Fare thee well…

Today is the end of my blogging for Philadelphia Weekly. Thanks to all of you who’ve read it the last couple of years. See ya down the trail.

Michael Gerson: Gays can keep their rights if they don’t sue for them

In today’s Washington Post, Michael Gerson compares and contrasts the debates over gay rights with the debate over abortion rights — and concludes that gay rights, once gained, will be longer-lasting and more “settled” because they (mostly) haven’t been imposed by an out-of-control judiciary on an unwilling or divided public. Instead, the cause has advanced naturally and gradually through culture. And he warns:

It remains possible that the gay rights movement could provoke a backlash. If the Supreme Court were to strike down restrictions on gay marriage nationally, one could expect a Roe-like reaction in parts of the country.

Gerson might be right in a tactical sense. But his argument ignores a couple of things:

• The advancement of civil rights tends not to take an either-or approach to the question of judicial advances versus cultural advances. The ending of Jim Crow across the South, for example, clearly relied on court cases like Brown v. Board of Education, but the efforts of Martin Luther King Jr. and his cohorts simply made racism less acceptable as a matter of custom. Racism isn’t gone, of course, but the days of being overtly racist and a participant in polite society are largely over. Both aspects — legal and cultural — were important to including African Americans in the life of the country.

• The argument also ignores the question of whether certain civil rights actually exist under the law. Pro-lifers and pro-choicers differ on this, of course, but if a right to abortion actually exists under the Constitution, then it doesn’t really matter how “settled” the debate is. The whole point of being under the rule of law is to recognize that minority rights often conflict with the desires of the democratic majority.

It’s nice if everybody likes it when you exercise your rights. But it’s not strictly necessary.

Jim Wallis’ un-Christian response to Glenn Beck

As much as I hated Glenn Beck’s call on Christians to flee churches that emphasize “social justice” — which is to say, just about every church there is — I’m still disappointed in the response of lefty Christian Jim Wallis:

“What he has said attacks the very heart of our Christian faith, and Christians should no longer watch his show,” Mr. Wallis wrote on his blog, God’s Politics. “His show should now be in the same category as Howard Stern.”*

I’m disappointed because Wallis’ response could’ve shown Glenn Beck what’s “Christian” about a “social justice Christian.” That is, it could’ve responded in a way that emulated Jesus’ exhortation to “love your enemies and pray for those who persecute you.” And maybe Wallis is doing so. But his response comes across as a piece of churlish, cheap moralizing in the vein of Bill Donohue or Donald Wildmon. It seems more interested in scoring political points than in doing God’s work in the world. It’s just uglier and less graceful — in the full meaning of that word – than you’d hope for.

Don’t get me wrong: I’m out of the church, so maybe I shouldn’t be offering theological advice to those who’ve remained. And I certainly believe Glenn Beck is an ass who needs a rhetorical slap in the face, oh, daily. But I maintain a respect for faith, even if I can’t share it. And I hate to see it cheapened by the sordid pettiness of our all-too-human politics.

* I had to rely on the New York Times account of Wallis’ words. For whatever reason, Wallis’ blog post isn’t opening up on my computer. If I find I’m erring in my response to Wallis’ words, I’ll correct the record.

Krugman: Health reform “looks good”

Paul Krugman on the health reform bill:

So what’s the reality of the proposed reform? Compared with the Platonic ideal of reform, Obamacare comes up short. If the votes were there, I would much prefer to see Medicare for all.

For a real piece of passable legislation, however, it looks very good. It wouldn’t transform our health care system; in fact, Americans whose jobs come with health coverage would see little effect. But it would make a huge difference to the less fortunate among us, even as it would do more to control costs than anything we’ve done before.

This is a reasonable, responsible plan. Don’t let anyone tell you otherwise.

Read the whole thing, as they say.

Lindsey Graham: If Obama defeats GOP obstructionism on health care, the GOP will obstruct even more!

Apparently President Obama and Congressional Republicans are interested in reforming the nation’s immigration system. Time for some bipartisan agreement! Well, yes and no:

(Lindsey) Graham, in a statement, said he had told Mr. Obama “in no uncertain terms” that the immigration debate “could come to a halt for the year” if the president moved to pass health care legislation by a method known as reconciliation, which requires a majority of 51 senators instead of 60 and would in practice require no Republican votes.

And Graham is one of the reasonable Republican senators, supposedly. But the GOP has apparently never heard of “you win some, you lose some.” They either win everything, or they shut down the system — even on areas where they disagree with Democrats. It’s a good way to attract votes, I suppose, but a damn poor way to actually get stuff done for the American people.

Supreme Court justices Clarence Thomas and Antonin Scalia are ok with savage prison beatings

At the New York Times, Linda Greenhouse notes that Clarence Thomas is OK with savage treatment of prisoners at the hands of prison officials — saying teeth-loosening beatings don’t violate the Constitution’s prohibition on “cruel and unusual punishment” if a judge didn’t formally sentence the inmate to teeth-loosening savage beatings. It’s a stance that goes back to Thomas’ early years on the court:

In his dissenting opinion in the Hudson case — which Justice Antonin Scalia joined, making the vote 7 to 2 — the new justice said that the Constitution’s framers “simply did not conceive of the Eighth Amendment as protecting inmates from harsh treatment.” The Eighth Amendment dealt with only the actual sentence, he maintained, and not with conditions inside a prison or deprivations that were not a formal aspect of the sentence. He said the Supreme Court had taken a wrong turn in the 1970’s when it adopted a more expansive view, and he added, “The Eighth Amendment is not, and should not be turned into, a National Code of Prison Regulation.”

No surprise that Scalia joined Thomas in this opinion. Scalia has maintained in public interviews that the Constitution prohibits torturing people convicted of crimes — but not people suspected of crimes. After all, it’s only “punishment” if if you’ve been convicted!

The weirdness is that  these views even conform to the plain words of the Eighth Amendment that Thomas and Scalia claim to hew so closely to:

Excessive bail shall not be required, nor excessive fines imposed, nor cruel and unusual punishments inflicted.

Notice that the prohibition against “cruel and unusual punishments” is not limited by the text to what judges do. A reasonable reading of the amendment is that the state is prohibited from inflicting such punishments, period.

The irony is that Thomas and Scalia are celebrated by small-government conservatives even though they apparently believe that government has the right and power to freely abuse your body — so long, apparently, as it does so off the record.

We’re apparently headed for another Supreme Court opening soon, and it’s possible we’ll hear — again — about President Obama’s much-derided (by conservatives) love of “empathy” in his court nominees. But Thomas and Scalia are Exhibits A and B in the case for empathy. Their version of the law and its requirements is so abstract — so confined to what’s on paper instead of the real-life implications for people’s lives — that it produces absurd results. If a prison sentence is a de facto sentence of being beaten and savaged at the hands of the state, that doesn’t matter to Scalia and Thomas.

The law sometimes produces inconvenient or unpleasant results; the law in the hands of those two justices, though, produces something Kafkaesque and evil.

‘The Green Zone’: Some books aren’t really movies

Matt Damon’s The Green Zone opens today in theaters, and I’ve got to say : This movie looks nothing like Rajiv Chandrasekaran’s Imperial Life in the Emerald City, the book upon which it’s supposedly based.

Here’s Slate’s Dana Stevens describing the movie:

As the camera jerked and joggled its way through an impossible-to-follow action sequence late in The Green Zone (Universal), I found myself thinking: “Damn, I’m sick of faux-documentary-style hand-held cinematography. This feels like ersatz Paul Greengrass at its worst.” Then I remembered: The Green Zone is directed by Paul Greengrass.

Wait. This is an action film? With spies and everything? But that’s nothing at all like Chandrasekaran’s book!

There’s very little action in Imperial Life in the Emerald City, to be honest: It takes place almost entirely in the “Green Zone” — the relatively safe area of Baghdad where American and Iraqi officials hid from the insurgents during the bloodiest days of the war therre — with brief forays out into nearby neighborhoods to gauge how “real Iraqis” are affected by the U.S. invasion. It’s first-rate reporting and writing, but it’s not a Matt Damon action thriller.

Bully for Chandrasekaran for selling the movie rights to his book. A more faithful translation of Imperial Life to the screen would’ve had to been done by somebody like M*A*S*H*-era Robert Altman — somebody who could take a cast of thousands and dramatize the not-exactly-front-lines absurdities of life in the Green Zone, where occupation officials were often chosen for their fealty to the GOP’s stance on abortion, say, rather than their knowledge of how to put a broken country back together. It could even play as a dark comedy! But Hollywood knows what sells, I suppose: Robert Altman movies stopped being widely successful 30 years ago (and Altman, of course, is dead) but gritty action flicks will live forever.

Corey Haim is dead. So is our sense of proportion.

Between the John Hughes orgy at the Academy Awards and the explosion of grief at the passing of Corey Haim, I realize that my generation is every bit as mawkish and self-obsessed as the Baby Boomers we used to mock. Hey Generation X: Weren’t we supposed to be a bit more cynical than this? In a good way?

Lord help us all when Puck from the third season of the Real World finally bites it. Presidential proclaimations and long critical reappraisals in the New York Times will surely follow.

JihadJane, the Pakistani VIPs and why racial profiling at the airport may not make us that much safer

A couple of items in today’s newspapers need to be juxtaposed.

First, this:

ISLAMABAD, Pakistan — A tour of the United States arranged by the State Department to improve ties to Pakistani legislators ended in a public relations fiasco when the members of the group refused to submit to extra airport screening in Washington, and they are now being hailed as heroes on their return home.

The leader of the parliamentary group, Senator Abbas Khan Afridi, said in an interview on Tuesday that before they were to board the flight for New Orleans, he and his colleagues were selected from a crowd of passengers at the airport and asked to stand aside.

They were then asked to accept a full-body scan by a machine, he said. Such body-scanning units are in use at 19 airports across the United States, and more are being installed.

One of Mr. Afridi’s colleagues, Akhunzada Chitan, told Mr. Mir on his “Capital Talk” program, “Going through a body scan makes you naked, and in making you naked, they make the whole country naked.”

With this:

A petite, blond-haired, blue-eyed high school dropout who allegedly used the nickname JihadJane was identified Tuesday as an alleged terrorist intent on recruiting others to her cause, as federal prosecutors unsealed criminal charges that could send her to prison for life.

Colleen Renee LaRose, 46, has been quietly held in U.S. custody since October on suspicions that she provided material support to terrorists and traveled to Sweden to launch an attack, according to federal officials who spoke on the condition of anonymity because the case is continuing to unfold.

LaRose, who lived in suburban Philadelphia, allegedly recruited men and women in the United States, Europe and South Asia to “wage violent jihad,” according to an indictment issued in Pennsylvania.

So let’s break it down: Our new policy of limited racial profiling on international flights turns out to alienate even the very people the U.S. government is trying to win over in the struggle against terrorism. (And, uh, if they were here as guests of the U.S. government, why couldn’t the government find some way of expediting the security process for them? Wouldn’t that have been the smart thing to do?) Meanwhile, it turns out you don’t have to be a 22-year-old male student from Islamabad to have terroristic intentions — a petite middle-aged blonde woman from suburban Philly also poses a threat.

Somebody might be able to make the case that our security procedures gain us more in safety than we lose in angry lost allies — but we shouldn’t fool ourselves into thinking that we aren’t losing something. Clearly we are. But it’s worth noting that under current profiling procedures, JihadJane would’ve had a clearer path to get on an American plane than a car salesman from Peshawar. So I’m dubious that we’re getting enough additional safety to justify the problems we’re making for ourselves.

Eric Massa just gave us the best New York Times headline ever

And beyond that, commentary seems impossible.