Tired of Texas

<< For the podcast, please click here. >>

First, they separated from Mexico because Mexico banned slavery. Then they tried to leave the U.S. when Lincoln was elected president because he hated slavery. Then they committed treason in 1861, seceding and making war on the U.S. Now there’s a Texas Nationalist Movement that wants to secede again, denying the treason in secession. Treason or not, I say get out. Texas has never been an honorable member of the United States. Their first principle has always been that white Texas men are entitled to injure others with everything from guns to slavery, segregation, the subjugation of women and labor policies that turn workers into peons. Let’s retroactively accept Texas’ secession. The Union will be better without them.

Texas leads the movement to prevent women from controlling their own bodies. In Texas it’s OK to force women to bear children so they become dependent on and can’t leave their oppressors. The rotten court that calls itself Supreme won’t help. Women will have to be airlifted out of Texas to states which care about protecting women instead of subjugating them and their bodies to the will and whims of Texas men.

And Texas is trying to corrupt elections for the whole country. As far as Texas is concerned, if you’re poor, Black or a person of color, don’t bother to vote – they’ll do everything they can to stop you. That can change the complexion of the House, Senate and White House. They’re trying to assert the right not only to control people in their own state but to control all of us from Texas. Kick them out before they destroy the country more than they already have.

There’s no justice in Texas. Sandra Bland is dead in a Texas prison because “It was not a model traffic stop.” To protest that an armed policeman is denying you your rights as a human being and an American citizen is “not a model traffic stop.” Worse, it justifies imprisonment and a staged “suicide.”

Texas denied American citizens their rights by withholding their birth certificates until 2015 when a lawsuit forced it to provide birth certificates to children born in Texas.

Then there are their governors and candidates for president. Perry. Bush. Abbott. Need I say more? I’m getting tired of Texas. Let’s reconsider their secession. They’re obviously not patriotic Americans. Let them go.

Even better: the President and the Senate have the treaty power under Art. II, sec. 2 of the U.S. Constitution. A treaty with Mexico could give Texas back. Think that could only be to settle a war? Fine. We could make a sham war with Mexico equivalent to Texas’ sham prison suicide of Sandra Bland, and settle it by transferring the state back. That would be good for Mexico, and good for America.

There’s another option – one they’re really afraid of. We could have federal registrars register  their undocumented citizens to vote and take over Texas. Then when the rebels fly their true Confederate colors over the weapons of their racist army, we could send the Grand Army of the Republic back to Texas, where it served until prematurely withdrawn in 1876, and drive those rebels into the Gulf. That’s a dream devoutly to be wished.

I’m just tired of Texas. Let’s get rid of it. OK, there’s no way, and I’ll never get a spot on Comedy Central. But I do deny the patriotism and human decency of Texas’ bigots. I’m truly tired of Texas.

— This commentary was scheduled for broadcast on WAMC Northeast Report, on September 28, 2021.

Criminal Responsibility for Global Warming

For the podcast, please click here.

Trying to light a fire under the public and our public officials, I’ve advocated declaring war on global warming, sought the clergy’s moral leadership, pressed the urgency of protecting a livable environment for the poor and minorities as well as the wealthy, and described the earth’s reaction to our failure to protect it.

But I found myself in tears during the Jewish High Holy Day services. Repeatedly we’re told that God bids us to be good to each other but I look around and see mass suicide and murder. Whether we’re religious or not, what do we want on our conscience?

Unfortunately, too many dawdle while politics squelches action despite the growing damage. Many turn away from climate change because they think it’s beyond what they can do – though effective action is as near as our polling places. All of us, our children and grandchildren would benefit if more Americans took responsibility. Ultimately this is a moral cause: to stop the rape of the earth that gives us life; and to stop the inevitable slaughter if we don’t protect our and each other’s earthly home.

Under New York Penal Law, a person who “recklessly causes the death of another person” is guilty of a form of manslaughter. Under federal law, “killing of a human being … without due caution” is involuntary manslaughter. We could argue forever about the meaning of those terms except that scientists have been warning us for decades and we now have clear evidence that global temperatures are rising, and accelerating forest fires, drought, sea rise, severe storms and temperatures so high that  people are already being killed. It has become clear that the predictions of the scientists are conservative – global warming is happening faster than they expected and with increasingly severe consequences. So when does it become reckless not to act – to write, to speak, to vote or to organize? When does it become lack of due caution to let the damage, destruction and death continue?

Do we have the moral, religious or legal freedom to turn aside while it is still possible to stop further global warming, and prevent killing much of the earth’s population? When we know the consequence, as we do, are we being appropriately cautious about the harm to others unless we do what we can to prevent rising temperatures from drowning, starving and incinerating millions? When does it become reckless?

Is it reckless not to insist that our governments engineer the transition of our economy from products and practices that belch greenhouse gasses, carbon dioxide and methane, to more healthful and efficient products and practices? Is it reckless to mismanage the fields and forests that could absorb some of the greenhouse gasses? Shall we engrave on our tombstones, “Here lie people who contributed to global warming even though they knew the consequences”?

Many won’t bother with tombstones, but will that hide us from our descendants’ memories, so long as they survive, or from the eyes of the Lord? Again, I try to put this in ecumenical ways, but I think fire and brimstone are absolutely appropriate. We have to act.

— This commentary was scheduled for broadcast on WAMC Northeast Report, on September 21, 2021.

Religious Voices on the Environment

For podcasts of my commentary, please click here.

I called recently for religious voices on climate change to ring out more strongly. I’m not alone.  As Christiana Figueres wrote in the Guardian, “It is time for faith groups and religious institutions to find their voice and set their moral compass on one of the great humanitarian issues of our time.”

I promised to return to those religious voices who have spoken out about climate change.

Forest Clingerman teaches religion at Ohio Northern University and wrote we are “laying siege” to what Psalm 19 calls “God’s glorious ‘handiwork.’” Zayn Kassam, a chaired Pomona College professor of religious studies, warned that mishandling the environment brings the Earth “a little closer to the fires of Hell,” citing the Qur’an as well as the Bible’s Book of Micah. Love Sechrest, teaching the New Testament at the Fuller Theological Seminary, invoking Jesus’ call for “service … to the common good,” warned that rolling back sustainable “climate policies … threaten the health of the planet.”

Warnings have come from the Irish Council of Churches, leaders of the Leadership Conference of Women Religious, Young Evangelicals for Climate Action, the United Church of Christ, the Leadership Team of the Sisters of Mercy of the Americas, the Church World Service, the Religious Action Center for Reform Judaism, the Christian Methodist Episcopal Church, the AME Zion Church, The Episcopal Church, and United Methodist Women.

Across the globe calls have come from Christian, Jewish, Islamic, Baha’i, Buddhist, Confucian, Hindu, Jain, Shinto, Sikh and Tao leaders and interfaith groups, underlining our obligation to protect the environment which gives us life.

One listener kindly sent me a link to Pope Francis’ Encyclical, on Care for our Common Home, which reads in part, the earth “now cries out to us because of the harm we have inflicted on her by our irresponsible use and abuse of the goods with which God has endowed her.” Pope Francis pointed to the “sickness evident in the soil, in the water, in the air and in all forms of life. … [T]he earth herself, burdened and laid waste … ‘groans in travail’….” He quoted Pope Paul VI, that by its “exploitation of nature, humanity runs the risk of destroying” the work and blessings of God.

And on September 1^st, Pope Francis, Eastern Orthodox Ecumenical Patriarch Bartholomew and Anglican Archbishop Justin Welby joined “to address together the urgency of environmental sustainability” and, citing Deuteronomy, called on “every person of good will … to choose life, so that you and your children may live … [by] play[ing] a part in changing our collective response to the unprecedented threat of climate change and environmental degradation.”

Reports about polar bears and ice flows or rising waters and storms aren’t enough, nor endless scientific reports with measurements that boggle ordinary minds. Religious and other moral voices must ring in our ears to invigorate the crusade about the great moral crisis of our time. As men and women of faith helped drive the abolition movement, so their message must help drive the movement to protect the environment we depend on, lest we come “a little closer to the fires of Hell.”

— This commentary was scheduled for broadcast on WAMC Northeast Report, on September 14, 2021.

Hohfeld’s Covid

For the podcast, please click here.

This was scheduled to air on one of the holiest days of the Jewish year. I think this commentary, which was recorded a few days earlier, is appropriate because law and religion both get at very significant moral issues – in this case, how we handle Covid.

So, are you game for a little legal philosophy? Law students are generally taught traditional legal concepts but more rarely the underlying fundamental logic of the law. Now you’ll be able to lord it over all the lawyers you know.

Wesley Hohfeld was just 39 when he died in 1918. A member of the faculty at Yale Law School, he had published two remarkable articles that continue to enlighten study of the law. Hohfeld gave meaning to the phrase that law is a seamless web because there is always a rule that defines what is and isn’t OK; there is never an absence of government.

Hohfeld began by asking what it means to say I’m entitled to something? What does it mean to say I have a right, or a privilege, or freedom? We bandy those terms about as if they’re the same, with simple, obvious meanings. But Hohfeld explained that someone’s right means someone else’s duty. My right to clean air means someone else’s duty not to foul it for me. They may claim another right, like the right to ditch masks, but then we’re claiming conflicting rights.

Someone may claim the privilege of going unvaccinated without a mask. But then the owner, manager, tenant or employer has no right to kick them out. Again we’re dealing with conflicting claims of rights. We can’t have legally conflicting freedoms.

Rights talk makes us think government is the heavy when it tells us what we can’t do. But Hohfeld revealed that law and government always tell us what we can or can’t do. To say nothing commands someone because the legal implication is that one of us can do what we want and the courts will penalize those who interfere. To say I have a right means government and the courts will protect me from your interference, not the other way around.

But then how should government choose whose rights to protect? Flip a coin? Take bribes or campaign donations? Play favorites, duck bullets or consider the general welfare?

Sometimes there are reasonable ways we can protect ourselves from the consequences of others’ exercise of their rights and privileges. Then maybe it’s worth it to make us do those work-arounds.

It sounds reasonable for me to protect myself and my family by keeping our masks on. But it’s about percentages – how effective are vaccines, masks and other precautions? Everyone’s precautions affect everyone else’s chance of getting sick. If encountering too much of the Delta variant in public means unwittingly bringing it home, do we all have to wear masks both in public and at home in order to protect our families? Is our home our castle where we have a right to safety and intimacy? Or did that right or privilege just get reduced?

Because government can’t protect us all without limiting privileges others claim, it’s never true that law and government can avoid choosing whose rights are more worth protecting and whose aren’t. What people call limited government is just government that favors the rich and powerful or people who talk tough. But I think I have a right to a government that makes reasonable choices, not one that lets some people do whatever they want, as if anyone’s rights are that broad. It’s not about getting government out of our lives – law is a seamless web. I’m fed up with sloppy claims about rights to commit wrongs – whether about masks, vaccines or guns.

— This commentary was scheduled for broadcast on WAMC Northeast Report, on September 7, 2021.

Unrestricted Capitalism A Poor Second to a Blended Economy

For the podcast, please click here.

My last commentary addressed the risk to democracy of unrestricted capitalism that leaves too many too desperate to see the benefits of cooperation. Democracy works poorly when the few holding the levers of power can convince the rest of us that they deserve the benefits and we deserve the scraps. Unrestricted capitalism mimics the game of monopoly, bankrupting all but the wealthy winner. It creates desperate people who’ll pin their hopes on demagogues’ empty promises, or celebrate their emperor’s new clothes.

We used to celebrate a blended economy in which public and private institutions each contributed whatever would work best. That was before those so wealthy as to need nothing convinced the rest of us that anything and everything government did for ordinary folk was “socialism,” as if a drop of government support destroyed the country and the difference and effectiveness of government programs was irrelevant. We used to be smarter than that.

Something very crucial is lost when we expect private companies to take care of everything. It’s naïve to believe that business will take care of everything. Companies do what they can profit from, so most of our needs are excluded from what they care about. And they hide a lot of the damage they do while making us sign documents that protect them and leave us to fend for ourselves if anything goes wrong, knowing the courts will back them up. The game is stacked and the public interest locked out of the marketplace.

We once believed government should serve the public interest, to do what business wasn’t motivated or good at doing. We understood it’s often cheaper to provide everyone with public services and utilities, and share the benefits of a well-educated, healthy and productive public. We once understood that regulation prevents a lot more suffering and expense than individual consumers can do for themselves and that it’s a waste to hospitalize people to treat what was preventable. We used to care that people have decent pay for decent jobs and we liked it that way. We celebrated public agencies that did their jobs well, not for ideological reasons, but because we expected government to help where it could. We expected government to serve and unleash everyone’s strengths – not just the wealthy.

The systemic poison goes deeper – money corrupted the sense of responsibility of too many public officials. If capitalism is poorly suited to serving our needs and public officials have been so corrupted by capitalism that they fail to protect the water supply as in Hoosick Falls, or are willing to poison the population to save money, as in Flint, Michigan, then we have to fight back. 

When the people who control the money also control the media and convince Americans that the capitalists are the solution instead of the problem, that we should all pay tribute to our oppressors, that they are entitled to larger and larger shares of the pie and workers small and smaller, then the disparity between the few and the many grows like a cancer, and the muscle of ordinary people in their own government shrinks.

The result is an America where smart capital leaves for other countries because we’ve disabled our own population with a disparity of wealth that leaves little opportunity at home, and poisons the possibility of self-government. We need to relearn the benefits of a blended economy and give ourselves better alternatives.

— This commentary was scheduled for broadcast on WAMC Northeast Report, on August 31, 2021.