And it’s not just the typical Democratic Party hacks that have embraced that slogan; Liberty Union candidate Ben Mitchell and Independent Emily Peyton have both recently dropped out of the race and are supporting Democratic candidate and current Senate President Pro Tem Peter Shumlin. Previously, the Progressive Party decided to sit out the race entirely.

I’ve never been particularly fond of Shumlin, as one might have guessed from my disparaging reference to him in my post on Bernie Sanders. Admittedly, he’s done some good things, like passing the gay marriage bill and leading the vote against relicensing Vermont Yankee (the leak-prone nuclear plant), but he’s way too fiscally conservative for my liking, supporting efforts to balance the budget on the backs of public sector workers and the poor.

Still, I can understand why people in my position would hold their noses and vote for him. Shumlin isn’t terrible, whereas Dubie is by all indications a radical right-winger, and a lot of people on the left are terrified of him. I think they can be a little on the hysterical side about the potential consequences of a Dubie victory, but still, this isn’t a “not a dime’s worth of difference” situation. And as I noted on Twitter, Shumlin was the candidate that impressed me the most at the gubernatorial debate I attended at Vermont Law School. Of the four candidates who participated, Shumlin seemed to have the most thoughtful positions, especially on healthcare and drug policy.

So, I hope Shumlin wins. But I didn’t choose him when I did early voting last week. I was genuinely conflicted on the issue (enough so that I felt the need to explain myself here), but I ended up voting for Dennis Steele, the Independent secessionist candidate.

The main reason why I didn’t vote for Shumlin was because of my lingering misgivings about him. Frankly, I just don’t trust the guy. It’s great that Shumlin supports single-payer healthcare, or closing Vermont Yankee, but regular readers can probably guess about how much I think Democratic candidates’ campaign promises are worth; if he wins, how long will it be before he starts walking back those great promises, talking about how “we have to be practical” like Democrats often do once they’re actually in a position to implement them? There’s reason to think that might happen in Shumlin’s case. I don’t think it’s very controversial to note that that Shumlin isn’t the most principled of politicians. Dick McCormack, one of my state senators, had a comment in the Seven Days profile of Shumlin that stuck with me:

Asked whether Shumlin is good for his word, McCormack hedges.

“Just make sure you’ve parsed every word,” he says. “The promise he makes may not be the promise you thought he made. There were times when I did not read the fine print. I won’t make that mistake again.”

That quote came to mind last week when I read this story on Vermont Tiger, a conservative blog, which accused Shumlin of secretly offering to relicense Vermont Yankee if it were under different management. I won’t vouch for the accuracy of the article, which is based entirely on anonymous sources (and whose version of events was criticized by Shay Totten at Seven Days), but my point is that I wouldn’t be surprised if it ended up being true. I think it’s an open question as to how serious Shumlin is regarding this and other issues, like single-payer. Remember, Obama said he supported single-payer too… and then opposed even a moderate reform like the public option once he was actually in power.

In addition, although I won’t go into the nuances of my position on the Vermont secessionist movement here, I wanted to show support for Dennis Steele’s secessionist platform, and especially his opposition to the wars (Christopher Ketcham, writing at the Huffington Post, described Steele as “the most radical antiwar candidate in the US”) and felt my vote would be more meaningful when cast for him.

That probably sounds weird to a lot establishment party partisans, who think that voting third-party or independent is “throwing your vote away,” especially when faced with someone like Dubie. (For an example of this thinking, see this post at Green Mountain Daily by an anarchist encouraging support for Democrats) But while I’m no fan of Dubie, it’s not going to be the end of the world if he wins. Liberals really need to learn to look beyond the next elections, and realize that there’s never going to be a “right” time to vote third-party or independent. There’s always going to be a scary right-winger around the corner that might win if we don’t hold our noses and vote for Democrats; every election is a “critical” election. If people continue to wait until the “right time” to vote for what they really believe in, they’re going to be waiting forever. And we can’t afford to wait forever for the establishment parties to come around.

“White House spokesman Robert Gibbs may have criticized attacks from what he called the “professional left,” but presumed member-in-good-standing Rep. Dennis Kucinich said today he won’t challenge President Obama in the 2012 Democratic primaries.” -David Jackson, USA Today

This is disappointing, but I can’t say I blame him, for the same reason I was willing to forgive his vote for the healthcare “reform” bill. It’s not fair to expect him to be a martyr when there’s not going to be a significant movement to back him up, and the fact is that liberals are still in love with Obama, and Kucinich would be persona non grata with them if he did mount a primary challenge. For this reason and others, it’s unlikely that anyone would be able to mount a serious primary challenge, at least from the Left.

Oh wait, I’m sorry, I can hear progressive Dems telling me already that they’re not “in love” with Obama, that instead they’re “disappointed” with him to varying degrees, but they still “support” him, want his agenda (which in theory they oppose on many counts) to “succeed,” won’t consider seriously opposing him, and wouldn’t dream of not voting to reelect him. Whenever this “loyal opposition” actually runs a serious risk of causing a bill or candidate to be defeated (in other words, of having an actual effect), they immediately pull back out of fear of “undermining” the Party. This happened at one point in the healthcare debate, and unfortunately included people like Howard Dean (and Kucinich, for that matter) whose courage I initially praised in my post on the cowardice of Bernie Sanders. They then shrug and say, “At least we beat the Republicans.”

So I really don’t see how the “loyal opposition” people are at all better than the people who say that Obama is the greatest President since FDR. I’m not trying to put words in people’s mouths, but to me, the two positions are indistinguishable because they have the same effect: an implicit declaration that they will never attempt to hold Obama accountable for his actions, and that he therefore has no reason to listen to them. I really can’t blame people like Robert Gibbs for telling the Left to fuck off (as administration officials have done several times before). Why should anyone take their whining seriously when they’re so scared by the prospect of Republicans returning to power that they’ll support Obama and the Democrats no matter what they do?

Getting back to Kucinich, while I understand his decision not to oppose Obama, I really don’t get his stated reason for doing so. From the article linked above: “What we have to do is focus on coming together for the purposes of getting out of Iraq and Afghanistan.” This makes no sense considering that the person Democrats, including Kucinich, will be rallying around radically expanded one war, maintained the status quo in another, bombed several other countries, and who knows, maybe we’ll be at war with Iran by the time he’s up for reelection. This is what Democrats will be “coming together” to support.

So it would seem that Kucinich’s role will be to give progressive cover to mass murder and keep opponents of the wars corralled in the Democratic Party. They wouldn’t want those psychopathic Republicans to win, after all. Sarah Palin is a crazy fascist and gets off on hurting people, unlike President Obama, who is a sensible centrist doing the best he can. He only blows up Afghan children with the best of intentions.

It’s not an exaggeration to say that Sanders is a hero to much of the Left, well-known even far from Vermont. That’s why Robert Greenwald gave him a web series, for instance. I noticed this most recently on my trip to back home to Illinois over winter break, when I visited my friends in the Peoria Area Peace Network. Every time his name came up, half the room would gush over him. At one point, I would’ve done it too. I agreed with (and still agree with) his positions and thought it was awesome having a socialist in Congress. As a supporter of third-party and independent candidates I liked that Sanders was an Independent and would potentially be less beholden to the Democratic leadership that so successfully corrals other progressives.

And yet I’m increasingly frustrated with Sanders. He seems more concerned with maintaining cordial relations with the Democratic Party than with supporting progressive policies. Like most progressives in Congress, he talks a good game but doesn’t really follow through on it.

This was something I first noticed in 2008 with his vocal support for Obama. I thought it was odd that Sanders was coming out so strongly for one of the primary backers of the Wall Street bailouts, of which Sanders was one of the primary opponents. And in fact I have yet to see any criticism from Sanders directly targeting Obama on that or any other issue. Instead, he frequently goes out of his way to avoid criticizing Democrats, or pulls his punches with them.

For instance, take this article by Sanders in The Nation. I more or less agree with the recommendations in the article, but notice who Sanders blames things on: the Republicans. The problem with the Democrats, he says, is that they “have absurdly continued to stumble along the path of ‘bipartisanship’ at exactly the same time the Republicans have waged the most vigorous partisan and obstructionist strategy in recent history.” In this and other public statements, he isn’t afraid to mount a frontal assault on the GOP, but when it comes to the Dems the problems get blamed on someone else: Wall Street, lobbyists, Republican obstructionism, and so on.

I question how much of Sanders’ support for Obama and the Dems is calculation versus what he really believes. If he were more hostile to the Dems, it would probably cost him a lot of support from the progressive movement; indeed, his coziness with the Dems is probably a necessary component of his hero status with the movement, as opposed to the outcast status of someone like Ralph Nader.

Also, it’s pretty much an open secret that Sanders has an unofficial deal going with the Democratic Party: he doesn’t overtly antagonize them, and they don’t run anyone against him. Nader discussed this issue in Crashing the Party, his memoir of his 2000 campaign. Sanders had agreed to introduce Nader at a campaign stop in Montpelier (although he wouldn’t give an endorsement). However, Nader also invited Anthony Pollina, then the Progressive Party candidate for governor, to speak at the event. Sanders apparently wasn’t happy about this. From the book:

When I arrived at the bustling high school auditorium, with its tables, volunteers, and incoming audience, Bernie Sanders took me aside and in grave tones expressed his concern at my having invited Pollina to speak with us. Clearly he was worried that the Democrats, who had agreed no longer to seriously challenge Bernie (with one exception in 1996), thereby sparing him a three-way race, would see his association with Pollina as a hostile act to their party and their governor.

I expressed surprise. “Bernie,” I said, “Anthony was once your staff member, and there are no positions that I know where you are in disagreement.”

He acknowledged that but repeated his displeasure nonetheless. Going up to the stage with Bernie, I thought to myself that an Independent should not have to worry about such matters. Bernie graciously introduced me and described our work together. But he left the stage and departed in the middle of my speech before I asked Pollina to come up and give his precise, factual stem-winder. [...]

[Brief aside: As I've written before, Pollina ran for governor again in 2008 (as an Independent, but for all intents and purposes still aligned with the Progressives). Sanders refused to endorse a candidate in that race, saying that he was too busy working to get Obama elected. Pollina came in second, ahead of the Democratic candidate.

Also, I couldn't think of a way to work it into this post, but I stumbled on this 2008 video featuring some sharp criticism of Sanders from Nader. It also features a defense of Sanders from Vermont Senate President Pro Tem Peter Shumlin, who inadvertently did a great job of convincing me not to vote for a Democratic Party hack like him if he gets the Dem nomination for governor this year.]

I tend to prefer courageous politicians, and my frustration with Sanders stems from the fact that he isn’t one. Many progressives would disagree with me; they admire “practical” politicians like Sanders and accuse people like me of being naive dreamers. They are adamantly opposed to drawing lines in the sand and instead say things like “We have to take what we can get,” or “We can’t let the perfect be the enemy of the good.” They frame the conflict as one of pragmatism versus idealism. Often, though, I think it’s better framed as a conflict of courage versus cowardice, with all too many progressives ending up on the latter side because they won’t stand up for their beliefs. I would argue that all of their “practicality” hasn’t accomplished very much, instead empowering the proponents of fake reform (who, unlike progressives, aren’t afraid to play hardball).

In the healthcare debate, such “practicality” might have sanded a few rough edges off of a terrible bill, but nothing more. A few dials will be fiddled with, but the same system will stay in place; the insurance industry gets a massive subsidy, the pharmaceutical industry gets a sweetheart deal, and we’re no closer to single-payer than we ever were. (Oh, and preserving the Hyde Amendment became the official position of the Democratic Party. That’s one of the less-noticed but most-important parts of the healthcare debate: how the Dems basically dropped all pretense of being a party that supports reproductive justice.) “Practical” progressives shrug and say that it’s the best we can do. My response would be that this is a self-fulfilling prophesy; as Cenk Uygur put it, progressives “got rolled on healthcare because they had no intention of putting their foot down – and everyone knew it.”

Regarding courage, Dennis Kucinich’s conduct in the healthcare debate contrasts starkly with that of Sanders. Kucinich was one of only a couple progressive Dems to vote against the House bill because he thought it was a giveaway to the insurance industry disguised as reform. For the grievous crime of voting his principles instead of his party, he took a lot of shit from progressives. I remember seeing comments on his Facebook page actually accusing him of being right-wing and in league with the GOP. However, he can’t be accused of not trying to improve the bill. If the Kucinich amendment had been part of it (which would have made it easier for states to enact single-payer), I might have been willing to grudgingly support it. But Nancy Pelosi decreed that the amendment be taken out, and “practical” progressives didn’t protest at all.

Another interesting comparison can be drawn with Howard Dean. I was never a huge fan of Dean; I didn’t think he was as liberal as advertised. I did respect how he opposed the war in Iraq before it was fashionable to do so, but didn’t support his campaign. And my from what I’ve heard of his time as governor of Vermont, he was virtually indistinguishable from a moderate Republican. Oddly enough, one of the best descriptions of Dean comes from Bernie Sanders, quoted in David Sirota’s book The Uprising: “If there’s a lesson of the Howard Dean campaign, it is that the younger generation’s definition of ‘progressive’ is anyone who rips apart the other side. Dean was a moderate, yet he became the progressive candidate for president because people get off on stridency.”

So imagine my surprise to find Dean to the left of Sanders on healthcare. Dean, of course, was probably the most prominant member of the “Kill the Senate Bill” movement. And, like Kucinich, he took a lot of shit from progressives and from the Democratic Party.

Sanders, on the other hand, seemed unwilling to take a serious stand on much of anything. One positive thing I’ll say about Sanders is that he was one of the only progressives in Congress that actually extracted something tangible in return for his support, in the form of increased funding for community health centers. And according to that article, he was pushing a version of the Kucinich amendment, although I don’t know what ever became of it. Still, he voted for a bill that forces people to buy private insurance with virtually no cost control mechanism. No amount of money for community health centers will change that fact. It doesn’t change the fact that he backed down from a threat to vote against a bill without a public option. And it definitely doesn’t change the fact that Sanders cowardly withdrew his single-payer amendment in the face of Republican obstructionism (because heaven forbid he inconvenience the Democratic leadership by delaying passage of the bill).

People like Sanders are progressive in their beliefs, but not in their actions. It doesn’t matter very much how progressive a politician’s beliefs are if he or she won’t stand up for them. This is what makes Bernie Sanders no different from most of the other progressive Democrats in Congress who promise great things and then predictably cave in the end. That doesn’t mean I think progressives should never compromise, but the reason no one in Washington takes progressives seriously is because everyone knows that they will accept a bad deal rather than stand and fight for something better. Sometimes it’s better in the long run to fight for what’s right and lose than to cave and pat ourselves on the back for our “pragmatism.”

“I also understand the term used often by our hero Ted Kennedy, that “the perfect is the enemy of the good”. However, in this case, I’d like to turn that spin around and say that, in the instance of the public option, half-assed and inadequate is the enemy of the necessary and the acceptable.” -Steve Steffens [article link]

In comments to my last post dealing with healthcare, I was criticized (rightly, as I’ll explain) for supporting a public option. I thought it would be a good idea to expand on my thoughts on the issue.

I’m definitely a single-payer supporter, and while I’ve never been one of those progressives who says “Single-payer isn’t going to happen right now, so lets not even bother talking about it,” at the time of that post I thought the public option was an acceptable compromise, at least better than doing nothing. But the more I’ve read about it, the less sure I’ve been.

These days, I’m of the opinion that it might be better to just hold out for single-payer, and that as terrible as the status quo is, the substantial risks associated with even a well-designed public option (let alone the crappy bill that will almost certainly come out of Washington) could make doing nothing the better choice. I wouldn’t say I’m opposed to the public option, more like ambivalent; I wouldn’t see it as a bad thing if a decent public plan passed, but I’m not really willing to expend any effort on its behalf.

It’s amazing to me how virtually everyone who believes in the basic concept of universal healthcare agrees that single-payer is the best way to achieve it, and yet even among very progressive people it’s seen as almost taboo. If they mention it at all, it’s almost always along the lines of, “Well yeah, in a perfect world we’d have single-payer, but…”

But what? But, as “progressive” Congressman Henry Waxman put it when asked why he removed his co-sponsorship of H.R. 676, the House single-payer bill, “It isn’t going to happen.” We see this often from politicians like Waxman, and Obama as well: they support single-payer when they’re out of power, but once they get any actual ability to implement it they suddenly start backtracking, talking about how “we need to be realistic”. Gosh, it’s almost as if they aren’t really serious about it and they’re just telling us what we want to hear!

Still, he’s absolutely right; I think we can be pretty certain that a single-payer bill, even if by some miracle it passed the House, stands little-to-no chance of surviving the Senate. But instead of insisting on what they know is right, many like Waxman are rallying around a “compromise” plan that’s far more complicated and expensive, and far less effective, even in the best case scenario.

I think progressives made a huge mistake in giving up on single-payer so easily, in not even putting it on the table. There is no “right” time to start talking about it. It might not pass today, but if we want it to pass in the future then we need to be laying the groundwork now, and at least keep the idea alive until then. This is the position of Dick McCormack, one of my state senators and primary sponsor of a single-payer bill here in Vermont. Even though by his own admission the bill is going nowhere, he says it’s important to keep people talking about it, and keep its failure from becoming a self-fulfilling prophecy. As I’ve said before, if nobody’s at least talking about a given position, that alone guarantees it will never happen.

Even if you disagree with me on the efficacy of the public option, I think it’s clear that by compromising so early, progressives ensured that they’d have trouble getting even that much, that the final plan would be watered down even further. Progressives have a long proud history of ignoring one of the basic rules of negotiation: asking for twice as much as what you want in the hope of bargaining down to something you can live with. Instead, we start from a compromise position, and then we’re surprised at being expected to tone things down further. As a result, instead of single-payer being the Left position and a strong public option being the compromise, the public option is the Left position and Blue Dog position is the compromise.

But isn’t the public option at least a step in the right direction? I won’t get into the specifics of what I think its problems are, because others have done it a lot better than I could. Here is a great article from Physicians for a National Health Program explaining the problems with the public option and why we should insist on single-payer instead.

Generally, I think the public option is very hard to do right, and given the current Congress anything that could actually pass will almost certainly not be done right. In fact, it’s looking increasingly unlikely that the final plan will even have a public option, or do much of anything other than funnel money to the insurance and drug companies. (Some, like Matt Taibbi and Glenn Greenwald, argue that Obama and the Dem leadership were never really serious about having a public option in the bill and planned from the beginning to bargain it away in order to placate the lobbies.)

In addition, as the PNHP article points out, there’s no reason to believe that incrementalism would somehow lead to single-payer, as some proponents of the public option argue. That hasn’t happened anywhere it’s been tried; I would argue that minuscule reform of this type just has the effect of delaying real reform. Democratic politicians are the experts at this: doing just enough to shut people up for a little while, without seriously challenging the interests of their corporate backers.

If the public option does fail, then in addition to creating an enormous, entirely deserved backlash against the Democrats it will probably sour the public on the basic idea of universal health care. This is already happening in regard to the stimulus and government intervention in the economy, as Chris Bowers argues at Open Left:

Whether or not the Democratic trifecta actually passes progressive legislation, the legislation that is passed and the policies that are followed will still be perceived as progressive. We simply can’t avoid that.

For example, right now the stimulus package pretty much equals left-wing economic philosophy in the eyes of the American people. If it doesn’t produce results, we are all going to see our ideas become discredited in the eyes of the American public, even if we thought policies of the Democratic trifecta did not go nearly far enough. The country is never going to say “well, that idea didn’t work, so let’s try a more extreme version of it.” People just don’t think that way in America.

Given the inadequacy of the public option and the improbability of passing single-payer on the national level in the near future, where do we go from here? I think we need to shift attention to the state level, where there’s often a much greater possibility of getting real reform. The main thing to do on the national level is to keep the federal government from standing in the way of state efforts to do the right thing. A key part of this is making sure the Kucinich amendment, which would make it easier for states to pass single-payer, makes it into the final healthcare reform bill.

We also need to work on reforming the Senate, which is obviously the main obstacle to real healthcare reform (and progressive reform in general) on the national level, pretty much no matter which party is in charge. David Sirota points out that it’s unresponsive by its very design, giving enormous weight to a group of Senators representing an extremely small number of Americans. As a result, Sirota says, the healthcare debate is being controlled by a small handful of legislators from small, rural states. The first step to reforming the Senate, Tom Geoghegan argues, is to get rid of the filibuster, the primary weapon of the opponents of reform. This entails a bloody battle, but it’s absolutely necessary.

And, of course, we need to ignore the false promise of bullshit “incremental” reform that just tinkers around the edges, and support policies that go to the root of our problems. In addition, we need to be suspicious of politicians like Obama who care more about ensuring a legislative victory for themselves than they do about actually doing something substantive.

“I’m an equal-opportunity law-enforcement guy – I lock everybody up.” -Sheriff Joe Arpaio

[in reference to the Skip Gates arrest] “…to me, this situation actually has far broader implications about all citizens’ relationship to the police and the way we are expected to respond to authority, regardless of race. I’ve watched too many taser videos over the past few years featuring people of all races and both genders being put to the ground screaming in pain, not because they were dangerous or threatening and not because they were so out of control there was no other way to deal with them, but because they were arguing with police and the officer perceived a lack of respect for the badge.” -Digby

I always cringe whenever Joe Arpaio’s name pops up in the news. I have trouble even saying his name without throwing the phrase “that fucking fascist” in front of it.

For those who don’t know, Arpaio is sheriff of Maricopa County, Arizona, and somewhat of a national figure. His reputation as “America’s Toughest Sheriff” has gotten him multiple book deals and a reality TV show, and made him a hero to the right. In the present instance, he’s the subject of a profile by William Finnegan in the July 20 issue of The New Yorker, which unfortunately isn’t available online. But if you can find it, it’s an excellent read. A couple good summaries can be found at Feministing and Immigration Impact.

I don’t want to go into much detail (you can find plenty of info at the sources previously cited), but basically, the problem with Arpaio is his brutally inhumane county jail, his flagrant abuses of power (including harassment of critics by his deputies), his transformation of the sheriff’s department into an immigration enforcement agency (and his subsequent racial profiling of Hispanics), and the fact that he’s a total publicity whore. His office is currently under investigation by the U.S. Department of Justice, and there have been thousands of lawsuits alleging abuse filed against the department (resulting in $43 million in costs for the county). In one outstanding example, Finnegan writes that the family of an inmate killed by deputies received an $8.25 million settlement “after the discovery of a surveillance video that showed fourteen guards beating, shocking, and suffocating the prisoner, and after the sheriff’s office was accused of discarding evidence, including the crushed larynx of the deceased.” Even the mayor of Phoenix has denounced what he describes as Arpaio’s “reign of terror.”

In short, Arpaio is a sadistic, racist, authoritarian thug. I wasn’t kidding when I called him a fascist.

So why do I care so much about this? I don’t have any personal attachment to Arpaio or Arizona politics. But it bothers me what Arpaio’s popularity says about us as a culture. He’s not just some obscure backwater nutjob. As Finnegan notes:

Maricopa County is not a modest, out-of-the-way place. It includes Phoenix, covers more than nine thousand square miles, and has a population of nearly four million. Joe Arpaio has been sheriff there since 1993. He has four thousand employees, three thousand volunteer posse members, and an over-worked media-relations unit of five.

Finnegan further points out that Arpaio remains the most popular political figure in Arizona, despite his scandals. In fact, it might be because of them. As Ann at the Feministing article I linked to argues:

Arpaio is popular because he’s hateful. He racially profiles Latinos, his ratings go up. He divides families and goes out of his way to deport peaceful people who are just here to make a living, his ratings go up. He treats jail inmates — some of whom have not even been convicted of a crime — as subhuman, his ratings go up. He sort of functions as a conduit for the worst impulses in our society.

And Arpaio’s message clearly resonates with a lot of people outside Arizona. I don’t know if it’s a majority, but it’s undeniably widespread. Our country is still very much in love with his brand of “tough on crime” horseshit. I remember the first time I heard about Arpaio: it was through a chain email from my grandparents talking about how cool he is and how they wished we had a sheriff like him. (MyRightWingDad has an example of this) And at the time, I thought, “Wow, what a fucking fascist.” But my family loved it. The people he abuses are just criminals (and mostly brown), after all, so who cares what happens to them? [Actually, many of the people detained by Arpaio are awaiting trial and haven't actually been convicted of anything, but I doubt this is a distinction many of his supporters care about.]

So what does this say about us as a culture? To me, it says that there are some ugly authoritarian impulses in the American psyche, and a lot of inhuman callousness toward certain classes of people – criminals, foreigners, the poor, etc. We think the authorities should have a mostly free hand, and that if they target you then you must have done something to deserve it. We don’t think we’ll ever end up someplace like Arpaio’s tent city – we’re good people, and only bad people get sent there. Think this has something to do with our relative lack of outrage about civilian casualties in our wars, or the torture and abuse of detainees in the “War on Terror”? When the Abu Ghraib scandal broke, Bill Maher drew attention to the parallel between that issue and our prison policies [this is from his book New Rules, which in turn is from his show Real Time with Bill Maher]:

[Abu Ghraib happened because] we’re also comfortable pretending that anyone in America who winds up in prison deserves not just loss of freedom but a brutalizing, terrifying trip to hell…

In a way, we are all Lynndie England because we know what’s happening in our prisons and we clearly don’t care. We tell ourselves the convenient lie that anyone who bears the label “criminal” or “terrorist” is irredeemable, subhuman psycho scum, and so whatever happens to them behind bars is justified, when the truth is that millions of nonviolent Americans have been traumatized for life in our prisons simply because they either did drugs or made a bad judgment, usually when they were young, stupid, and drunk – you’d think President Bush could relate.

Another example of our authoritarian culture can be found in the response to “Gatesgate.” I’m sure just about everyone reading this has heard the story by now, where Harvard professor Henry Louis Gates Jr. was arrested in his own home for “disorderly conduct,” in other words for failing to show proper deference to a police officer. Not for threatening Officer Crowley, or refusing to comply with his orders, but rather just for talking back. One could argue Gates was being a jerk – but who wouldn’t be mad in that situation? And how does that justify arresting him? Is there any law requiring him to respect police officers?

This sort of thing happens all the time, and unlike Gates a lot of people don’t get off with just an arrest; they get beaten, tased, or even shot. And cops often face little to no consequences for doing it. As Ian Welch at OpenLeft points out:

My interactions with police in the US have all reinforced to me that even something as simple as a question is interpreted by many policy [sic] as a direct assault on their authority, and that they have no tolerance for any such thing. If a policeman in the US asks you to do something, or tells you, you’d best do it, right now, whether he has the right to order you around or not. And if you don’t, be ready to deal with the consequences.

The real problem, though, is the complete lack of public outcry over stuff like what happened to Gates. There’s a lot of people out there who see no problem with this. Some of Officer Crowley’s defenders, like the one quoted in Digby’s post on the matter, explicitly argue that either we give police a completely free hand, or we content ourselves with living in a Mad Max-style lawless wasteland; as if those are the only two options. And it’s not at all uncommon for people to say things like, “Well, Gates should’ve known better than to mouth off to a cop; he got what he deserved.” As Digby put it, “I have discovered that my hackles automatically going up at such authoritarian behavior is not necessarily the common reaction among my fellow Americans, not even my fellow liberals.” Even if they don’t necessarily agree with Crowley, they think it’s pointless to resist. The only reason anyone even notices is this case is because the victim was someone prominent.

We as a culture often mindlessly submit to authority, and don’t place much value on civil liberties. Hence the non-outrage over torture and warrantless wiretapping; and hence you get even many progressives arguing that it’s okay that Obama isn’t doing more to roll back Bush admin abuses of power, and is even embracing or expanding them, because health-care, the economy, etc., are so much more important. Who cares if we live in a dictatorship as long as the guy running it has a (D) next to his name?

So why should civil liberties and the rule of law matter? To quote Digby’s post yet again, “Police are emboldened when they repeatedly get away with using bullying, abusive tactics against average citizens who have not been convicted of any crimes.” Even if the officers have the best of intentions, that kind of power inevitably leads to abuse, because there’s nothing to keep it in check. And it never stops at just the “bad” people, but quickly spreads to anyone they deem a problem. If they can do it to poor blacks and Hispanics (let alone a Harvard professor), they can do it to you too. That’s something to keep in mind since, as Ted Rall points out, many white people have police horror stories of their own.

That’s why I care so much about Joe Arpaio or the Gates arrest, and why I’d deny that I’m trying to undermine the police when I complain about violations of civil liberties or abuses of power. Instead, I’m trying to keep the cops honest.

This is essentially the argument made by Marie Marchand, executive director of the Whatcom Peace & Justice Center in Bellingham, WA, in an article at CommonDreams titled I Want My Money Back! (Pres. Obama!) From the article:

…I thought I was supporting change I could believe in, not more of the same bloodshed and war!

Betrayal is a part of life. After awhile, you just come to expect it. Yet, the initial shock always hits you as a surprise. Alas, the nature of betrayal. Humans are vulnerable to being betrayed because underneath our husky shells, our pain and hardened hearts, we are soft and trustful creatures. We want to believe in people.

I’m not that young, so I possess some cynicism. But I’m not that old either, so I manage some idealism. Sure, I am used to being betrayed by my government. But I thought my days of calling the White House in tears were over. To think that Barack Obama preyed on this naive hope in me and millions like me is unforgivable.

I expect the Republicans to throw money at the Military Industrial Complex. Yet, from the Democrats, I was promised a different direction (like OUT of the Middle East). Regrettably, there has been miniscule change. There is still nothing to believe in.

You know, it’s great that she’s saying this, that she’s seen the light. But I can’t help but feel frustrated when I hear arguments like this. In my opinion, there was ample evidence from the beginning, if you looked past the sunny rhetoric to what Obama actually proposed doing, to suggest that he was very “conventional” in his views. As Jeremy Scahill put it recently in an interview with Socialist Worker:

What people, I think, misunderstand about Barack Obama is that this is a man who is a brilliant supporter of empire–who has figured out a way to essentially trick a lot of people into believing they’re supporting radical change, when in effect what they’re doing is supporting a radical expansion of the U.S. empire.

I think that it’s a bit disingenuous for people to act as if though they were somehow hoodwinked by Barack Obama about this.

If people were playing close attention during the election–not just to the rhetoric of his canned speech that he gave repeatedly, and the commercials, and the perception of his supporters was that he somehow was this transformative figure in U.S. politics, but also to the documents being produced by the Obama campaign and the specific policies he outlined–you realized that Barack Obama was very much a part of the bipartisan war machine that has governed this country for many, many decades.

What we see with Obama’s policies in Iraq, Afghanistan and the broader Arab and Muslim world, as well as his global economic policies, are a continuation of the most devastating and violent policies of the Bush administration–while placing a face on it that makes it easier to expand the iron fist of U.S. militarism and the hidden hand of the free market in a way that Republicans, I think, would have been unable to do at this point in history.

A similar point could be made about Obama’s economic positions; how could anyone really think he was going to stand up for the downtrodden or radically restructure the system when he was surrounding himself with neoliberal economists like Larry Summers and had advisers privately tell people he didn’t really mean all that stuff he was saying about free trade? [A very telling anecdote: I remember how when news about the latter came out, the problem for my very pro-Obama in-laws was not Obama's bullshitting, but how it would effect his chances of winning.]

There were some exceptions to this rule, areas where Obama supporters can legitimately claim to have been betrayed, such as Obama’s embrace once in office of Bush’s radical secrecy doctrines (which he had strongly campaigned against). As David Sirota notes, Obama hasn’t exactly been shy about blowing off campaign promises, and in fact expresses borderline surprise about actually being expected to follow through on the stuff he said to get elected. “It’s true that politicians have always broken promises, but rarely so proudly and with such impunity [as Obama]“, Sirota said. And even I have to admit to being surprised about the degree of Obama’s badness, of how totally Obama embraced Bush’s policies on some issues.

But for the most part, I don’t think it’s right to speak of Obama as having “betrayed” progressives. It’s not betrayal if he didn’t agree with you in the first place. He was pretty clear about where he intended to lead the country; the idea of him being this great progressive was almost entirely wishful thinking on the part of his supporters. That’s what’s so frustrating: the preponderance of evidence pointed to Obama being a kinder, gentler face for American Empire, but supporters like Marchand chose to tune that out in favor of hopenchange.

Also, at the risk of sounding bitter, my sympathy is dampened somewhat when I think back to how, as a Green Party supporter, I was treated like a buffoon by people like Marchand when I questioned whether Obama was really the closet lefty that many seemed to think he was. When they weren’t rationalizing his positions, the best defenses I would get were along the lines of: “Come on, he can’t be that bad!” “Yeah, [insert position here] is horrible, but he doesn’t really mean that; he has to say that to get elected.” “You’re being such a Naderite purist; wouldn’t anyone make you happy?” “Don’t you understand, we can’t let McCain win! It doesn’t matter how horrible the other guy is!” It’s hard not to take the asshole route and say, “I told you so!” An acknowledgment of wrongdoing on their part would be nice, but probably too much to expect from people trying to justify why they supported Obama in the first place. It’s just easier for them to say, “No one could have seen this coming!”

I know some will say it’s too early to be talking about 2012, but is Marchand’s realization about how shitty Obama is going to translate into a vote against his reelection? Or is she going to blow off her concerns and fall for the hype again (or at best hold her nose and vote for him anyway)? How long until we start hearing that Obama can’t really start getting things done until his second term?

My point in all this is that I don’t think progressives were tricked or duped by Obama (just as I don’t think they themselves were stupid or uninformed); rather, they fell for him because they wanted to believe.

[Certainly, there are other progressives who knew exactly what they were voting for with Obama, but did it anyway for various reasons. I disagree with them too, but this post isn't about them.]

That said, it’s important that we try to understand why people like Marchand wanted to believe if we ever want them to drop their support for the Democrats. There are possibly a lot of people out there like her who are becoming disillusioned with Obama (although as The Nation‘s Eyal Press argues, it’s not clear how much of the Left this represents; there’s still a lot of people out there, like Press, for whom nothing can seem to shake their support for Obama). Sounding smug and superior, putting them on the defensive, isn’t going to win their support for an independent progressive movement that won’t allow itself to be an arm of the Democratic Party. We need to recognize that some of the reasons they wanted to believe are legitimate, if unfortunate, and work from there.

The most important thing to realize is that none of us are perfectly rational, coolly and calmly weighing the pros and cons of candidates/positions. People choose candidates in large part based on how those candidates make them feel and then justify that gut decision after the fact. For people desperate to believe that change within the two-party oligopoly is possible, Obama made them feel pretty good. Marchand says as much in her article:

I knew I was naïve; yet like millions of Americans, I had no choice but to believe. Our hearts were desperate for hope. We saw Barack Obama as an oasis in the desert. To think that he may be just a mirage is heartbreaking.

At least Marchand has the guts to look within and admit that the object of her hope is just a mirage, even if she can’t go all the way to realizing that she should have known that in the first place. It’s good that it’s happening this soon into Obama’s term. As for the numerous progressives for whom it seems Obama can do no wrong (or who like Press blow off that wrongdoing by talking about how we need to be “pragmatic”), bear in mind that it took six years after Bush was elected for conservatives to turn against him. I’m not holding my breath waiting for the Obama lovers to wake up.

Here is a message that progressive organizations and media outlets need to start sending to all Democratic party committees and members of Congress:

We are done attacking Republicans until you pass a public option for health care.

Until a public option is passed, I don’t want to hear about the latest hate and idiocy spewing from Limbaugh, or Tancredo, or Palin, or Gingrich, or whoever. And to tell you the truth, I don’t want to attack them for it, either. Because, right now, Republicans are not the obstacle to progressive governance. Instead, Democrats who refuse to support a public option are the obstacle.

I recommend reading the whole post, with which I couldn’t agree more.

It’s the Democrats that control most of the levers of power these days, so failure to enact progressive legislation lies entirely with them. They can’t blame opposition from the Republicans anymore, who have almost no influence at the national level (although you wouldn’t know that from media coverage). Rather, the blame lies entirely with the group of corporate Dems frequently described as “moderates” or “centrists” (thanks to whom conservatives still essentially have a majority in Congress), and with the party that refuses to challenge them.

The Democratic leadership’s excuse du jour for watering down legislation is the need to appease these “moderates,” yet they steadfastly oppose any public pressure on them from the progressive movement, let alone primary challenges aimed at replacing them with progressives. A case in point is Arlen Specter, whose reelection Obama has said he’ll support literally no matter what Specter does. Why do they work so hard to keep people like this in office? Is it perhaps because it offers a convenient way to avoid doing the right thing, like in the current health care debate?

As Bowers puts it:

We should be naming names, flying to their home states to hold large rallies, and lining up primary challengers against public-option averse Democrats. Instead, our leaders are holding fundraisers for them, pressuring their primary opponents, and hosting dinners in their honor. Kind of makes you wonder how serious even those Democrats in favor of the public option are about change. [emphasis added]

If you doubt this, then consider that the tolerance by Obama and the rest of the Democratic leadership of opposition from the “moderates” on issues like the public option stands in stark contrast to their willingness to bully progressives on war funding. As the Huffington Post reported just today, administration officials are threatening to withhold support at reelection from freshmen in Congress who vote against the supplemental war spending bill. This dynamic – coddling of “moderates,” bullying of progressives – demonstrates loud and clear the real priorities of the Democratic establishment.

All of this perfectly illustrates why I come down so much harder on Democrats and their progressive enablers than Republicans. I hate Rush Limbaugh and Bill O’Reilly as much as the next progressive, and I can see the appeal in attacking them due to the easy target they present and how egregiously offensive they are, but focusing on them while treating corporate Dems as a lesser evil isn’t going to bring us any closer to change. As I’ve said previously, the Dems are “frequently in a position to implement progressive policies, or to stop conservative ones, but choose not to.” On many issues right now, the Dems are the ones standing in our way; they’re the ones we should be fighting.

“But I have a sickeningly familiar feeling in my stomach, and the feeling deepens with every interaction with the Obama team on [LGBT] issues. They want them to go away. They want us to go away. …

…the overwhelming sense – apart from a terror of saying anything about gay people on the record – is that we are in the same spot as in every Democratic administration: the well-paid leaders of the established groups get jobs and invites, and that’s about it.” -Andrew Sullivan

It’s pretty hard to defend Obama’s inaction on gay rights issues, but that doesn’t stop people from trying. Reader tiradefaction recently sent me this article on the subject by Emma Ruby-Sachs entitled Obama’s Public Opinion on Gay Marriage Doesn’t Matter. From the article:

“I would love to see Obama stand up and say that LGBT Americans deserve equal rights in all areas of the law – something he stated publicly many times before he was President and a sentiment he has now retracted. After all the time spent campaigning for Obama, my own little heartbreak would be mended if Obama would tell the entire country that people like me are worthy of full rights.

But as a political junkie not only do I know that won’t happen, but I don’t care if it does.

I believe that Obama’s public opinion on gay marriage is particularly irrelevant. As well, any public statements made by his office, while comforting, will not translate into actual gains for our movement.

So excuse me for adhering to real politik here, but our focus should not be on whether or not Obama is commenting on Iowa marriage decisions or making public statements about UAFA. They are not the kind of actions that will win this fight.”

Instead, Ruby-Sachs says, we should “pressure members of Congress to stand up and publicly support gay rights issues. Those votes, those individuals, are the ones that matter. They can attain critical mass, can change the accepted discourse in the U.S. and lead to easy votes on equal rights legislation.”

She’s right to an extent. The president isn’t singularly important, and we do need to be pressuring Congress (leaving aside the issue of whether certain segments of the LGBT movement are actually willing to pressure any Democrat, let alone the president). But I still have serious reservations about the article.

First of all, she’s trying to have it both ways. Obama’s cool if he stands up for gay rights, but even if he doesn’t that’s still okay. One frequently sees this among Obama lovers: there’s no way he can possibly screw up in their eyes. Taken to extremes, it can become a quasi-religious “Obama works in mysterious ways” argument, wherein every disappointing action is taken to be part of some super-secret plan to do the exact opposite of what he appears to be doing – like the claim from some quarters that the real reason Obama has embraced many of Bush’s legal justifications for state secrecy is because he’s actually hoping the courts rule against him.

Or, in many other cases people just change what they think to be in line with who they’re supporting – as Ruby-Sachs is possibly doing with Obama on LGBT issues. An example of this line of thought can be found in the response of the Obama lovers to his flip-flop on releasing torture photos, for which they’re now scrambling to provide excuses. Glenn Greenwald had an important question for these people:

“…if you actually want to argue that concealing these photographs is the right thing to do, then you must have been criticizing Obama when, two weeks ago, he announced that he would release them. Otherwise, it’s pretty clear that you don’t have any actual beliefs other than: “I support what Obama does because it’s Obama who does it.” So for those arguing today that concealing these photographs is the right thing to do: were you criticizing Obama two weeks ago for announcing he would release these photographs?”

Likewise, Ruby-Sachs says she “would love to see Obama stand up and say that LGBT Americans deserve equal rights in all areas of the law,” and then promptly turns right around and says it’s fine that he hasn’t. Does anyone really think that if Obama did start publicly supporting gay rights, she’d say, “Maybe it’d be better if he stayed quiet on the issue”? There are much worse offenders than her (she at least recognizes the need to apply pressure to Obama), but still, cognitive dissonance anyone?

As to the main point of her article, that Obama’s opinions and actions are “irrelevant” and “will not translate into actual gains for our movement,” I totally disagree. While the president may not be able to push legislation though by himself, there’s still quite a bit he could be doing. For one thing, Ruby-Sachs rightly alludes to backroom arm-twisting Obama could be doing to advance legislation, although she makes no apparent attempt to explain why he isn’t doing that already.

Presidents play a major role in framing the debate and defining the “conventional wisdom.” If the president isn’t engaged in an issue, much of the media will take that as a sign that it’s not important, and many Democrats in Congress will be less willing to stick their necks out for fear no one will be there to keep their heads from getting chopped off. Frank Rich of the New York Times commented recently on a significant factor holding back the Democrats on LGBT issues:

“As [Freedom to Marry executive director Evan] Wolfson said to me last week, they lack ‘a towering national figure to make the moral case’ for full gay civil rights. There’s no one of that stature in Congress now that Ted Kennedy has been sidelined by illness, and the president shows no signs so far of following the example of L.B.J., who championed black civil rights even though he knew it would cost his own party the South…

‘This is a civil rights moment,’ Wolfson said, ‘and Obama has not yet risen to it.’ Worse, Obama’s opposition to same-sex marriage is now giving cover to every hard-core opponent of gay rights, from the Miss USA contestant Carrie Prejean to the former Washington mayor Marion Barry, each of whom can claim with nominal justification to share the president’s views.”

LGBT-friendly legislation is much more likely to pass if a president, especially one as (inexplicably) popular as Obama, keeps it from being moved to the back burner. This is especially the case on the issue of “Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell”. It’s clear that at best repeal of DADT is a low priority for the Obama administration, and as Kerry Eleveld reported in The Advocate, there are signs that they might not follow through with it. This is a problem, because as Eleveld notes:

“Aubrey Sarvis, executive director of SLDN, indicated that a bill was unlikely to be introduced without support from the president. ‘Congress will likely not act without a nod from the commander in chief. Congress often defers military personnel matters to him. And Obama is the ultimate enforcer of ‘don’t ask, don’t tell,’’ he said.

A Democratic strategist who spoke on the condition of anonymity pressed the point a little harder: ‘No one wants to push this without the backing of the White House,’ he said.”

DADT is also one of the few areas of LGBT policy where Obama could take concrete action himself, without waiting for legislation from Congress. Granted, a repeal from Congress would be necessary in the long-term. But Aaron Belkin argues at The Huffington Post that Obama could de facto kill DADT with an executive order. So… why doesn’t he? Instead, he’s choosing to fire Arab linguists, while writing notes to the fired soldiers about how upset he is with doing it, even though he hasn’t done anything to stop it.

And this brings me to my last issue with Ruby-Sachs’ article. Even if I were to concede her point that public statements from Obama “will not translate into actual gains for our movement,” I’d still argue that it would be nice to know for once that Obama actually believes strongly in something, actually has a backbone and is willing to take a stand for something or someone. I’m not being hyperbolic; I’m really not sure. You have to admit that Obama isn’t exactly the most courageous politician out there (although that’s probably something a good chunk of his supporters like about him; it would seem that one person’s doublespeak is another person’s political realism).

On the contrary, there doesn’t seem to be much that he isn’t willing to sacrifice for the sake of political expediency. He appears completely opposed to radically restructuring the system, and definitely isn’t willing to take risks to do so. In fact, one of the few things he’s showed any degree of backbone on is handing the treasury over to Wall Street in the form of bailouts, standing up for neoliberal economic policies in the face of widespread public opposition.

On issue after issue, including LGBT issues, Obama has taken mostly symbolic steps to appear slightly less monstrous than his Republican opponents even while doing little to substantively alter the status quo. This is especially true on civil liberties/national security issues. He is admittedly showing real courage on closing Guantanamo in the face of an absurd fearmongering campaign (to which all too many other Democrats gave in)… but is pretty much just using it as a cover for embracing slightly modified Bush/Cheney policies, like abuse of state secrets, “preventive detention,” and a “kinder, gentler” form of military commissions. Not to mention, he wants to keep the prisoners at Bagram Air Base, a place every bit as bad as Guantanamo, stripped of their rights. Even Jon Stewart joked recently, in the context of poking fun at Dick Cheney’s hysteria over Obama’s positions, that there’s really only a 3-5% difference between the two.

Obama frequently utilizes one of the oldest tricks in politics, saying that he “supports” a given policy or position, and then doing nothing to advance it. David Sirota argued that this was the case with “cramdown” (allowing bankruptcy judges to modify home loans to prevent foreclosure, which subsequently failed in the Senate), and increasingly seems the case with the Employee Free Choice Act. He campaigned on EFCA to get union support, but his financial backers and many of his advisers are completely opposed to it, and he doesn’t seem willing to expend any “political capital” to see it through. “The motive for the two-step is obvious,” Sirota said. “Obama aims to get public credit for populist positions, while wink-and-nodding his way to moneyed-interest appeasement”.

So I reiterate: is there anything Obama is strongly committed to aside from the path of least resistance? It would be nice to know that he sees the LGBT community as something other than a source of votes and money; for a self-described “fierce advocate” for gay rights, he seems awfully willing to throw gays under the bus.

Well, I finally gave in and made a Twitter account, despite my intense hatred of Twitter. I have a specific purpose in mind for it, though, so that might make my decision slightly better. (It didn’t stop my wife from giving me a confused look when I told her, though.)

I’m planning to keep the content focused on politics/religion/whatever else you might find here. I’ll probably use it to share links, which I’d been looking for a way to do.

There’s a widget in WordPress which is supposed to add my Twitter feed to my blog, but I can’t get it to work yet. In any case, you can check it out here.

AlterNet recently had an interesting article by Tana Ganeva on new statistics about the attitudes of American Catholics: Most American Catholics Far More Liberal Than Church Leadership. From the article:

“The Catholic Church leadership continues to render itself more and more irrelevant with out-of-date and loudly proclaimed stances on abortion, reproductive rights, gay rights, AIDS policy, stem cell research… [but a new Gallup poll] shows that the views of practicing Catholics on a range of social issues are more or less in line with American non-Catholics.”

It’s of course heartening to see that so many Catholics reject church doctrine. But that to me raises the question as to why they still publicly identify with the church when they reject so many of its stances. I’m not surprised that they’re not embracing atheism, but I don’t get why they don’t at least switch to a more tolerant denomination, or even split off and form their own parallel church.

This brings be to the conclusion Ganeva draws from the data, with which I highly disagree:

“But it also points to the fact that often the most vocal spokespeople for a religion are not the most representative of that denomination’s adherents as a whole, but rather a crazy fringe given a platform by our sensationalist media. This is another pretty obvious point to bring up, but it is an important one, since often liberal reactions to the crazies is to trash all religious people — when many of them, as revealed by the Gallup poll, don’t give a damn about how other people choose to live their lives.”

It may be true that the Pope and the church hierarchy don’t represent the views of American Catholics. But it’s not “our sensationalist media” that keeps them in a position of power and influence; it’s the acquiescence of millions of liberal American Catholics who pay lip service to church leaders, keep going to Mass, and keep giving the church money, even as in private they completely blow off the church’s teachings. I’d be willing to cut liberal Catholics some slack if they were doing more to publicly oppose their leaders.

A little while back I stumbled on a great comment on this post at Pharyngula that perfectly illustrates my concerns here. The post was about this sickening story on a brutal Mormon prep school in Utah, and some of the commenters argued along the lines of, “Yeah, that’s horrible, but the majority of Mormons aren’t like that.” To which a user named asteranx responded:

“It simply doesn’t matter if a majority of Mormons are nice people – if the nasty ones are in charge, it’s because the nice ones are allowing an extremist minority to speak and act on their behalf. And just stepping up and saying ‘Most of us don’t agree’ is a rather impotent response while the ones you don’t agree with (after being elected by majority vote) are beating children in your name.”

I wouldn’t say I oppose religious moderates; I’d much rather people be that than fundamentalists. It’s more like I’m uneasy with the concept. There are many reasons for that uneasiness, but one of the main ones is the role moderates play in legitimizing religious fundamentalism/extremism. The primary way they do that is by refusing to oppose the extremists publicly and strongly; and by continuing the unthinking respect given to religion, the idea that it’s wrong and “intolerant” to criticize people’s religious beliefs, no matter how crazy or harmful. [for further reading on the latter point, check out this post from Greta Chrstina: Does The Emperor Have Clothes? Religion and the Destructive Force of Asking Questions]

Many moderate believers, when faced with criticism of their association with a hardline church, or more generally when people in mainline churches are confronted with crazy fundamentalism, think it’s enough to just politely say, “Well I don’t agree with that,” and then move on. I don’t think they should be let off the hook that easily.