy.

The underlying question, of course, has to do with why so many people are so opposed to gay marriage, and whether their opposition to it is a legitimate basis for distributing certain social privileges unequally.

First, a recent survey found that the public’s attitude toward the legal status of same-sex couples appears to be largely determined by the words used to describe it. Thus, if the issue is presented as a question of extending equal treatment to same-sex couples through such arrangements as “civil unions,” Americans are relatively sympathetic; but if the term “gay marriage” is used, the public becomes much leerier. That is likely because most people see “marriage” as a religious institution, and the major religious denominations have, for the most part, adhered to a traditional heteronormative definition of marriage. But while this clearly represents an obstacle to public acceptance of same-sex couples, it also represents an opportunity for challenging the legal barriers to “civil union” or “gay marriage” or whatever you wish to call it. Here’s why:

The essential claim driving the opposition to gay marriage is that homosexuality is immoral, and this claim is almost always grounded in religious belief. The rhetoric routinely invokes the supposed “threats” that homosexuality poses (to the “social fabric,” to the “sanctity of marriage,” and so forth), but these never rise to any level of specificity – which suggests that these dangers are less than they are made out to be. If people aren’t actually hurting anybody else, they should be allowed not only to go about their own business, but to enjoy the same rights and privileges as their neighbors. To deny gays and lesbians the chance to participate equally in the social and political life of the nation is both unchristian and overchristian. It is unchristian in the sense of being mean-spirited. It is overchristian in that it gives government sanction and support to a particular religious belief system, one in which the scattered Biblical references to homosexuality are taken to justify making legal distinctions between people.

And that is where the anti-gay-marriage movement blurs the line between church and state. It is no different, really, from an Islamic country’s denial of rights and privileges to women based on a conservative reading of the Koran. In both cases, individuals are targeted for unequal treatment not because they have caused tangible harm to anybody, but because the religious traditions of the majority accord their group identity secondary status. Which is un-American. Private religious institutions, of course, can recognize or not recognize whatever relationships they want to. But a government of the people shouldn’t legally demote an entire segment of the population simply because it disapproves of them – and it certainly shouldn’t modify the national charter in order to do so. In doing so, conservatives would undermine a core principle of our democracy: the coexistence of majority rule and minority rights. Without the protection of the latter, democracy devolves into a tyranny by numbers.

Civil unions represent a step in the right direction. A constitutional amendment banning gay marriage represents a step toward theocracy.

FEATURED ARTICLE

From time to time, the Uncommon Denominator will highlight particularly interesting or important articles about American political culture. The following is the introduction to “The President Keeps His Distance,” by Rich Lowry, editor of the conservative National Review. The article sheds light on one of the major faultlines in conservative politics, that dividing primarily religious from primarily economic conservatives.

“The Christian right has infiltrated and taken over the White House – in the person of the president of the United States. If Jerry Falwell and Pat Robertson had sat down 15 years ago and created the profile of their perfect president – a born-again Christian from the Bible Belt, flagrantly open about his faith – George W. Bush would fit it almost to a T. Yet he is not quite what anyone would have imagined. All around Bush a culture war rages, but in it, he is at most a reluctant participant – and perhaps a pacifist at heart.”

Click here to read the whole article.

CHECK IT OUT

You’ve seen his press conferences, heard his contempt for the press corps, listened as he antagonized the world. But what is that oddly compelling quality to Donald Rumsfeld’s performances? Is it, as Maureen Dowd suggests, a kind of “metrosexuality” smoldering beneath the macho exterior? Is it the wolfish grin, hypnotizing his prey? Or is it perhaps an unusual grace with words? If the English language is George W. Bush’s bête noire, is it Rumsfeld’s secret weapon, and secret love?

Hart Seely has compiled a wonderful body of evidence suggesting that it is. In Pieces of Intelligence: The Existential Poetry of Donald H. Rumsfeld (Free Press, 2003), Seely takes actual statements of the Pentagon’s top enchilada and arranges them into the verse forms for which they seem to have been unconsciously intended – poems which live and breathe, unlike the numbing drabness that a prose transcript would convey. Here is one of the more well-known pieces, titled “The Unknown”:

As we know,

There are known knowns.

There are things we know we know.

We also know

There are known unknowns.

That is to say

We know there are some things

We do not know.

But there are also unknown unknowns,

The ones we don’t know we don’t know.

Less abstract, but no less riveting, is “The End of the World,” a kind of free-verse ottava rima, with a wonderfully mysterious ellipsis:

Puffs of dust

End up crawling

Up your leg

And hitting your knee

Because it’s . . .

There might be

As much as an inch

Or two or three.

In drawing out these Rumsfeldian cadences, Seely’s book promises welcome relief from the so-often stifling pronouncements of the neoconservative wing of American politics. Check it out.

HAPPENINGS

Presentation on Electronic Voting Machines – On August 7, Co-founder Katherine Forrest gave a presentation on the hazards of Electronic Voting Machines to the Wellstone Democratic Renewal Club in Emeryville, CA. Emeryville is located in Alameda County, which uses the Diebold voting equipment that has received so much bad press recently. Following the presentation, the Club passed a resolution to demand modification of the voting machine equipment to provide a voter verifiable audit trail (VVAT), to encourage absentee voting in all elections until VVAT is in place, and to declare their support for a bill now in Congress (HR 2239) that would require VVAT in all systems used for national elections.

Dr. Forrest and other Commonweal Institute speakers are available for speaking engagements on the topic of Electronic Voting Machines in the San Francisco Bay area. To request a speaker for your organization or media broadcast, please call 650-330-1395.

ENDORSEMENTS

“America needs a true marketplace of ideas, not a one-sided monologue by the right. At a time when airwaves and emails are filled with conservative voices, the Commonweal Institute is more important than ever.” – Robert Reich, former U.S. Secretary of Labor, University Professor at Brandeis, co-founder of The American Prospect magazine

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