Author: Ophelia Benson

The walls keep getting closer and closer and closer. Read Michelle Goldberg on the subject if you want to have nightmares for a week.

Speaking to outsiders, most Christian nationalists say they’re simply responding to anti-Christian persecution. They say that secularism is itself a religion, one unfairly imposed on them. They say they’re the victims in the culture wars. But Christian nationalist ideologues don’t want equality, they want dominance.

Yes of course they say secularism is a religion. Secularism is a religion, science is a religion, ‘evolutionism’ is a religion, ‘Darwinism’ is a religion, atheism is a religion, humanism is a religion, naturalism is a religion, rationality is a religion, everything that doesn’t bow down and grovel before their benighted impoverished world view is a religion. And if some of them get their way – we won’t just be silenced or put under house arrest for life, we’ll be executed. So let’s hope they don’t. But…listening to Goldberg on Fresh Air on Thursday I learned more about the Constitution Restoration Act and became very very afraid. If enough loonies get into Congress, which seems not nearly as impossible as I would like it to be, that thing could pass. The Supreme Court would throw it out in a heartbeat, because it’s so unconstitutional it’s a joke – but then they would just amend the Constitution. I don’t think that’s likely (she said nervously) – but – I wish I could be more confident than I am. What’s the Constitution Restoration Act, you wonder? Oh, nothing. No biggy. Just a little tweak that strips judges of the power to hear cases involving ‘any matter to the extent that relief is sought against an entity of Federal, State, or local government, or against an officer or agent of Federal, State, or local government (whether or not acting in official or personal capacity), concerning that entity’s, officer’s, or agent’s acknowledgment of God as the sovereign source of law, liberty, or government.’ That’s all. Nothing. Just a law that would forbid the judiciary to review official moves to impose theocracy. Why would anyone object to that?

Terrifyingly, there doesn’t seem to have been much news coverage of this. Like, any. Oh well done. The major meeja ignored the little matter of Bush systematically ignoring acts of Congress that he didn’t feel like obeying by cranking out more than seven hundred fifty ‘signing statements’ in which White House lawyers say he doesn’t have to if he doesn’t want to; and now we find they also slept through this little business of legislation aimed at establishing a theocracy in the US. What would be outrageous and terrifying enough to get their attention, one wonders? Does it absolutely have to emit huge clouds of black smoke and cause giant buildings to fall down to be worth noticing? Or does it have to be not Republican and not Rush Limbaugh’s greatest hero to be worth noticing? Or what? Why is this kind of thing allowed to ooze along in such soothing silence?

There is one article at Znet. Great; that’ll reach millions.

Znet wonders about the non-coverage too, not surprisingly.

The potential impact of the Constitution Restoration Act on American life, law and politics is so radical and vast that you would expect a boiling national debate. Yet just as with the crimes and questions of 9/11, everyone in the media seems terrifically busy looking the other way. If you want yet another dramatic metric of US journalistic dysfunction, try Googling “Constitution Restoration Act” in their News category and see what you get. Today, three weeks after the bill was filed, I find a grand total of three throwaway mentions in Alabama’s Shelby County Reporter, the Decatur Daily, and the Massachusetts Daily Collegian. (“Terry Schiavo” in contrast will net you over a thousand news hits, and “Michael Jackson” just passed 36,000 with a bullet.)

Just so. Googling ‘Constitution Restoration Act’ in Google News is exactly what I did – that’s how I found the Znet article – and sure enough – a year later, and the cupboard is still bare. That is pathetic. I have few illusions about the US ‘news’ media, but that is pathetic. The ‘signing statements’ were all but ignored until Charlie Savage of the Boston Globe got busy, and an attempted theocratic putsch is also ignored. It boggles the mind.

The CRA already has 28 sponsors in the House and Senate, and a March 20 call to lead sponsor Sen. Richard Shelby’s office assures us that “we have the votes for passage.” This is a highly credible projection as Bill Moyers observes in his 3/24/05 “Welcome to Doomsday” piece in the New York Review of Books: “The corporate, political, and religious right’s hammerlock… extends to the US Congress. Nearly half of its members before the election-231 legislators in all (more since the election)-are backed by the religious right… Forty-five senators and 186 members of the 108th Congress earned 80 to 100 percent approval ratings from the most influential Christian Right advocacy groups.”

That was 2005. It hasn’t passed yet. But the bastards are still gathering.

And there arose a great noise in the land, and a whirling on the waters, and the people were sore afraid, or upset, or worried, or puzzled, or something. Why? Because of a movie, of course. What movie? you ask, all athirst to know. Well what movie do you think? The Rembrandt code, of course. No no, I know; the Renoir code. No no, I’m just playing silly buggers; the Kandinsky code. Oh all right, the Da Vinci Code. (A title which causes a faint electrical hum of irritation every time I hear or see it, because as any fule kno, Da Vinci is not Leonardo’s surname. It’s like titling a book and movie The Of Devonshire Code after the Duke of Devonshire, or the Of Arc Code after Joan of that ilk. Tsssss.) Okay so the Da Vinci Code and how people are all knotted up about the underwear. There’s this cardinal for instance.

“Christians must not just sit back and say it is enough for us to forgive and to forget,” said Arinze. “Sometimes it is our duty to do something practical…This is one of the fundamental human rights – that we should be respected, our religious beliefs respected, and our founder Jesus Christ respected,” said Cardinal Arinze.

See, I didn’t know that. I didn’t know that it was a fundamental human right that we should be respected. (We who? Christians? Humans? Cardinals? People who pitch fits about movies? Zealots? Wannabe censors? Nags? Bullies? Who?) I also didn’t know it was a fundamental human right that our religious beliefs be respected and our founder Jesus Christ be respected. That is news to me. Here’s me trundling along from day to day with my human rights being violated from here to Sunday, because I can tell you for a fact that there are people in this world who don’t respect me. The ones who’ve never heard of me would be one place to start; the ones who know me well and think I’m a bore and a nuisance would be another. And yet, all the time, it is my human right to be respected (and not, apparently, everyone else’s human right to decline to respect me, however boring and useless and a complete waste of time I may be), and nothing is done about it. Comrades, what we have here is a wholesale violation of civic order, a massive breakdown in the fabric of how things are supposed to be. What we also have here is a potentially worrying state of tyranny, in which we are all required to respect more than six billion people, at least five billion of whom we wouldn’t recognize if they sat next to us at the annual Bus Spotters’ Gala and said howdy. That seems like a lot of respect-duty we’ve all been falling down on.

The cardinal goes on, in his pleasant mild humble conciliatory way.

“Those who blaspheme Christ and get away with it are exploiting the Christian readiness to forgive and to love even those who insult us. There are some other religions which if you insult their founder they will not be just talking.”

Ah! Very true! They will not be just talking, they will be shouting and threatening and torching and killing. They will be putting out bounties, they will be traveling towards Denmark, they will be taking action. How heart-warming it is to see a cardinal using their pleasant example to threaten the blasphemers. How exhilarating it is to know that religions think they have a right to veto novels and movies that tell stories about their story. How the walls do keep getting closer and closer and closer.

Thought for the day. From Dave Hill at ‘Comment is Free’.

Why are some progressives turning against identity politics? After all, aren’t they the means for liberating the oppressed? In fact, they have always had their critics from the left. But Islamic terrorism has, I guess, provided a new and more public momentum. Awkward questions are being asked, not least on this site: how can liberals support assertions of Muslim identity when these include the subordination of women and hatred of gays? How can the anti-war left march hand-in-hand with hardline Islamists? Tricky issues. And I’m a bit conflicted about them. I’m wary of accidentally joining in with the dreary right-wing drone about “victim culture”, “multiculturalism” (whatever they think it means), “political correctness” and so on, which some “hard liberals” seem in danger of doing. Yet it has long been very clear that while identity politics can be a rational and affirming response to prejudice and oppression they can also be deeply reactionary: racial essentialism, inward-looking nationalism, cultural purism and a general suspicion of difference and change too often become integral to them.

Just so. One always is very wary of joining in dreary right-wing drones, and yet, there are times, in the deep of night, when all is asleep save for the occasional bat streaking past the window, when the little pool of light cast by the reading lamp is surrounded by darkness as far as the eye can see, when bits of those dreary drones can seem disconcertingly…not entirely wrong. When one suddenly knows what they mean about victim culture, and wonders how whiny one may be oneself. Then one decides to stop thinking and go to sleep instead.

But, he’s right: identity politics can be and in fact is both a rational response to oppression and indeed victimization but it can also (often at the very same time) be horribly reactionary and confining. That’s why Amartya Sen and Anthony Appiah both have new books out on the subject. It’s a difficult, tangled, and important one.

This little aside in Scott McLemee’s column made me laugh.

For better and for worse, the American reception of contemporary French thought has often followed a script that frames everything in terms of generational shifts. Lately, that has usually meant baby-boomer narcissism – as if the youngsters of ‘68 don’t have enough cultural mirrors already. Someone like Bernard-Henri Lévy, the roving playboy philosopher, lends himself to such branding without reserve. Most of his thinking is adequately summed up by a thumbnail biography – something like, “BHL was a young Maoist radical in 1968, but then he denounced totalitarianism, and started wearing his shirts unbuttoned, and the French left has never recovered.” Nor are American academics altogether immune to such prepackaged blendings of theory and lifestyle. Hey, you – the Foucauldian with the leather jacket that doesn’t fit anymore….Yeah, well, you’re complicit too.

Snicker, snort. I love that. ‘You’re complicit too.’ In fact I’d like a sweatshirt or bumper sticker with that on it.

Speaking of bumper stickers, a kind reader of B&W who is connected with the Bioliteracy Project at the University of Colorado at Boulder sent me a couple of bumper stickers that say: ‘Leave No Child Behind: TEACH EVOLUTION’. Life is good.

Funnily enough, reviewers aren’t thronging and jostling to review Why Truth Matters. Maybe they figured out that it was actually an extended exercise in irony, or something, and didn’t want to be made to look foolish by taking it seriously. Anyway there is one review from Library Journal, posted at Barnes & Noble.

Benson and Stangroom (coeditors, www. butterfliesandwheels.com) set out to prove why truth matters. Their argument isn’t so much one for truth as one against ideologies and philosophies that minimize truth’s importance. These counterarguments include discourses on basic human thought, cultural relativism, political reasoning, feminism, and other current and historical thought movements. The writing is superbly engaging, and each chapter is well argued. But the book’s strong point is its reasonable and concise overview of the major arguments and viewpoints directly and indirectly limiting the precedence of truth. This overview allows readers to grasp easily not only each argument but also the subtle patterns into which the arguments connect. Though easy to follow, the text does assume a fair amount of prior reading. Recommended for academic collections and larger public systems with suitable demand.-Jason Moore, Madison Cty. Lib. Syst., MS Copyright 2006 Reed Business Information.

Well, yeah. It does assume at least a little prior reading. It wouldn’t be anyone’s choice for the first or only book a person ever read. But some books are like that. They’re part of a conversation. Not all books can be the ideal choice for the first or only book a person ever reads. Some have to fit into the middle somewhere, so that the conversation can go on. (I mention that because it’s actually quite difficult to figure out how much to assume readers will know or be able to figure out and how much they will want explained. Too much in one direction and you frustrate readers and perhaps make them feel ignorant or stupid or both, but too much in the other direction and you risk making them feel patronized and insulted and also slowed down and impeded and plain bored. It can be very tricky.)