I’ve seen some Facebook comments and tweets saying that we on the left should give Trump a chance and work with him. This is a puzzling request. For one thing, it’s a given. Trump is president; no one denies that. There were certainly some irregularities in the election process—years of voter suppression tactics by Republicans, the unethical actions of the FBI director days before the election, the inability to verify election results in Wisconsin, Michigan, and Pennsylvania—some of which could have been enough to tip a close election from one candidate to another. However, the Electoral College voted and Congress accepted the result, so Trump is president.

And if Trump is president, he automatically gets a chance. He has a Republican Congress to pass legislation for him, so no matter what progressives say and do, he will in fact have no excuse for any failures to achieve his goals and fulfill his many promises.

But why exactly should people on the left give Trump a chance and work with him? After all, we can see that his ideas are wrong, his words are often morally repulsive, insulting, and divisive, and he has surrounded himself with a cabinet of billionaires who have never shown any interest in helping the common person. If Trump has bad ideas and says stupid things, the moral obligation of anyone on the left or right is to point out how wrong and stupid he is. The hope is that he, or one of his advisors, will come to their senses for a moment and therefore propose a better idea. I suspect the chances of this are slight but it would be worse to be silent in the face of the disastrous policies he has promoted so far.

Also, don’t forget for one second that the Republicans refused to accept and work with Obama for eight years. From day one, they devoted themselves to blocking his administration in any way they could. Why is it that a significant percentage of those on the rightwing believed the obvious lies that Obama was born in Kenya and is a secret Muslim? It’s because many on the right, including Donald Trump, pushed these lies in order to delegitimize Obama’s presidency. The Republicans in Congress mounted the most obstructionist campaign ever seen in the history of this country’s Congress.

And you think progressives should grow up, accept Trump, and work with him? Get real. Politics is sometimes contentious, sometimes means a clash of ideas and movements. That’s life. Accept it, grow up, and learn why progressives see through Trump’s lies and are concerned for this country’s future. Those who voted for Trump clearly had a lot of anger, but it’s unfortunate that they were fooled about the sources of the problems that led to their anger and it’s unfortunate that they were fooled by decades of propaganda against Hillary Clinton.

Hillary Clinton is not perfect. I doubt if she would have reined in the greed and corruption of Wall Street, nor helped enough to reduce the growing economic inequality in this country. However, she would have made a vastly better president than Trump. Trump proved that already during his days as the president-elect, and his continued lies and childish ranting have proved it each day of his presidency.

So, don’t whine rightwingers. Trump gets his chance every time he acts, every time he speaks, and every time he tweets. And every time he does something stupid, every time he lies, he deserves to have that mistake, that lie, mercilessly thrown back in his face. So far, all he has done is blow the chances he has gained as the head of this country.

Kelly Quelette describes herself as a 25-year-old stay-at-home mom and also as “a white female. A victim of sexual abuse. A Republican. A Christian” who is voting for Trump. She published her views on her blog at https://kellyquelette.wordpress.com and it gained a wider audience for a few days by getting picked up by some other web sites.

I was not impressed by her writing. She comes across initially as sincere and earnest, but a closer examination shows her to be naïve, dishonest, even deceitful.

She looks at four areas to justify her support for Trump:

1. National security (especially immigration policies)
2. Economy stability
3. Supreme Court
4. Abortion

In these areas, she usually misrepresents Clinton’s position while naively seeing Trump as having the better solution.

Quelette claims that Clinton wants “open borders”, that she would “allow anyone and everyone into our country.” Quelette does not say how she gets this idea of Clinton’s policy. Yet a little research (for example, http://www.cfr.org/campaign2016/hillary-clinton/on-immigration) shows that Clinton’s immigration policy says nothing about letting in everyone, no matter what. It’s certainly a more liberal approach than Trump’s walls since it includes provisions for humane treatment of detained illegal immigrants, a path to citizenship for undocumented immigrants, and the acceptance of refugees from places like Syria. It also includes a focus on deportation for trouble makers. And when Quelette asserts that we must screen immigrants, she shows her ignorance of the fact that we do this already. Trump’s walls would be an unbuildable boondoggle.

Someday this country will need to change its immigration policies to be more restrictive. But this will not be because of terrorists sneaking in and killing people. It will be because of a recognition that at a certain point we cannot keep absorbing a large number of people without causing our own country to get overpopulated like too many other countries are now. Right now we’re caught in between isolationist, fear-mongering, xenophobic policies of rightwingers and the more generous, yet ultimately unsustainable policies favored by the Democrats (and many businessmen who want cheap labor).

On the economy, Quelette believes Trump will be better because he is a businessman. The fact that a government and a business are very different does not deter her here. She also naively believes that Trump has been a model businessman; she foolishly believes the ones he stiffed did not do good work. She offers no evidence in support of that, and since the evidence is rather that it was a routine policy on Trump’s part signals that the quality of work had nothing to do with it. Her faith in the hard-work of the rich and how they deserve their wealth, and thus shouldn’t pay more taxes would be quaint if it didn’t lead people to accept economic policies like lower taxes for the rich that have proven to be a failure. Some of the rich have worked hard and come up with great ideas that allowed them to become wealthy. Others simply inherited the money, and others simply got into a lucrative position through family connections and then could basically scam the system (think, hedge fund managers who earn insane amounts of money, amounts that reflect in no way what little value they might bring to our society). She doesn’t understand the common sense workings of the rich. If you give rich people more money, why would they hire more people if there is no demand for the goods or services their company provides? If you give them more money, where will they invest it? They will invest it maybe in this country or maybe in some other country, thus not helping the average person on the street, but just helping themselves get even richer.

Trump is someone who, because of the money he started his adult life with, could take advantage of the leverage that wealth gives in the business world and then also use the tax and bankruptcy laws that benefit big businesses. Leading a government is a wholly different ball game for which he has no skills and little knowledge. Blustering and bullying on the world’s stage will lead to disaster for this country and maybe much more of the world.

Her biggest reason to vote Trump is the chance that the next president will get to select up to 5 new judges. Certainly, from a purely conservative approach (that is, totally disregarding all the negative factors about Trump), this is a reason to vote for Trump. The problem here of course is that the conservative-dominated court that we had until Scalia died made horrendous decisions, especially those that favored corporations over real citizens and those that hurt voting rights and 4^th amendment protections.

Finally, she gets into the abortion debate, where she thinks the issue is “plain and simple.” This is an absurd and ignorant position from the get-go. Abortion will never be plain and simple. Just ask any women who has had to make the choice or any woman who lived in a country that didn’t give her any choice. There will always be times when an abortion is necessary, but those times can be greatly reduced (and progress has been made here) with good education and the availability of contraception and medical care. Quelette lies when she claims that Clinton thinks that fetuses have no rights even a few minutes before birth. Clinton clearly accepts the existing court decisions that limit late-term abortions.

Quelette comes across as a young, sincere person whose yearning for certainty causes her to fall into the trap of simplification. She simplifies Clinton’s view so she can pretend she is evil and she simplifies the abortion issue so she can pretend she is on the side of all that is good and right. Sorry, life just isn’t that simple. You need to look at all the facts, which means you can’t just accuse Clinton of something without showing the evidence for your view. You can’t ignore Trump’s unpresidential temperament, sleazy business tactics, and general moral failings.

I’m going to weigh in on the recent racial turmoil by pointing out the stupidity of a puerile opinion piece by Todd Starnes at the Fox News web site (see http://www.foxnews.com/opinion/2016/07/08/dallas-attack-pigs-in-blanket-crowd-got-what-wanted.html). He starts by saying all lives matter and he recalls how as a child in his church in the Deep South they would sing about how everyone, no matter what color, was cared for by God. The Sunday school lesson didn’t sink in too deeply for Mr. Starnes (nor for too many in the South) because he goes on to deceptively vilify blacks. When you dishonestly attack a group of people, you are clearly acting as if some people don’t deserve to be treated justly, fairly, honestly–that their lives in fact don’t matter.

Let’s start with the phrase “All lives matter.” That is in fact a laudable, morally admirable statement. However, you have to consider the context in which people are saying it. The context is that, in response to many senseless killings of blacks by policemen, the black community started promoting the “Black lives matter” slogan. This was a slogan that did not deny that all lives matter; it did not claim that only black lives matter. In response to policemen and the justice system repeatedly acting as if black lives did not matter, the phrase asserts the idea that we must as a nation start treating blacks as full citizens, deserving of justice and equal treatment under the law, that black lives matter also.

If you respond to the phrase “Black lives matter” with the phrase “All lives matter” or “Police lives matter”, you are missing the point, perhaps purposely. There hasn’t been any doubt that police lives matter because their lives and careers have been protected again and again by our justice system, even when the police were clearly acting either incompetently or murderously. You would be more accurate to say, “All lives SHOULD matter”, not “All lives matter,” because the reality is that all lives do not matter but we SHOULD work toward the goal of all lives being valued.

Starnes goes on to whine about Obama’s response to acts of violence, claiming that Obama has always urged caution and patience when a Muslim has killed Americans, but he has immediately assumed law enforcement officers were guilty. This is nonsense of course. Starnes quotes Obama saying “cops acting stupidly” and “If I had a son…” as evidence that he is no friend of law enforcement. But the fact is cops have acted stupidly and that is putting it kindly. Also note that the “If I had a son” phrase refers to the Trayvon Martin case where the killer was not a policeman, just an idiot wannabe-cop who clearly provoked a confrontation and then killed an unarmed person.

Finally, Starnes refers to some chants at some of the recent protests. In Minnesota, the protesters chanted, “Pigs in a blanket, fry ‘em like bacon.” Starnes is horrified at this, but one of the protesters claimed it actually was more of a teasing chant that only last 30 seconds and, in support of this, a policemen on the scene responded to it with, “Everybody likes bacon. I think we can all get behind that.” In other words, if you focus on that chant, you’re not being fair. You are not looking at the complete situation, a situation that gives blacks more than ample reason to be angry.

Another chant Starnes refers to is one at a New York protest about the death of Eric Garner where some people yelled, “What do we want? Dead cops. When do we want them? Now.” Once again Starnes is being dishonest. As pointed out by Joy-Ann Reid of MSNBC, the protesters who made this chant were not with the main protest nor did they do this chant during the main protest. That is, they were a fringe group, more extreme. Starnes is deceptively using the most extreme cases in order to vilify all blacks. (See http://www.msnbc.com/the-reid-report/the-truth-about-the-dead-cops-chant)

One of the inevitable results of injustice is that you will have extremely angry people. If you are the target of their anger, of course you will want to say that any violence on their part is unjustified, illegal, and immoral, especially if you see yourself as innocent. But what are these people supposed to do when for decade after decade their rights are denied? The various civil rights movements in this country are replete with peaceful protests and with activists striving to bring about change through the legal system, and yet change comes not at all or at a snail’s pace. At some point, the more extreme of them, the less patient, or perhaps the less stable of them, will snap and perpetrate horrors on others. If you want to reduce the chances of this happening, you must actively work for a just world.

Another inevitable result is that even when a persecuted group tries to protest peacefully, there will be radicalized individuals who will see the situation as an opportunity to get revenge. For example, when a protest in St. Paul, Minnesota closed a freeway, it became a riot when certain individuals started throwing stones and other debris at the police. BLM claims these people were not part of their group, and I’m inclined to believe them. However, it would also be unsurprising if some members of BLM are willing to be violent, but at the same time you really can’t expect BLM to control every person who might show up for a protest.

Starnes of course is the kind of person who will blame all negative outcomes on the BLM movement or on black protesters in general. He will make no effort to get the facts or understand the full picture. He is more interested in keeping blacks as second-class citizens, as ones whose lives do not matter.

If you have conservative relatives, you see their views in the social media. Unfortunately, the social media suits the hit-and-run type of communication very well. Just smugly post some seemingly clever phrase, and think you’re saving the world for conservatism. However, if you examine the logic of these, you will find it wanting in every case. Most common is the use of the strawman fallacy, where the person argues against something that isn’t real, and not surprisingly, thinks he or she has won.

For example, take the following:

If gay people were shot in the forehead, it would have been a hate crime.

If black people were shot in the forehead, it would have been a race crime.

Christians were shot in the forehead, and it’s a gun control problem?

The writer is referring to the recent Umpqua Community College shootings in Oregon. The words push the right-wing buttons for a slew of things that conservatives habitually whine about: tougher gun control, a supposed war on Christians, and the idea that gays and blacks get special treatment.

Yet there is a fundamental dishonesty in all three of the statements. If a gay person is shot in the forehead, it is in fact not necessarily a hate crime. It’s only a hate crime if the perpetrator was motivated by homophobia, that is, targeted the person because the person was gay. Similarly, for the claim that when a black person is shot in the forehead it is a race crime. Unfortunately, black people, and people of any race, get shot in the head and elsewhere for many reasons, and many of those reasons have nothing to do with race.

But the last sentence is the most dishonest one. For starters, it’s not clear that the shooter was specifically targeting Christians. His writings show a general anti-religious view, especially against organized religion, but not just Christianity. Some survivors report that those who identified themselves as Christians were shot in the head and those who did not identify as Christians were shot in the legs, but other survivors report hearing no questions from the shooter about their religion.

The shooter’s writings show other motivations for killing people than anti-Christianity. The shooter was clearly a depressed, mentally unstable, frustrated person who wanted to go out in a blaze of pseudo-glory. One should also note that even if one admits that there are some hate crime aspects to this case, they are largely irrelevant because the shooter is dead. Calling a crime a hate crime enables the justice system to impose harsher punishments. If the person is dead, the punishment phase is moot.

It’s also dishonest if one tries to connect this shooting with a mythical war on Christians. One Tennessee minister went so far as to urge his congregation to arm themselves. Yet there is no war on Christians in this country. Christians are still the most powerful and privileged religion in this country. Many of them like to claim they are being persecuted but usually that is because someone objects to statements from some of the more extreme Christian sects or because someone objects to Christians trying to use the public government or public school system to promote their religious views. Such Christians rightly deserve ridicule and even legal rebukes for their clearly unconstitutional actions. Religion belongs in an individual’s mind and heart, in the home, and in the church or temple, but not in government-funded locations and activities.

Next, in this case, we are dealing with a mass killing. The first two sentences talk about individual gays and blacks being killed. The fact is that modern guns not only making killing one person easy; they make mass killings far too easy to accomplish. Hate crimes can and have been perpetrated without guns. Just think of the cases when a group of people have attacked an individual because of their race or sexual orientation, and they have been able to seriously harm or kill that person without any need for a gun. They would just string the person up from the branch of a tree.

But when a mass killing occurs and it was clearly made more feasible by easy legal access to an arsenal of weapons by a mentally troubled individual, it is clear that something needs to be done, and this something should include a system that puts limits on how many guns a person can own, what type of guns a person can own, and what kind of person can own a gun. Note that the Oregon shooter was dismissed from the military after a short time. The military clearly saw that this man had problems. If we implement rational gun control, people who can use guns responsibly will still have them, but there will be fewer cases of unstable people having access to guns. We’ll never eliminate gun deaths, but we can reduce them greatly without any infringement of Second Amendment rights.

In a recent column, George Will laments that the NYT uses the headline “Economy Pulls Ahead” and says then that the American economy is “an island of relative strength.” This, says Will, is an example of what Patrick Moynihan called, “defining deviancy down,” that is, of viewing something as good or normal that used to be considered deviant. Yet, if we look closer, we can see that Will’s column is, ironically, a clear example of “defining deviancy down.” Will demonstrates how columnists can now get away with producing logically weak, blatantly partisan, utterly inane columns. Of course, we’ve always had political hacks churning out such garbage, but Will has sometimes been held up as intellectually superior to the run-of-the-mill propagandists on the right.

To read Will’s column, follow this link: http://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/george-f-will-defining-economic-failure-down/2015/02/04/39e44eee-abd1-11e4-9c91-e9d2f9fde644_story.html

Will is correct to note that economic growth in recent years has not been as robust as in other recoveries and that there has not been as much concern about this as one would expect. At the same time, the NYT headline and its description of the US economy were perfectly correct. Note that the NYT said the economy was “an island of relative strength.” They did not say simply “strength” nor did they say “great strength.” Rather they were careful in their wording, clearly implying that a truly strong economy would be different. This contradicts Will’s claim that we now consider modest growth as acceptable. In fact, in recent years progressives have repeatedly called for measures to improve economic growth but Republican obstructionism has prevented the government from doing more. The real question is “Why have Republicans not done more to help the economy for all sectors?”

At this point, Will had two paths he could have explored. One, he could have explained why we have had slow growth and, two, he could have explained why slow growth is not criticized as harshly as it could be. He does not attempt the latter, and what he offers in regard to the former fails miserably.

Here are his main arguments for the causes of the weak and slowly growing economy:

1. Economic weakness is due to “alarming cultural changes”: There were fewer births in 2010 compared to 2000 and 49% of people 25-34 today have never been married as compared to 12% in 1960.
2. To a “considerable extent,” the economic weakness is the government’s fault because of the “uncertainties created by the Affordable Care Act” and because of too many government regulations.
3. Unemployment benefits hurt the economy (they are supposedly an example of “iatrogenic government” or a cure that actually harms) and the slight improvement recently “may” be due partly to the Republicans preventing an extension of unemployment benefits.

Stop a moment and ask yourself, “Could changes in birth rates and the time people marry, the ACA, government regulations, and unemployment benefits really be the main drivers of economic weakness? Are there no other factors that should be brought up here?”

Argument #1: In this one, George Will throws out a grand statement: Our economic malaise is “both a cause and a consequence of alarming cultural changes.” The idea that the vicissitudes of an economy can affect the culture and vice versa is obvious. It is only of value if one shows carefully the actual cause and effect processes. Since the interaction of economy and culture can go in both directions, it would be of interest to analyze which aspect is of more importance in this case. Yet Will gives us nothing–no explanation as to why fewer births and fewer marriages among younger people cause economic weakness. The population is still growing thanks to immigration, so one cannot blame problems on a shrinking market due to fewer people. Although married people tend to me more stable economically because of tax breaks and the ability to share expenses, Will does not show how that translates to a better economy. In fact, when people are single (and not living with anyone else), they must spend more individually on such items as housing and a car. More spending should mean more money in the economy. It’s much easier to see how a poor economy makes it more likely that people will delay when they marry and have children, but Will is a lazy here. He can’t be bothered to go into details; you just have to trust his great insight.

Argument #2: The claim that the ACA creates uncertainty and thus hurts businesses makes no sense, mainly because the only real uncertainty about the ACA is whether or not the Supreme Court will find a way to gut it. The law is in place in the meanwhile, and there is no significant uncertainty about what businesses must do. Will’s claim about regulations hurting the economy is just the usual right-wing talking point against regulations. It is and will always be nonsense. The issue is not how many regulations you have, but whether you have enough good ones. We clearly don’t have enough good regulations, and that has a severe negative impact on the economy and on our tax burden. The government must clean up the mess when extraction industries pollute the environment, when the financial sector recklessly crashes the economy, and when businesses in general offer the lowest wages and benefits they can get away with, thus requiring many working people to apply for government assistance or live in abject poverty in their old age.

And even if we admit that the ACA causes some increase in expenses for some businesses, to be fair, we must also admit some ways the ACA helps the economy, thus counterbalancing any drag on the economy that Will claims to see. By helping Americans be healthier and avoid medical bankruptcies, the ACA helps the economy in the long term. Also healthier employees will help a business by reducing work force disruptions due to illness and employees with healthcare will have less incentive to leave to find a job that includes healthcare benefits.

Argument #3: This is yet another argument that makes no sense. Cutting people off from extended unemployment benefits is not going to have a noticeable positive effect on the employment rate. People don’t suddenly get jobs because their benefits weren’t extended. Employers don’t start hiring because benefits weren’t extended. Employers start hiring because they see an increased demand for their goods or services and they need more employees in order to take advantage of that.

Also, not extending benefits actually reduces the amount of money going into the economy since unemployment benefits have the advantage of going to people who need to spend every bit of it right away on essentials. So, it’s money immediately going into local economies. However, it’s not a huge amount; in fact, according to CNN Money, we’re talking about approximately $30 billion, a pittance so small in comparison to the economy as a whole that it would be hard for a statistician to find the effect on the economy. (See http://money.cnn.com/2012/11/29/news/economy/unemployment-benefits-cost) And if a few more people got jobs because their benefits were cut, perhaps because in desperation they took low paying jobs well below what they were qualified for, the amount of money they in turn would be putting in the economy would not be large enough to identify as a cause of the improvement, even slow improvement, in the economy.

Will’s arguments are all weak, and poorly supported, if at all. One can only conclude that he has no interest in attempting to explain any real reasons for our lackluster economy. One can list many reasonable possibilities—stagnant wage growth, ever increasing income and wealth inequality, insufficient efforts to stimulate the economy by the federal government (thanks to Republicans), unnecessary tax breaks for the wealthy, unnecessary layoffs of state, county, and city workers, insufficient protection of American jobs from unfair global competition, and so on. Will’s interest then must be in helping the Republicans hide their role in destroying the American economy. They have profited much by deceiving Americans into pouring their energies into fights for unneeded measures, such as prayer in public schools or voter IDs, or fights against imaginary dangers, such as gay rights. Their base is so caught up in thinking the Republicans might deliver on these hot button issues, that they don’t see the harm they are suffering or why. And they don’t seem to learn when year after the year the Republicans don’t deliver. Again and again, Reagan would tout the need for school prayer, but he could never deliver it and I’m sure he knew it. Of course, if it ever happens that the Tea Partiers get everything they want, you’ll see disaster for this country and then hopefully the collapse of the rightwing as a result, for they will be revealed for the frauds that they are.

In his column, Will simply took two phrases from Patrick Moynihan that caught his eye—“defining deviancy down” (ooh, alliteration) and “iatrogenic” (ooh, big word)–and then quickly spun a shallow fairy tale around them. As with so many opinion pieces from rightwingers, if you don’t bother to analyze and research what they are talking about, you are more ignorant after reading them. Thanks to the media who coddles him by paying him well for his drivel, Will sets a low standard for political writing. He himself has defined deviancy down. And if you want to impress your friends with the an example of an “iatrogenic” cure, just look at the austerity programs that conservatives love so much, but have failed around the world, much like the blood-letting medical practice of centuries ago.

The USA Today was generous enough to publish an opinion piece by Steve Deace, a radio show host, that attacked those who criticized the “Duck Dynasty” star, Phil Robertson, for his homophobic remarks (Follow this link). Now that it’s a good number of weeks since the affair was fresh, we can judge even better just how wrong Deace was. I can find fault with almost any sentence that Deace has written, but I’ll focus on three main areas: his claim that liberals are intolerant, his use of the Bible, and his complaint about government interference in how Christians run their businesses.

Deace’s piece starts with the line “The ‘tolerance’ society demands from Christians really is silent compliance” and later he whines about how “those pushing the new ‘my way or the highway’ definition of ‘tolerance’ have decided accommodating our differences of opinion is defeat.” To see why these accusations of intolerance against those who ask for equal rights for gays are ridiculous, all you must do is look at the wider context. Start with the fact that Christians for centuries didn’t just express some disapproval of gays; they actively persecuted, reviled, bullied, arrested, and murdered them. Neither gays nor the left as a whole have done anything remotely comparable in return. When some backwards moron like Phil Robertson uses his celebrity status to spread his homophobic and racist views, he encourages the kind of violence against minorities that has blackened this country’s history all too often.

And of course, in the end, Robertson hardly suffered and probably benefited. His suspension came at a time when filming was done for a while. His employers may even cynically have suspended him in order to boost sales and viewership. The initial show for the season was watched by fewer people than the first show of other years, but the Constitution does  not guarantee that one won’t suffer some consequences for expressing stupid ideas.

It seems difficult for some to understand, but tolerance does not include tolerance for those who are hateful, violent, and intolerant. Tolerance does not mean acceptance of all behavior or all beliefs. Those who are tolerant are simply much more willing to accept differing views without immediately condemning those who hold those views. The dividing line between what a society acknowledges as acceptable and what therefore all its members should be tolerant of is not a hard and fast line. Two hundred years ago homosexuality still would have been considered even by “tolerant” people as unacceptable. Similarly, hundreds of years ago, many societies found slavery acceptable. Times have changed. The homophobic views of narrow-minded Christians (and narrow-minded adherents of other religions) have been exposed as based on ignorance, prejudice, and ideological fanaticism.

When Deace brings the Bible into his argument, he immediately undermines his argument. He smugly claims that “[i]rrefutable history documents that the Bible and its teachings were the biggest influence on those that founded the freest and most prosperous nation in human history.” Yes, most of those who founded this country were clearly influenced by Christian teachings. But so what? It is also irrefutable history that this country was not established as a Christian nation and that throughout its history there have been numerous consistent actions from the highest judicial level to keep it a secular nation. It’s also irrefutable history that the nation’s founders were influenced by non-Christian traditions and philosophies as well. To bring the Bible into any national debate, especially one with legal ramifications, is to bring up a non-applicable authority. To the extent that his country is a secular country, it is free from the religious tyranny that some of its inhabitants would unfortunately so readily impose. From a legal standpoint, as soon as you use the Bible as your authority in this country, you have admitted you have to legal argument.

Deace also claims that “Robertson plainly repeated simple truths that are fundamental to western civilization — the Bible calls all sexual activity outside of holy matrimony sin and immoral, and it’s natural for a man to be attracted to a woman.” So what? Again, in spite of the importance of the Bible to Christians and in spite of some Christian’s belief that it is an inerrant source of truth, it has no legal standing in our society.

More important, the Bible’s views on sexuality are limited by the cultures which produced the Bible. Many cultures throughout history have taken quite limited views on human sexuality while a few have been more accepting of more diverse sexual and marital practices. What is crucial for our time is that we live in a society that values individual rights and also is an open enough society that homosexuality could come out of the closet. As more and more people have openly acknowledged that they were gay or lesbian or bisexual, and as more and more heterosexual people could see that these people were simply human beings—relatives, fellow workers, neighbors, and so on—then people could come to see that those who did not fit the heterosexual norm were fully deserving of respect and equal rights. People have started to understand that one’s sexuality is not a choice; it’s a part of who each person is. If you are a person who does no harm to others through your gender or sexual orientation, then you deserve acceptance. Those who do not see this are ignorant and narrow-minded, locked in an archaic mindset, and undeserving of tolerance.

Deace also tries to get sympathy for his side by criticizing the heavy hand of government when it tells businesses they must serve homosexuals or when it requires employer-funded health insurance to include birth control. This clearly appeals to those who think we can do with less government (even though it is these same far right Christians who want the government to control women’s reproductive choices). But let’s try taking seriously Deace’s idea that businesses should be allowed to serve only those customers who meet a business owner’s religious criteria. For those who have disapproved of biracial marriages on religious grounds be allowed to serve only whites? Could Catholics refuse to serve divorced customers? Could Christian Scientist business owners demand to be exempt from meeting any health insurance requirements? The much saner route is that any public business is obligated to serve the public, all of the public, not just some of it. End of discussion.

I also have no sympathy for the whining over the requirement for health insurance to include birth control. Employer-funded health insurance should be seen as part of the benefits package that employees receive for their work. Just as the employer cannot dictate what employees spend their money on, so employers cannot intrude into the employees’ use of health insurance by making it more difficult for them to get a legal medical benefit. The extreme Christian employers try to claim that because they are the ones funding the health insurance (or part of it anyway—few employers pay 100%), their religious or moral conscience is violated. Yet it is the government, not the business, that is mandating that birth control be included in the health insurance. It is inevitable in a country the size of the United States and where the laws are numerous and complex, that some individuals will object to many of those laws. I morally and religiously object to the obscene amount of money our country spends on war, but I don’t get to withhold a percentage of my taxes. Similarly, since they have decided to open a public business, Christian business owners need to follow the laws that apply to all businesses and not demand special treatment.

Kyle Becker at The Independent Review Journal recently posted an article claiming to list the 16 things we learned from the government shutdown (see Becker article here). The list includes only a few items that are accurate, such as “The American people deserve better than what they are getting from this government.”  For the most part, they are either stupidly picky complaints about some effect of the shutdown or they show an ignorance of how the government, legislation, and the economy work.

Mr. Becker whines about the national monuments being shut down and about money being spent on signs that say “Closed due to government shutdown” rather than just “Closed.” He does not have the wisdom or judgment to admit that such things are trivial compared to other programs that were  cut and that the real issue here is the Republicans willingness to hurt American people for no good reason.

Several items that show the writer’s ignorance about the government’s role in the economy and about how government debt is different than a regular person’s debt are shown in the following items from his list:

“The way that Washington politicians solve a debt ceiling crisis is to always vote for more debt.”

Reality: Politicians did not vote for more debt. They voted to pay debts already incurred. This is a fundamental misunderstanding of the whole debt crisis and debt ceiling issues. Congress had already voted to fund federal programs. Raising the debt ceiling is just saying that they are willing to in fact pay for these obligations. It is just as if you leased a car and agreed to pay $300 per month for the next few years. If you don’t want the obligation to make your lease payments, you should have avoided making a lease beforehand, but you don’t get to skip out on paying what you contracted to pay. The government shutdown cost us about $2 billion. That’s $2 billion of our money wasted for nothing. The real cause of the high national debt is not raising the debt ceiling. It comes from Bush’s tax cuts for the wealthy, his getting us involved in two mismanaged (and, in the case of Iraq, unnecessary) wars, and the corrupt financial sector that both Democrats and Republicans have enabled. If you want to reduce the debt, elect a Congress that raises taxes on the people who have an increasing share of this country’s wealth (the rich), cuts the bloated budgets for defense and “homeland” security, and passes measures that actually help regular people get good paying jobs that not only help them individually but also lead to increased tax revenues.

 “Obama basically argued that if we don’t borrow more money it’s like a ‘deadbeat’ choosing not to pay his mortgage. Wouldn’t putting bills on a credit card be the sort of thing a ‘deadbeat’ would do?”

Reality: This is a poor analogy. If you put bills on a credit card, you still presumably plan or promise to pay the credit card debt. Republicans want to just walk away from obligations. If we allowed this kind of behavior to become the norm, the U. S. government’s budget process would become unpredictable, and the economy would react negatively. The country’s credit rating would surely go down, thus causing more expense to service the debt.

 “400,000 non-essential “public servants” being laid off for a few weeks is more important than the fate of 310 million citizens and their per person debt of around $54,000 each”

Reality: While it is true that you can divide the total debt by the number of people to get an amount that each supposedly owes, it doesn’t really work this way. What should happen if the government, especially Congress, did its job correctly with regards to influencing the economy is that it would enact policies that would improve the economy, thus raising more revenue to reduce debt. That is, everyone throughout the economy would be earning more, and keeping more, even though they would be paying a higher tax amount (because of their larger income). If the Republicans keep hurting the economy, this future can never come about. And, yes, we do need to raise taxes on the rich. Bush cut them irresponsibly at the same time he was running up huge amounts of debt by getting into two wars.

“Compromise” for the Democrats always means meeting 100% of its demands.

Reality: This one shows how ignorant Becker is of how legislation comes about. For one thing, the ACA was itself a compromise. That’s the way legislation works when there are two parties. Whatever law gets passed inevitably has compromises. For the Republicans to threaten a government shutdown in order to get further compromises is ludicrous. Second, during Obama’s entire administration, Obama and the Democrats have been willing to compromise but the Republicans haven’t. In fact, progressives continually criticize Obama for being far too willing to compromise with the rightwing.

If you take Kyle Becker’s article seriously, you become more ignorant than you were beforehand. It serves only to confirm the biases many people unfortunately have based on the vastAmountof garbage the right wing sends to them.

I saw on Facebook recently one of those rightwing screeds that more typically is sent around by e-mail. It was about a high school principal who read a long statement about how they couldn’t say prayers at football games anymore because of a court ruling, but somehow society allowed all sorts of other  allegedly terrible things.

There is so much wrong with this principal’s speech that I’ll have to take his points apart one by one.

First, the idea that public schools should be allowed to include sectarian prayers is obviously at odds with the Constitution as it has been interpreted for years. This was a public event paid for with public money. Not all of the public necessarily followed the same religion as the principal (apparently a fairly conservative brand of Christianity), but if any those who had a different religion or perhaps no religion were at the game, they would be forced to listen to the dominant religion’s doctrine. This makes those people second-class citizens and that is not what this country is about.

I always wonder why the people in so many places (not just in the United States and not just Christians) want to use the power of the government to further their religion. Isn’t their religion attractive enough that people will join it without government coercion? Do they really want the government, which so many love to bash as corrupt and inefficient, to be involved with the religion they hold so dear?

The principal, after mentioning the ban on official prayers at the game, goes on to whine about many other things that can be done in society and sometimes specifically in a school. Each of these shows a misguided moral sense and other logical problems. But the fact is that they are also irrelevant to the prayer issue. The prayer issue is a legal issue involving the First Amendment, specifically the separation of church and state aspect of it. The other items the principal mentions are not the same kind of issue.

His first complaint is that he could publically show approval of “sexual perversion” and just call it “an alternate lifestyle.” By sexual perversion he means homosexuality but shows his bigotry by lumping it with other unnamed behavior that might more accurately be called sexual perversion.  He obviously does not understand nor accept that homosexuality is NOT a choice, not simply an alternate lifestyle. Some people are simply born that way. He did not choose to be heterosexual; others do not choose to be homosexual.  He was taught to loathe homosexuals based on some Bible verses, and he does not have the ability to see beyond such narrow thinking.

He then complains about the dispensing of free condoms. He is under the mistaken impression that giving out condoms causes teenagers to have sex. He cannot accept the fact that teenagers will have sex whether they have condoms or not. They might have a more sex with condoms, but the end result will be fewer sexual diseases and fewer teenage pregnancies.

He then complains about the idea that the killing of an unborn baby can be presented as a “viable means of birth control.” This is a distortion. People do not look at abortion as a viable means of birth control. It is something necessary and justifiable in many cases, and it is generally looked at as the least-desired solution. And if contraception were more easily available, there would be fewer abortions.

His next claim is to whine about Earth Day as a day where students are supposedly forced to worship Mother Earth under the guise of ecology. This is nonsense. There is no pressure on any teacher to teach Earth Day as a time to worship Mother Earth. If some teacher was a religious follower of “Mother Earth” and did try to teach that, the teacher would be subject to the same legal problems that Christian proselytizers have often gotten into. He is echoing a favorite tactic of the right with environmentalism. They attempt to hurt environmentalism  by labeling it a kind of religion, and thus not really based on science.

The principal says that people with strong, traditional Christian views are presented in classrooms as simple-minded and ignorant. Of course, he gives no actual examples. Some traditional Christians are in fact simple-minded and ignorant, and in fact an argument can be made that fundamentalists are likely to be more ignorant on many topics that the average person. They prefer to live in a sheltered world where they avoid such sciences as biology because it might conflict with their attempt to believe literally in the Bible. Also, most teachers (and you can bet this would include the teachers in his schools) bend over backwards to be tolerant of Christianity and usually other religions as well. But with a principal like this as your boss and living in an obviously Christian community, a teacher is not going to bad-mouth a Christian.

So, after this principal finished, supposedly all of the people in the stands and the players in the field all stood and prayed. This we are supposed to take as something inspiring. It is not. Don’t you wonder how many people in the stands would rather not have stood and prayed, but felt they had to in order to avoid conflict with their neighbors? Don’t you wonder if these people ever read Jesus’s admonition to pray in private?

The principal’s claim that they just want to pray for safety and good sportsmanship is not impressive. It would be just as good to make a statement hoping for a safe and fairly played game, and urging the players to bring that about. The idea that you need to pray for such an outcome is ludicrous. How many football games can you remember ended with no injuries? Why weren’t the prayers answered?  Maybe, if there is a God, then he or she is smart enough to know that if you are going to have a football game, there will be some injuries, and God does not see the need to break the laws of physics for people determined to bang into each other.

This event apparently did occur in Tennessee in the year 2000. The text posted on Facebook has been going around for over a decade. It goes to show that the right wing has no new ideas. They just keep trying to recycle the same tired and discredited notions.

Victor David Hanson recently wrote a column purporting to answer the question “Why Do Societies Give Up?” (See original here) His answer in the end is “History has shown that a government’s redistribution of shrinking wealth, in preference to a private sector’s creation of new sources of it, can prove more destructive than even the most deadly enemy.”

Unfortunately for his readers, Hanson gives no evidence in support of his conclusion. This is, first of all, because there is obviously no way to answer such a question in 15 short paragraphs and provide any amount of convincing evidence. His little column is just a pretentious masquerade hiding conservative propaganda. And, interestingly enough, the little bits of historic information he gives, contradict his conclusion.

Much of his column is a quick parade of fallen empires, civilizations, and countries. He notes that many causes have been presented for their downfall:  inflation, depleted resources, invasions, excessive spending, squabbling over fewer resources, “bread and circuses,” corruption, bloated bureaucracy, nationalization of industries, top-heavy government, and so on. Of these choices, Hanson’s conclusion seems to most closely fit the “squabbling over fewer resources” one, since he also earlier talked about “bicker[ing] over entitlement spoils” but he gives no reasons to believe this is the cause rather than the others he listed or others that you or I could think of.

If anything, Hanson contradicts himself. He also said that “By any historical marker, the future of Americans has never been brighter” and that we have more material goods than ever. If that is so, what does he mean by “shrinking wealth”? When he mentions “government’s redistribution of shrinking wealth” he no doubt, as a well-known conservative, means to criticize progressive social programs. But numerous studies have shown that the redistribution of wealth in the last 30 years has been to the elite. Their income and wealth have grown significantly while the income and wealth of the middle and lower classes have stagnated or fallen.

Hanson demonstrates the propaganda technique of a seemingly knowledgeable and authoritative coverage of a complex topic. As mere propaganda, it falls apart quickly on close examination. Hanson’s column is so cursory that it’s insulting to anyone with a regard for facts or evidence. It’s just an excuse to blame liberal policies for an alleged decline of America.

So he notes the horror of our “unsustainable debt” by throwing around the “T” word. Of course, if you look at the facts about our national debt and recent annual deficits, you would not be filled with horror or fear that America is going to implode because of it. You would be filled with anger that the corrupt politicians and the equally corrupt financial sector of this country have worked together to cut taxes on the rich and waste money on unnecessary wars, while doing little to counteract one of the biggest causes of our financial woes, health care.