I STILL Believe Anita Hill

"I believe Anita Hill."

As I was going through storage boxes in my office last week (on international women’s Day, it so happens) I came across a cache of old political buttons.

One of them contained the simple message “I believe Anita Hill.”

The confrontation between Anita Hill and Clarence Thomas occurred almost a generation ago; there are political activists in our Coachella Valley today who were either toddlers or yet unborn when Anita Hill’s testimony painted an unflattering portrait of Clarence Thomas is a man who personifies and exemplifies Lord Acton’s famous dictum that “power tends to corrupt, and absolute power corrupts absolutely.”

As I held the “I believe Anita Hill” button in my hand, I recalled a somewhat unfortunate conversation I have had with a former friend of mine, like me, a gay man.  What ended our friendship was his statement to me that women’s issues, which he described in a tone that can best be characterized as dismissive, did not matter at all to him. 

Was his position simply the misogyny that sometimes crops up among certain isolated individuals in our own gay community?  Or was it an indicator of a larger problem?  Are we men, as men, so complacently accustomed to the idea of male privilege that, irrespective of our sexual orientation, we don’t feel as if we have a dog in the hunt?

 
If so, we need to disabuse ourselves of that notion.

 
A generation ago, when Anita Hill was courageously calling out Clarence Thomas for his misbehavior, it probably would have been fair to say that there existed a consensus that the tide of history was moving in favor of full and unequivocal recognition of women’s first-class citizenship in the American Commonwealth.  Despite setbacks such as the failure of the equal rights amendment, it did appear that within a relatively short time, women would finally be recognized as the authentic owners of their own bodies, receive equal compensation for work of equal worth, and be fully acknowledged in law as possessing rights coextensive with those of men.

Oh boy, were we ever wrong.

If anything, women in America have come under attacks of such force and magnitude as to justify comparisons between their attackers and the Taliban.  Issues we had thought settled and closed, such as access to contraception, are now being re-litigated by social conservatives and presidential wannabes like Rick “Google Problem” Santorum.  A woman’s right to make reproductive choices without state intervention is under coordinated attack across the country, and some right-wing commentators have even gone so far as to question whether women should have the right to vote.

 
So, you may ask, what do these issues have to do with us guys?

 
The short answer is: an awful lot.

Full disclosure: I may have a somewhat skewed perspective.  When I first entered the workforce as a teenager, my supervisors were all women.  It was not until I started working as a summer law clerk that I actually was supervised by a man.  Several of my close female relatives, including my own mother, are or were in highly responsible executive positions.  No woman in my extended family can ever be said to have been barefoot, pregnant, and in the kitchen.

I may also have a skewed perspective because, in a socially conservative University in a socially conservative town in a socially conservative state during the Reagan administration, there were a number of us who were unafraid to be vocally and actively pro-choice; we understood and accepted the risk that standing out in freezing rain defending the Porter County Planned Parenthood facility in Valparaiso, Indiana proclaiming “this clinic stays open” might expose us to a certain degree of calumny from the anti-choice contingent. 

And calumny we got. 

I know what it’s like to be called “baby killer,” and to have my death prayed for; the thick skin I had to develop stood me in good stead during the years I spent on the City Council in Cathedral City, were being belabored was simply part and parcel of life for my colleagues and me.

For me, the issues at stake have less to do with pregnancy and contraception per se than with basic personal autonomy.  As a man, I can’t get pregnant; as a gay man, I can state with some confidence that the likelihood of a pregnancy resulting out of some sexual encounter of mine is probably quite small, nay, nonexistent.  But what I understand at a visceral level is that as and to the extent any government can control a woman’s bodily autonomy, whether by forcing her to carry an unwanted or unplanned pregnancy to term, or worse, depriving her of the ability to control through contraception whether a pregnancy even begins, that government can also control the extent to which I am able to live my life openly as an out gay man in the Commonwealth.  The same people who want to abolish reproductive choice are those who would happily compass my vanishing under color of a verse in Leviticus.

Sadly, that’s an equation which some in our community don’t seem to get.  Fortunately, most of us do, but it remains incumbent on all of us to be forthright in acknowledging that, as a matter of both principle and well considered self-interest, men, gay or straight, need to be with our sisters at the barricades supporting a woman’s basic right to be the mistress of her own body.

When Anita Hill dared to confront Clarence Thomas, she dared to take on an aspect of male privilege that depends for its existence upon an uncritical acceptance of the proposition that men have and should enjoy carte blanche to control women not merely by their actions, but also by their words.  Clarence Thomas’ documented acts of inappropriate sexual harassment link him ineluctably to Rush Limbaugh’s slut-shaming of Georgetown law student Sandra Fluke.  In both cases, the conduct in question reflected an atavistic assertion of straight male privilege to which the rest of us should take the strongest exception.

And while decent people throughout America have taken exception to Limbaugh’s despicable conduct, the fact that he felt emboldened enough to engage in it at all tells us that we --- especially men --- have a lot more work to do.  As presumptive holders of a societal privilege that even now tends to attach more to men than to women, we have a heightened moral responsibility to call out the Clarence Thomases and Rush Limbaughs in our society who believe that being male constitutes a license to engage in what amounts to the verbal equivalent of rape.

Because almost twenty years on, because I still remember the truth-telling courage it took for her to confront Clarence Thomas, I still believe Anita Hill.

-XXX-

Paul S.  Marchand is an attorney who lives and works in Cathedral City, California.  The views expressed herein are his own, and do not constitute legal advice.  He STILL believes Anita Hill.

UNFAITHFUL IN LITTLE, UNFAITHFUL IN MUCH: How Rick Santorum is Unqualified to be Dogcatcher, let alone President

By: Paul S. Marchand

For the longest time, I couldn’t think of Rick Santorum without also thinking of a remark attributed to Voltaire: “my only prayer to God is a simple one: ‘Lord, make my enemies ridiculous.’  The Lord has granted my prayer.”

Who, after all, could take seriously the various rantings and ravings of the quondam Pennsylvania senator, whose public record seemed to be made up of such obsessional sex-centric gems as “man on dog?”  Who could help but chuckle at Mr. Santorum’s so-called Google problem, even as one might have been tempted to wonder what washer setting would be the best one for getting santorum out of the bed linen.

Even after he had managed to beat Mitt Romney in the Iowa caucuses, many Americans, presumably including Mitt Romney, still viewed Mr. Santorum is nothing more than an over-the-top pre-Vatican II whack-job, whose actual chance of capturing the Republican nomination for the presidency, let alone of actually getting to the White House, was between slim and none.

I, too, shared that view.

No longer.

As Rick Santorum has educated us out of the words of his own mouth as to the extreme nature of his views, he comes across less and less like some peculiar love child of Elmer Gantry and Fulton Sheen, and more like something we have not seen in all of our American history, the denominational demagogue who seems intent upon reducing all of America to a state of absolute doctrinal obedience to the See of Rome.

 No matter how one views the universe, such a development ought to frighten us all worse than bombs.  For Mr. Santorum has clearly either forgotten or chosen to ignore the long and painful history of Roman Catholics in the United States.  In 1928, Protestant voters rejected the Democratic presidential candidacy of the Happy Warrior Al Smith because they could not bring themselves to trust a Roman Catholic in the White House.

Thirty-two years later, after having adroitly and sincerely assured the American public that he would not allow the White House to become a wholly owned subsidiary of the Vatican, John F. Kennedy became America’s first, and thus far only, Roman Catholic President.  But Rick Santorum (along with a disquietingly large number of U.S. Roman Catholic bishops) has repeatedly told voters he thinks Kennedy was wrong to have done so.

Worse, Mr. Santorum has gone out of his way not only to question the President’s personal theology and compare him to Adolf Hitler, but also to suggest that hundreds of millions of American Protestants are not really Christian.

The slightly ridiculous presidential wannabe of six weeks ago has now morphed into a man who causes me --- for the first time in my life as an American --- to fear not only his views and his person, but also the very church of which he is a member.

This is not how things ought to be.  In Mr. Santorum’s own words, “it’s not okay,” whether on a political or personal level.  On both sides of my family, I’m descended from uncounted generations of Irish Catholics, for whom the Church was not only the custodian of the way to heaven, but also of the besieged culture of the Irish nation in a time when men and women could be, and often were, hanged for the wearing of the green.

Yet I am also descended from rock-ribbed Norwegian Lutherans, staunch Welsh Nonconformists, and unconquerable freethinkers for whom the whole idea of religion was nothing more than a damn fool notion invented by the wealthy and the fleecing of the poor.  Perhaps inevitably, I wound up consciously choosing to find my spiritual home in the Episcopal Church.

And because my Church centers itself midway between Rome and Geneva, walking a middle path that is both Catholic and Protestant, both holding on to the ancient traditions and deposit of faith while also participating in the Reformation, I repeat: Mr. Santorum’s astonishingly medieval and un-American views are “not okay.”  There can be no room in America for a repetition of Pope Boniface VIII’s infamous 1302 bull Unam Sanctam, perhaps the most extreme, over-the-top claim of papal spiritual supremacy ever committed to writing.

No Santorum:  not for president, not for senator, not for dogcatcher.

●    It’s not that I find Mr. Santorum’s positions “not okay” because the Reformation is an integral part of my own Anglican faith tradition, and his ultramontane rejection of the authenticity of my faith is thus offensive to me.

●    Neither is it that I find Mr. Santorum’s positions “not okay” because for an ostensibly straight man he demonstrates a weirdly obsessional interest in what queer people like me do in our bedrooms.  (Rick, I hate to disappoint you, but what we do in our bedrooms often involves snoring, but as we sometimes say, “there’s gay and then there’s ‘damn curious.’”)

●    Nor is it that I find Mr. Santorum’s positions “not okay,” because they insult every woman living, dead, or yet to be born, including the Virgin Mary herself, whereas I was brought up to reject that kind of antediluvian patriarchy.

●    It’s not even that that I find it “not okay” that Mr. Santorum’s denominational rants are an occasion of sin because they reopen old sectarian wounds and resurrect old sectarian prejudices that should have been laid to rest generations ago.

No, what really makes me good and mad is that Rick Santorum’s every word on the subject of social issues is an utter breach of faith with his obligations as an American.  His utterances have been, and will continue to be, searing and direct violations of the oaths he took (presumably invoking God’s help at the time) as Congressman, as Senator, and as lawyer.

I know a little bit about oath-taking; when I was admitted to practice law in the states of Indiana and California, I took an oath to support and defend, among other things, the Constitution of the United States.  I have taken similar oaths in order to be emitted to practice in various federal courts, and I took other, also similar oaths on being sworn in as a member of the Cathedral City City Council.  In none of those cases did I raise my right hand, place my left hand on a copy of the Constitution, and swear to uphold the Bible.  Rather, I placed my left hand on my maternal grandmother’s copy of the King James Bible, raised my right hand, and in the presence of God and the company assembled, swore to uphold the Constitution.

Now, as much as I may know a little bit about oath-taking, I also know something about the First Amendment; in fact, I think I may know rather more about the First Amendment, or at least understand it better, then Rick Santorum will ever do.  And one basic constitutional truth I very clearly understand about the First Amendment can be summed up by borrowing the words of Frederick the Great of Prussia, who once famously declared that his kingdom “everyone must get to heaven his own way.”  What was true about Prussia in the 18th century is also true about America in the 21st.

Moreover, as much as I may know something about the First Amendment, I also know how easy it is for the ill considered actions of a single person to bring obloquy and contempt down upon an entire community.  By way of example, I have seen how a single incident of misbehavior by a single gay man can be used by homophobes to travesty the entire gay community.  I wonder if Rick Santorum has given any thought at all to how his intemperate and extremist positions have embarrassed millions of American Roman Catholics, including a whole raft of my relations. Worse, he has also disserved both the nation and his own church by doing his level worst to reawaken dormant denominational disquiets in the minds of a large part of Protestant America, and to cause many of us to reach anew for our long-unread copies of Foxe’s Book of Martyrs. 

My Roman Catholic relatives, friends, neighbors, and colleagues deserve better than to have their views, and those of their Church, misrepresented by the likes of Rick Santorum.  My Protestant relatives, friends, neighbors, and colleagues deserve better than to have the authenticity of their faith traditions lightly dismissed by this man.

If Mr. Santorum has not thought about the consequences of his divisive and extremist rhetoric, then he ipso jure disqualifies himself for the presidency: no man so wanting in basic judgment and understanding of foreseeable consequences should be allowed anywhere near 1600 Pennsylvania Ave. On the other hand, if Mr. Santorum is deliberately stoking the flames of denominational division, seeking to demagogue not only the bishops but also the faithful of his church, then he disqualifies himself all the more.

America, we all know, is a nation composed of persons of every faith and no faith at all.  While Mr. Santorum complains that his religious freedom is in some way being infringed because he cannot impose his denomination’s dogmas and mores on those of us who do not share his views, the fact remains that the freedom of any American to practice his or her religion depends upon his or her acknowledgment that others have an equal right to practice some other religion or no religion at all.

Freedom of religion is only meaningful insofar as it also implies freedom from religion.  Because Rick Santorum cannot understand that basic fact, and because Rick Santorum has managed to give himself and his denomination a bad name, and to revive those old sectarian suspicions about the intentions of the Roman Catholic Church, and because he so evidently seeks to restore in their fullest form a set of patriarchal and medieval dispensations that no longer speak to our American sense of who and what we are and ought to be, he deserves no support from any American who takes our Constitution seriously.

-xxx-

PAUL S. MARCHAND is an attorney who lives and works in Cathedral City, California.  After having his right of first class citizenship in the commonwealth questioned and his faith denigrated by Rick Santorum, he’s good and mad.  The views expressed herein are his own, but if you don’t think Rick Santorum should be anywhere near the White House, you are welcome to share them, too.

THE ARC OF OUR CONSTITUTIONAL UNVERSE BENDS TOWARD JUSTICE TODAY: Thoughts on Perry v. Brown

By: Paul S. Marchand

Waiting for the Ninth Circuit to release its opinion in Perry v.  Brown this morning, I felt a curious sense of preoccupation and adrenaline, a sense I recognized immediately.  It’s the sense any lawyer feels at the end of a jury trial, waiting for the jury to come back with a verdict.

Of course, Courts of Appeals don’t come back with verdicts; they issue opinions.  Still, when the Ninth Circuit announced yesterday that today would be The Day on which it would issue its opinion on the merits, that same “wait for the jury” sense of anticipation began to build.

In this sense, the result in Perry v. Brown, because anticipated, actually wound up being somewhat anticlimactic; the record on appeal from the Northern District of California was so overwhelmingly favorable to the case made by supporters of marriage equality that a contrary result would have been virtually inconceivable.

Nonetheless, today’s opinion on the merits frames the issue in a way many LGBT activists might not have expected.  Writing for a two judge majority on the panel, Reinhardt, J., steered clear of issuing any kind of ringing declaration on the issue of marriage itself.  Judge Reinhardt’s opinion is almost at pains to explain that the court takes no position on the issue of whether, as a matter of federal constitutional law, GLBT people enjoy “a fundamental right to marry.”

Instead, the majority opinion deals with questions of process.   

Can a public right to be taken away simply because a majority of voters in a particular election may feel private or personal disapproval toward a discrete and insular minority group within the population?  

Can a public right be taken away where the proffered justifications for stripping an identifiable constituency of a particular right do not bear even rational relationships to legitimate government objectives?

According to the Ninth Circuit, the answer in this case is “no.”  “The People may not employ the initiative power to single out a disfavored group for unequal treatment and strip them, without a legitimate justification, of the right as important as the right to marry.”  Perry, slip opinion at 7.  In reaching its conclusion, the Court relied heavily on the historic Supreme Court decision in Romer v. Evans (1996) 517 U.S. 620, in which the Court held unconstitutional a Colorado initiative measure which had forbidden any local government in Colorado from enacting measures prohibiting anti-LGBT discrimination.  Romer, in short, stood and stands for the proposition that the electorate may not simply impose second-class citizenship on GLBT people simply because a majority of the electorate may disapprove of queerfolk or find us “icky.”

By carefully avoiding the larger question of whether there exists a right to marry a partner of the same gender, the Court may well have insulated itself from some, if not all, avenues of SCOTUS review; it is virtually a truism that when constitutional issues are at stake, a court --- whether a trial court or an appellate Tribunal --- should decide those constitutional questions on the narrowest possible basis.  Certainly, the Ninth Circuit seems to have done so here.

Indeed, by framing its decision as being about the limitations of the initiative process, the Court positioned this case well within the parameters of long accepted federal jurisprudence on the subject of minority rights.  Beginning with the famous Footnote Four of United States v. Carolene Products Co. (1938) 304 U.S. 144, in which the Supreme Court suggested that legislation singling out “discrete and insular” minorities for  less favorable or unfavorable treatment might be subject to more searching scrutiny, federal courts have developed a body of case law providing for ascending levels of scrutiny when legislative classifications of individuals are in play.

By declaring that the proffered justifications for Proposition 8 could not even pass “rational basis” scrutiny, i.e. they were not even rationally related to any legitimate government interest, the Court also cleverly avoided ruling on the issue of whether sexual orientation constitutes a “suspect classification” which would require strict, high-level scrutiny of any statute purporting to classify on the basis of sexual orientation.  Given that any holding identifying queerfolk as constituting a “suspect classification” would probably be stoutly resisted by the conservative SCOTUS majority, Judge Reinhardt was probably wise to avoid so holding.

Of course, anti-LGBT activists and social regressives will, and already have begun to, blast today’s decision.  Given that three of the four front running GOP presidential wannabes have already expressed support for a so-called Federal marriage amendment, we may anticipate that Perry v. Brown will become a major part of the Republican campaign to unseat President Obama this fall.  Certainly, this will be an issue for people who define America in terms of denominational orthopraxy; Rick “Google him” Santorum has often declared that his opposition to marriage equality is a hill he is “willing to die on.”

And perhaps, to borrow from the Klingons, today is a good day for social conservatives to die on that hill; our national conversation on marriage equality has shifted radically in the last decade as a majority of Americans have come to accept the proposition that Ruth and Naomi or Jonathan and David could have just as much opportunity to be happy or miserable in wedlock as Adam and Eve.

Certainly, we’ve come a long way since I was one of the first attorneys in California to take on a marriage equality challenge, almost 20 years ago.  At the time, even in the queer community, the idea of marriage equality was the stuff of visionary thinking.  Though the Hawai’i Supreme Court had ruled in favor of marriage equality, no one on the mainland was even willing to take up the issue.  A professional colleague suggested, rightly it turned out, that we were 15 to 20 years away from marriage equality, and that a national conversation on the issue would have to ensue before the idea of same gender marriage could be taken seriously.

Today, that conversation has led to a national reconsideration of the issue of marriage equality.  As more and younger Americans accustom themselves to the idea that withholding the liberty of marital contract from same gender couples makes no sense, social conservatives can be expected to fight all the more desperately.  Yet, as was the case with our armed forces, participation in marriage by queerfolk has neither destroyed the institution nor has it caused Western civilization to collapse.

To almost any American younger than 50, the reality of out queerfolk participating openly in society is simply “not strange.”  Virtually every straight American has LGBT coworkers, GLBT friends, LGBT neighbors, or queer family members.  For most Americans under the age of 50, the so-called gay agenda has been held up to the light and found not merely unthreatening, but actually rather boring.  For our agenda are usually the same as those of our straight neighbors; my gay agenda for yesterday included paying my Edison bill and my water bill; today my gay agenda will include visiting a family member in a nursing care facility.

Perhaps, in a sense, it was this understanding that queerfolk are so completely integrated into the quotidian realities of American society that made it possible for the Ninth Circuit to frame its opinion as it did, walking a fine line between acknowledging, as the Romer Court did, that anti-queer animus is not a constitutionally sufficient basis for legislation, while at the same time cleverly keeping marriage per se off center stage.

The arc of our constitutional universe is long, but today it, too, bent toward justice.

-XXX-

Paul S. Marchand is an attorney who lives and works in Cathedral City, California.  In 1993, he handled one of the first challenges to California then-statutory same-gender marriage ban.  The views expressed herein are his own, and not necessarily those of any entity or organization with which he is associated, nor are they intended as, and neither should they be construed as, legal advice.

INSERT FOOT IN MOUTH, MASTICATE VIGOROUSLY: Why the Susan G. Komen Foundation’s Volte-face on Funding Planned Parenthood Is Too Little, Too Late.

By:  Paul S. Marchand

For almost three decades, the Susan G. Komen foundation enjoyed an unsullied reputation for fighting the good fight on breast cancer.  Its astonishingly effective public relations effort was successful not only in getting macho straight guys, including cops and firefighters, to wear pink, but also in bringing together persons of every conceivable social, economic, or political outlook in the fight against breast cancer.

Until this week.

In an unbelievably ill considered, nay, stupid decision, the Komen foundation decided to discontinue grants to Planned Parenthood, ostensibly because Planned Parenthood had been the subject of an investigation being undertaken by a Republican Florida Congressman.

In fact, there is strong evidence to suggest that the happenstance of the investigation was merely a fortuitous pretext for a politically motivated decision by Komen Foundation VP Karen Handel.  Handel, a prominent Republican activist and unsuccessful office seeker in the state of Georgia, has a long and malodorous reputation for being an opponent of a woman’s right to choose.  The decision to inject the Komen Foundation into the Culture Wars over reproduction appears to be made, or at least heavily influenced, by Ms. Handel.

Today, the Komen Foundation, in the face of a well-deserved torrent of scorn, reversed itself, announcing that it would restore its grants to Planned Parenthood.

Unfortunately for the Komen Foundation, its humiliating climbdown may not be sufficient to restore a reputation left in less than tatters by its ill-conceived foray into divisive, Culture War, wedge issue politics.

What had given the Komen Foundation the moral authority to bring together Republicans, Democrats, men, women, and every other sort and condition of American had been the public perception of the Komen Foundation as being above politics and partisanship; breast cancer, like AIDS, is an equal opportunity killer.  Few if any Americans do not know someone who has lived with the terrifying reality of breast cancer.

Because such a huge number of Americans have been touched by the reality of breast cancer, it was possible to get macho straight guys to wear pink; it was possible to bring together at Komen Foundation Runs for the Cure people who might otherwise not give one another the time of day.  The Komen Foundation operated in what amounted to a political and cultural safe space, an increasingly rare phenomenon in a society that has come to polarize itself along almost every conceivable line of division.

As long as the Komen Foundation stayed away from the kind of overtly political activity that has left other eleemosynary institutions bruised, broken, and hemorrhaging credibility, it was remarkably successful in maintaining a safe space for doing the good work it had been established to do.  Its decision to discontinue its relationship with Planned Parenthood, no matter how quickly reversed, blew that safe space right off the map. 

Now, unfortunately, instead of being seen as the curatrix of a successful, nonpolitical, “bring people together” effort, the Komen Foundation is now, and will be, perceived as just another Culture War operative.  The quality of goodness, even of innocence, which had been such an integral part of the Komen Foundation’s appeal is gone.
 
None of this needed to happen.  The Komen Foundation deserves no kudos for its volte-face; its original decision should never have been made in the first place; one does not praise a child for cleaning up a mess the child has made.  The Komen Foundation also deserves significant criticism for being foolish enough to bring on to its senior management staff a right-wing, anti-choice activist with a clear Culture War agendum; the failure of the Komen Foundation to vet Karen Handel more carefully than it did is inexcusable and unacceptable.

The saddest part of this whole tawdry episode is that it is becoming increasingly difficult for organizations like the Komen Foundation to continue to exist as islands of common ground.  Our culture has been increasingly hijacked by extremists who are more moved by Mao Zedong’s insistence on always putting politics in command than they are by any sense of moral imperative to do good by and for one’s neighbors.

If the Komen Foundation can rightfully be excoriated for being stupid enough to hire an executive of such right-wing Maoist tendencies as Karen Handel, a mistake for which it will probably pay a huge price, we should also feel a sense of outrage that we have allowed our society to be hijacked by political apparatchiks who see in organizations like the Susan G. Komen Foundation not vehicles for the accomplishment of positive social good, but merely as subjects for their lascivious ogling and wedge issue politics.

Having inserted its institutional foot into its institutional mouth, and chewed it right down to the bone, the Komen Foundation may well find itself permanently crippled.  The women of America deserved better than that.

-xxx-

Paul S.  Marchand is an attorney who lives and works in Cathedral City, California.  The views expressed herein are his own, and are not necessarily the views of any organization with which he is associated.

HAPPY NEW YEAR: A WISH LIST BEFORE WE GET TO WORK

By: Paul S. Marchand

Any new year is a time for resolutions and wish lists.  Of course, most resolutions go unkept, and few, if any, of the wishes on our lists actually come true, but that doesn’t stop us from making them.

And who knows?  Sometimes we actually keep a resolution; sometimes a wish does come true.

So, what follows is an admittedly idiosyncratic list of wishes and resolutions, some broader in scope than others, some candidly parochial or even personal, for what promises to be a tumultuous 2012:

Let me start with some wishes for all of us in the Ninety-nine Percent:

-First, for continued economic improvement and recovery.  The American Middle Class is the backbone of our strength and our prosperity, but its interests have been too long ignored and sacrificed on the altar of others’ interests.

-Second, that the American Middle Class, which had felt itself voiceless and without advocates for so long, may continue to find its voice, and to hold accountable the politicians and plutocrats who had taken it for granted that the middle class would supinely acquiesce in its own destruction.

-Third, that a newly vocal middle class would use the means at its disposal to ensure that those who wage social and economic war against it do so at their own political peril.

-Fourth, that the middle class resists the wedge-issue tactics of division that politicians of the Scott Walker/John Kasich/Rick Scott ilk use to set us against one another, and which define as enemies those who walk our beats, fight our fires, and teach our kids, when in fact, we are all part of the Ninety-Nine Percent.

Let me also express some wishes for our society in a time when preachers, pundits, and politicians seek to revive the culture wars and exploit them for their own purposes:

-Not only would I like to see marriage equality become a reality wherever the American flag flies, I would also like to see people of good will across the country take a firm stand against the LGBT-baiting that has become a rhetorical staple among political hopefuls of a certain ideological bent.

-I would like to see people of good will speak out ever more strongly for women, and by implication against the war on women that, by seeking to restricting a woman’s autonomy over her own body, also seeks to reduce women in general to the status of chattel.

-I would like to see people of good will speak out ever more strongly for learning and literacy, in the liberal arts and in the sciences, and by implication against the war on learning that has become an ongoing effort of the right wing.  Without a strong commitment to the learning the right scorns as “elitist” our national prosperity and security are at unacceptable risk.

-I would like to see people of good will speak out ever more strongly for the kind of basic human decency that rejects immigrant- and race-baiting.  A discussion about immigration issues is a legitimate one to have, but the racism that too often accompanies that discussion should have no place.

Closer to home, my wish list is a little bit more parochial and even personal:

-We need to find a way to develop a workable legislative “fix” to California’s redevelopment problem.  Abolishing California’s redevelopment agencies, which have been around for almost 70 years, represents a meat-ax solution to a problem that should have been solved with a scalpel.  Certain redevelopment abuses -such as Palm Desert’s use of RDA money to build a lavish golf course and country club, should never have been tolerated, but redevelopment done right had done a power of good in many communities.  Now is the time for Governor Brown and the Legislature to go back to the drawing boards and restore redevelopment in a way that redresses abuses and empowers communities to undertake the kind of work redevelopment was intended to be about in the first place.

-Local leaders in Cathedral City need to do more than talk about economic development.  There has been much talking, but little doing, in the last year, and that needs to stop.  Cathedral City continues to lose businesses, and that does not serve our residents or our business community well.

-Those of us who have made resolutions to exercise more and eat less need the help of our friends, corporeal or digital, to actually keep them.  For if we are able to keep those resolutions on and keep the pounds off , you may see less of us, but what you do see will hopefully be healthier and fighting fit for what promises to be a tumultuous year ahead.

Happy new year, and now, as Ed Schultz might say, “let’s get to work.”
-xxx-

PAUL S. MARCHAND is an attorney in Cathedral City, where he lives and works.  The views expressed herein are his own, and he hopes you’ll be seeing less of him in the months to come.

THE YEAR OF DAMNED FOOLS AND DAMN-FOOL NOTIONS

By: Paul S. Marchand

It’s been nearly 30 years since I watched Linda Hunt, Sigourney Weaver, and Mel Gibson play off each other in Peter Weir’s The Year of Living Dangerously, which takes place against the backdrop of the overthrow of Indonesia’s then-President Sukarno.

A generation and a half later, as America swings into another presidential election year, I can’t help but think of 2011 as the Year of Damn-Fool Notions, or maybe just of damned fools.  Unfortunately, it’s pretty clear that 2012 will be the year of Damn-Fool Notions redux, as we listen to the policy proposals of a bench of GOP presidential hopefuls unparalleled in its thinness since the Democratic presidential pool of 1988.

It’s hard to say which Republican candidate is more appalling.

Has it been Newt Gingrich, with his apparent nostalgia for a dispensation that used to send children into factories at six?  To say that there is something disturbing about the idea of undoing more than a century of legislation designed to keep children in school and out of unsafe working conditions is to understate the case by order of magnitude.

Has it been Willard M. Romney, who was for what he was against before he was for what he was against, or is it the other way around?  The dizzying speed with which Mr. Romney takes up and discards positions has been one of the most extraordinary and unedifying political spectacles of our time.

Has it been Ron Paul, the political munchkin whose antebellum, nay, antediluvian views on race and society seem to be biting him on the posterior of late?  It certainly seems under his libertarian façade, Dr. Paul is nothing more than old-fashioned neo-confederate racist with a generous, adulterating dose of bad Ayn Rand thrown in.

Has it been Rick Perry, who cannot seem to open his mouth without committing another faux pas, detracting as he does so from the sum total of human knowledge?  Listening to Rick Perry demonstrate the limitations of his understanding leaves one wondering whether he possesses even a basal skull set for public office.

Has it been the other Rick, whose last name, when Googled, defines a postcoital byproduct, and whose apparent obsession with what gay men do in the privacy of our bedrooms has led to more than just the occasional raised eyebrow?  To say that he comes across as a political charlatan of the extremest order is also to understate the case.

Has it been the incredible Michelle Bachmann, who would, no doubt, love to come across as an American Margaret Thatcher for our time, but who instead comes across as the crazy pro. per. lady ahead of you on the appearance calendar in court --- the one who insists on explaining in excruciating detail whatever conspiracy theory is uppermost in her mind?

At all events, none of the GOP seekers after the Presidency seem to have recalled Mark Twain’s advice that it is better to remain silent and be a thought a fool than to open one’s mouth and remove all doubt.

Time was that the Republican Party could put up highly competent, highly intelligent, highly articulate candidates for public office.  Indeed, by comparison with the current crop, even Richard Nixon would be preferable.

For I was not in jest when I suggested that the current bench of GOP presidential hopefuls shows even less to the American electorate than did the Democratic field of 1988 that ultimately gave us Michael Dukakis -- the best, sadly, of that year’s not very inspiring lot.

In the end, the Republicans will probably do what they have historically done; they will fall in line behind a candidate who has the best campaign machine: Mitt Romney.  And they will do so because, as Bill Clinton once famously observed, while Democrats want to fall in love, Republicans want to fall in line.

Given the thinness and the inadequacy of the GOP presidential field, it’s not surprising that comedians of every stripe should have found the endless Republican primary campaign for the presidency to be an endless source of grist for the comic mill.  Such a development should have Republican strategists deeply worried.

When a campaign season degenerates this early into farce, it ought to be a warning to candidates and their staffers that they are not being taken nearly as seriously as they need to be in order to win.  Back in 2008, a friend of mine with experience in both political campaigns and the entertainment industry, watching Tina Fey’s dead-on impression of Sarah Palin, had no hesitation in calling the race right then and there for Barack Obama.

Worse still for our friends in the party opposite has been the fact that this endless, agonizing primary affairs has also had the effect of giving the President enormous quantities of ammunition to use against whoever crawls out, broken and bleeding, from the GOP scrum to emerge as the nominee.  Another friend of mine, a longtime GOP stalwart, expressed it this way: “the Republicans have learned the Democratic trick of forming a circular firing squad aiming inward.”

So, as we enter into the final days before the much-overrated Iowa caucuses, we see a series of presidential wannabes who have not only managed to make us laugh at them but also to give us sticks to beat them with.  The President, who at the beginning of the fall had seemed to be a dead man walking, increasingly appears to be not only the only adult in the room, but also the only person with the intellect, the understanding, and the stature for the job.

This is not the narrative any GOP strategist wants to see emerging.  It might have been different, had the candidacies of Jon Huntsman, Buddy Roemer, or Gary Johnson ever developed any meaningful throw weight, but all three of them were too smart, too pragmatic, and too potentially appealing to crossover voters, to be able to survive the hard line right wing slugfest the Republican primary processes have become.

For Democrats, the 1988 presidential debacle proved to be a fortuitous turning point.  The lessons learned from that election enabled us to select in Bill Clinton a candidate with sufficient appeal to capture the White House in 1992.  This current election may very well prove to be a similar turning point for the GOP, though I'm not holding my breath.

For while I am not calling the 2012 election for President Obama just yet, I have no hesitation suggesting that the election is his to lose; the auguries suggest that he will in fact be reelected.  If the GOP is serious about fielding a presidential candidate with meaningful hopes of winning in 2016, it’s going to have to tack back toward the center, much as the Democratic Party had to do between 1988 and 1992.  For if it does not, 2016 may prove to be a very unpleasant year indeed for the Grand Old Party.

-xxx-

PAUL S. MARCHAND is an attorney who lives and works in Cathedral City.  The views expressed herein are his own.

FOR UNTO US CHILD IS BORN

By: Paul S. Marchand

An unwed mother. 

Situationally homeless. 

Pregnant. 

Traveling with a partner who is not the father of her unborn child.

Not the sort of thing we would expect from “respectable” people.

Indeed, many, hearing such a word-picture, might well be inspired to angry, fulminating discourse on the ills of our 21st-century American society.

Of course, the word-picture in question actually comes from the narrative set forth in Luke’s Gospel of the birth of our Savior in a manger in Bethlehem more than 2000 years ago.

Across generations and centuries, the Lucan infancy narrative, encapsulating both the paradoxical power of powerlessness and the human compunction we feel in the presence of the smallest and weakest among us, has been at the heart of the Christmas story.

For at its core, the Christmas story is about more than giftgiving or liturgies or Christmas trees or official proclamations or Christmas cards (with or without First Dog, pace Sarah Palin).  It is about proclaiming a radical view of human and social justice over against a dispensation that still, after 20 centuries, organizes the world very much without reference to the teachings the infant in Bethlehem sought to impart to us, a dispensation that still reflexively takes the side of Dives over Lazarus --the one percent over the 99 percent.

Some years ago, an Episcopal priest of my acquaintance inveighed against the common cliché of “putting the Christ back in Christmas.”  Instead, he suggested we should perhaps seek to put the Mass back in Christmas.  By sharing the gifts of human companionship, human compunction, and human charity, and by breaking bread together --- both at home and in the context of the Eucharist --- this priest suggested we could do more to share the spirit of Christmas than if we had had all the tangible things in the world wrapped in paper under the tree.

For as much as the birth of a child focuses the thoughts of that child’s family toward what must be done to create a better future, so too does the infancy narrative which lies at the heart of our Christmas story call us to examine our consciences and our conduct, and to focus our thoughts on building a better future for our communities, for our country, and for the world.  The greatest gift of Christmas, therefore, may not be what lies under the Christmas tree.  The greatest gift of Christmas may be the opportunity it gives to us to renew a commitment to the kind of social justice the Infant in the manger came into this world to proclaim:

    “The Spirit of the Lord GOD is upon me; because the LORD hath anointed me to preach good tidings unto the meek; he hath sent me to bind up the brokenhearted, to proclaim liberty to the captives, and the opening of the prison to them that are bound; to proclaim the acceptable year of the LORD, and the day of vengeance of our God; to comfort all that mourn.” Isa. 61:1-2

For unto us a child is born, unto us a son is given, Who shall be called the Prince of Peace.

Merry Christmas.

-xxx

PAUL S. MARCHAND is an attorney who lives and works in Cathedral City, California.  He is a member of the Riverside County Workforce Investment Board.  The views expressed herein are his own.