Religious Liberty, Reproduction, and Women’s Voices

Maura Casey, writing in the Hartford Courant (and reprinted in the Beacon today) is encouraging Catholic women to raise their voices and

“…acknowledge the vast disconnect between Catholic teaching and the reality of our lives, and we need to do it now. We need to support the availability of birth control in letters to the editor. We need to write to the White House and Congress. And, we need to say, with respect, ‘I disagree, Father. I use birth control, and I’ve told my children to use it, too.’ Otherwise, the priests, bishops, Republican presidential candidates and scores of male commentators will get away with the pretense that they are speaking for us.”

Maura Casey, like me, is in her 50s.  Unlike me, and unlike the priests, bishops and male commentators denouncing birth control ‘in the name of religious liberty’ Maura Casey is a woman and a mother. 

That makes her, in concert with millions of other women, the real “authorities on the importance of birth control to our health and freedom.”  She is one of the 98 percent of Catholic women who report using birth control and she tells us that many of those women

“would consider themselves irresponsible mothers if they did not tell their children to ignore the church’s teaching on birth control—particularly when using birth control makes abortions are less likely.”

As I read this I was reminded of the many powerful Catholic women who have touched my life.  My cousins, schoolmates, and friends have each taught me much about sacrifice and selflessness and love.  While not without struggle, most have remained part of a church that still cannot find it in its heart to reject the notion that preaching the gospel (when necessary using words) is not a gendered activity. 

My maternal grandmother lived a life of joyful and laughter-filled service, exemplifying a love that puts the needs of others first.  My own mother even more so, in that saintly fashion of a person living a life so fully and lovingly engaged in the real world that she is the most important person in the life of everyone who knows her.  Even when I was my most rebelliously unkind…to her…her love never wavered.  I have never seen a more powerful voice for living as Jesus calls us to live.

My eighth grade nun has spent her life teaching and serving the deaf community. Two very close friends have spent years teaching Sunday school in the basement. Yet all these contributions and sacrifices remain largely marginalized, certainly in terms of the prerogatives of leadership to say what being Christian means.  Their experiences are still to be interpreted by a hostile and unrepentant hierarchy that has a very poor track record of living the gospel itself. 

Thanks Maura Casey.  I have never met you, but it feels like I have.  Most of what is good and meaningful about my life would not have been possible without a small army of women like you, and by no means just Catholic women, who have nurtured and taught, ministered and mentored, countless women and men like me.  I applaud your commentary today and I believe that the church and our communities will be stronger and more loving to the degree that we all “hear from the great, as yet untapped voices of sanity” whom you are calling to selfless service once again.

Are Elites De-Skilling Us in the Skills Needed for Democratic Deliberation?
Yesterday, in the Akron Beacon Journal, there was a point-counterpoint pairing of commentaries reprinted from the LA Times.  A conservative claimed it was impossible to talk to a liberal and then a liberal returned the favor.  Most may read this as entertaining, mud-wrestling circus clowns performing over morning coffee, and yet I wonder if it does not point to an achilles heel in American--or modernist--politics.  Has modernity finally succeeded in undermining the already delicate preconditions for meaningful democratic deliberation and decision making?  Worth considering seriously, as a cancer without partisan face, though today it does seem that the far right is taking the lead in driving us toward this particular cliff. 

Two other recent commentaries help us puzzle through this.  First, Ruth Marcus reported on data demonstrating (again...though she, wrongly in my view, focuses on this being only a democratic party problem) that there is a big difference between the blood sport hatred driving elite activists in both parties to seek out the distraction of divisive culture wars and the fundamentally pragmatic, moderate, and tolerant attitudes shared by most ordinary Americans in both parties (and those not affiliated with either party...see Morris Fiorina's brilliant analysis in Culture War?).  Second, a Rolling Stone commentary identifies the deeply paranoid and anti-intellectual style of politics manifest here (see Hofstadter).  While the analysis in the Rolling Stone suggests it is a partisan phenomena, and that may be true if we were to only examine a snap shot view of the world we live in today, the Rolling Stone's own effort to place this in larger historical context suggests otherwise.

Paul Krugman reminds us that the very real anger and frustration many Americans experience today is rooted in the very real and dramatic decline of opportunity in the land of opportunity.    

“Lately, inequality has re-entered the national conversation. Occupy Wall Street gave the issue visibility, while the Congressional Budget Office supplied hard data on the widening income gap. And the myth of a classless society has been exposed: Among rich countries, America stands out as the place where economic and social status is most likely to be inherited.”

Let that sink in a minute.  America is now a place where prosperity is more often inherited, not earned.  A nation created without a natural aristocracy, like the one in Europe that our founding families fled, is now a place where our children are more likely than their European counterparts to be born into a social class with little hope that our platitudes about a ‘meritocracy’ will translate into a real road to social mobility. 

And it took outsiders, the Occupy Wallstreet folks, to put this issue onto our agenda, because the already powerful would rather focus our attentions elsewhere, ignoring the fact that our leadership, public and private, has failed to deliver on the promise that hard work will pay off in America. 

“So you knew what was going to happen next. Suddenly, conservatives are telling us that it’s not really about money; it’s about morals. Never mind wage stagnation and all that, the real problem is the collapse of working-class family values, which is somehow the fault of liberals….”

Instead, being born a Romney or a Soros is the ticket to success and that is a recipe for killing innovation, undermining American prosperity, even as we know that average worker productivity in America continues to grow faster than anywhere on the planet…without reward.  And it is not only rising worker productivity that stands out as evidence of hard work and discipline, that is, evidence that average workers are not the place to find a morality gap in America.

“...the plunge in teenage pregnancies among all racial groups since 1990 or the 60 percent decline in violent crime since the mid-‘90s....

Still, something is clearly happening to the traditional working-class family. The question is what. And it is, frankly, amazing how quickly and blithely conservatives dismiss the seemingly obvious answer: a drastic reduction in the work opportunities available to less-educated men….”

Living wage jobs, with benefits (provide through work, as we have in the past, or provided through social contract because that is a more cost-effective and business friendly way to provide benefits) have been increasingly scarce since the 1970s, particularly for the angriest constituency today: under-educated white men. 

“For lower-education working men, however, it has been all negative. Adjusted for inflation, entry-level wages of male high school graduates have fallen 23 percent since 1973. Meanwhile, employment benefits have collapsed. In 1980, 65 percent of recent high-school graduates working in the private sector had health benefits, but, by 2009, that was down to 29 percent….

Back in 1996…Wilson published When Work Disappears: The New World of the Urban Poor, in which he argued that much of the social disruption among African-Americans popularly attributed to collapsing values was actually caused by a lack of blue-collar jobs in urban areas. If he was right, you would expect something similar to happen if another social group — say, working-class whites — experienced a comparable loss of economic opportunity. And so it has.

So we should reject the attempt to divert the national conversation away from soaring inequality toward the alleged moral failings of those Americans being left behind.”

This anger is not unfounded, but it is also not founded on a morality crisis in the working class as much as on leadership choosing not to reward worker productivity and discipline and instead choosing to inflate elite wealth in ways that destabilize the economy and communities.  This is the source of the threat to our way of life; this is the moral issue that is our challenge today…recreate living wage jobs with benefits because it is opportunity that spurs innovation and prosperity, not an American aristocracy.

Many news outlets are now reporting on President Obama's policy on contraception.  In my view, most are missing the point, but that may even be part of the point.  The Huffington Post describes the president's "accomodation," while ABC said the president 'blinked,' the Daily Beast claims he 'fumbled,' and Fox News chose to continue to blast the president for seeking to infringe on religious liberty.  Only CNN chose to report the story as a presidential effort to forge a compromise.

The president has claimed since he wrote Audacity, long before he even formed a campaign to run for president, that one of his priorities was to fix the beltway dysfunctionalism.  To to this he has been fairly consistent in his efforts to reach across the aisle, frequently alienating his base by embracing Republican ideas (like the individual mandate in place of a single-payer plan). 

As an election approaches, it is unlikely that the president's pathway to compromise with the hard right refusniks will become any easier.  So it is important for him to continue to find ways to avoid dysfunction (that is, get policies passed) and to do so in ways that will  make it clear to voters (including moderate Catholic voters) that he is the moderate, middle-of-the-road leader willing and able to reach across the aisle.

With that in mind, to the degree that the most conservative Catholic leaders are focusing their anger on opposing a position that super majorities of Catholic voters agree with (and not just in the abstract, since most actually use birth control)...this can only help single the president (as well as moderate and liberal Catholic leaders) out as the reasonable minds, the moderates willing to work together for reasonable compromises that work. 

This strikes me as nothing like a fumble or blink or "accomodation," but as a well designed compromise that secures a good policy outcome for women's health care, respects the religious concerns of the all but the most extreme Catholic leaders, and demonstrates that compromise is possible. 

Recent liberal assaults on Mitt Romney for his comment that he is ‘not concerned about the poor’ teach us something about political communication.  This now familiar quote was taken out of context by Romney’s democratic opponents.  When we hear the sentence that immediately follows the sound-bite saturating communication channels at the moment, Romney sounds a whole lot less cold hearted. 

“I’m not concerned about the very poor. We have a safety net there. If it needs repair, I’ll fix it. I’m not concerned about the very rich, they’re doing just fine. I’m concerned about the very heart of America, the 90, 95 percent of Americans who right now are struggling.”

Romney did say that he is not concerned about the poor, so democrats circulating the sound-bite are not lying, but as a sound-bite pulled from context it is designed to be misleading, constructed to send a message very different from the one Romney himself, as the person being quoted, intended to send.  In this sense, the democrats are, like Romney, misrepresenting the facts.

At the same time, this quote has been taken out of context in a second way: it is separated from the best available data on what we know about our lives today.  As Ruth Marcus from the Washington Post argues persuasively that

“The deeper problem is that Romney’s remarks betray a trio of fundamental misunderstandings: of the nature and scope of poverty in America; the state of the social safety net; and the impact of his own proposals on protections for the poorest Americans.”

The context that is missing here is that more than 15% of Americans live in poverty.  That is 46.2 million Americans living (for a family of four) on less than $22,134 a year.  The poverty rate has risen for whites and blacks, but the white rate rose to 9.9% while the black rate rose to 27%.  Nearly one in ten Americans make up the working poor, that is, they live in households with an adult working that is nevertheless below the poverty level.  This is part of a long-term trend, not simply the result of our most recent recession, since the average annual income for full-time male workers today is less than it was in 1973. 

But there is a third way that the Romney quote is out of context: it is discussed as if it was not strategic. Romney is talking about the poor in a way that is designed to mobilize middle-class (largely white and male) resentment against the poor.

Here we might say that Romney’s statement displaces one context (the data on poverty) with another intentionally misleading context to strategically suggest that we are already doing a lot for our poor citizens so it is okay to direct our anger toward doing a bit less for them and more for ourselves.

But in a real world context where Medicaid coverage is grossly inadequate (though that will be remedied with the new health care reform), “food stamps provide about $1.44 daily per person per meal, [and only] one in four poor renters receives housing assistance,” it is not surprising that a candidate would want to reframe the conflict to distract us from the fact that the US “has one of the least generous safety nets in the wealthy developed world,” as Marcus notes.

In this sense, I wonder if democrats focusing on the ‘I am not concerned about the poor’ sound-bite are reinforcing the image and message Romney’s more carefully coded phrasing intended to send, while also making it more difficult for us to see his strategic choice to confuse voters and mobilize the very real frustrations of the working poor and struggling middle class by re-focusing their resentment and anger toward the poor rather than toward elite leadership failures.

Further, according to Marcus, it is not just Romney who is willing to talk about poverty out of context.

“It is a bipartisan truth that talking about the poor has fallen out of political fashion. Both parties prefer to focus their rhetoric on the beleaguered middle class, which, perhaps not coincidentally, is where the votes are.”

To the degree that states succeed in disenfranchising poor and minority voters, the electoral pull toward discussing poverty as if it were merely a justification for middle-class resentment will only grow more difficulty to resist.

For anyone concerned about the future of democracy, watching the Republican primary has been painful.  Not because these candidates are any more of a threat to democracy than any other candidates, but because we are observing the impact of Citizens United.   One of the most important ways to fight back is to work to change the law.  Corportations should no longer be treated as if they were people, with the same speech (and other) rights as individual citizens.  Another, more immediate, way to fight back is to come together around an Arab Spring moment for American democracy in 2012.

We can see in the primary that the general election will be flooded with unregulated corporate money saturating our communication channels with negative ads, bullshit (used as a technical term here for misleading messages designed to misrepresent the speakers intentions, which is not the same thing as a lie), and branded information.  Even the highest quality fact check organizations will be hard pressed to keep pace with the deluge we are about to experience.  With all the creative minds sharing ideas through social media, and the example of the power of that sharing that we observed in the Arab Spring and Occupy Wallstreet, I suggest it is time to concentrate that energy on thwarting the impact of Citizens United on the 2012 election.

This post is a call for creative ideas about implementation.  Let me offer an implementation idea that is likely inadequate, yet should clarify the idea being put on the table here, so others might contribute more arresting ideas that will capture the attentions of key publics, articulate an accessible message about power and campaign contributions, and will successfully use social media to mobilize people to act.  So, here is the illustrative idea that should be treated as a catalyst:  can we use social media to coordinate a national... 'Mute Out the Noise' campaign to give citizens, united, some time to think...and call on all Americans to mute all political ads for the final 30 days before the election?