Anna Lind-Guzik

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    [post_content] => When Trump appointee Neil Gorsuch was confirmed to the Supreme Court, the Christian Right celebrated. Now they're wondering if they've been betrayed.

On June 15 the Supreme Court of the United States handed down a landmark decision in Bostock v. Clayton County, Georgia, ruling that Title VII of the Civil Rights Act of 1964, which prohibits employment discrimination “on the basis of sex,” extends to sexuality, gender identity, and gender expression. Justice Neil Gorsuch, a young Trump appointee with a solid conservative background, wrote the 6-3 decision—leaving many right-wing Christians feeling betrayed and outraged.

“Bostock is as bad as you think,” reads the headline of one take published on June 19 in conservative evangelical magazine Christianity Today. The New York Times reported that Franklin Graham, president of the Billy Graham Evangelistic Association, called June 15 “a sad day” and worried that the decision would “make it harder to defend our religious freedom, as far as being able to hire people of like mind.”

Readers will remember that Gorsuch filled the vacancy left by arch-conservative Justice Antonin Scalia, who died toward the end of Obama’s second term. Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell made the unprecedented move of refusing to hold senate confirmation hearings for Judge Merrick Garland, the candidate named by President Obama. McConnell insisted instead on leaving the seat vacant until after the 2016 presidential election. The dubious Gorsuch appointment, in other words, was seen as a major victory for conservative Christians and Republicans.

What are we to make of Gorsuch’s seeming “defection,” and what are the implications of the SCOTUS decision for the 2020 election?

The U.S. Christian Right’s primary strategy to gain and maintain theocratic control over other Americans is to weaponize the concept of religious freedom. Andrew Seidel, a constitutional attorney who is Director of Strategic Response at the Freedom from Religion Foundation, explained that "the end goal is to make conservative Christians and Christian nationalists a special, favored class.”

In other words, the Christian Right wants the "right" to discriminate against anyone whose lifestyle or professed views conflict with white evangelical Christian thought. According to this view, a pastry chef can refuse a commission to bake a wedding cake for a same-sex couple because gay marriage conflicts with his religious beliefs; or an employer can refuse to cover contraception in their health coverage. Similarly, a pharmacist can refuse to sell a woman the morning after pill because his religious belief holds that life begins at conception.

In a sort of bait and switch, evangelical Protestants, traditionalist Catholics, and Mormons have, with significant success, attempted to replace a pluralistic understanding of religious liberty that is essentially in keeping with the vision of America’s founders, with a revisionist, Christian nationalist definition of religious freedom as the “right” of conservative Christians to dominate in the public square. This push has come along with the ascendance of a hypermasculine, patriarchal strain of evangelicalism that culminated in white evangelicals’ embrace of, and enduring loyalty to, President Donald Trump.

The point is neatly illustrated in another recent article from Christianity Today, in which evangelical political scientist Daniel Bennett argues in the wake of Bostock that all is not in fact lost for religious liberty, while positing a fundamental “conflict between LGBT rights and religious freedom rights." Bennett’s conservative Christian framing shows that he (like most of his coreligionists) thinks of religious freedom as a zero-sum game. In the context of pluralistic democracy, however, religious freedom should be understood as a fundamental area in which to ensure equal accommodation in the public square. Bennett, of course, ignores the existence of LGBTQ Christians and straight Christian allies. To approach religious freedom democratically means to see it as intertwined with, and complementary to, LGBTQ rights, rather than pitting the two against each other.

There is legal precedent for a pluralistic conception of religious liberty. Frederick Clarkson, a vocal advocate for the liberal reclamation of religious freedom, points to the 2014 case General Synod of the United Church of Christ v. Cooper in arguing the point. In that case, a federal judge ruled in favor of progressive Christian clergy who had been barred by North Carolina state law from solemnizing same-sex marriages—despite their religious conviction that they should do so.

There are other legal precedents that could be used by right-wing Christians to support their definition of religious freedom. The 2012 Supreme Court case Hosanna-Tabor Evangelical Lutheran Church and School v. Employment Opportunity Division exempts religious institutions from anti-discrimination laws if the employee affected can be considered a religious minister. However, the case left much ambiguity around the definition of “minister,” and thus the “ministerial exception” is likely to be the site of future litigation.

Meanwhile, the Christian Right has managed to expand religious exemptions in other recent cases: in the 2014 case Burwell v. Hobby Lobby Stores, Inc., for example, the Supreme Court ruled that a closely held corporation could be exempt from the Affordable Care Act’s contraception coverage requirement if adhering to that requirement would constitute a violation of the owners’ sincerely held religious beliefs.

These precedents in favor of religious exemptions did not stop arch-reactionary Rod Dreher, an adult convert to the Orthodox Church in America and senior editor at The American Conservative, from tweeting his alarm about the supposed threat posed by Bostock to churches’ tax exempt status. “Thanks to two GOP appointees—Roberts and Gorsuch,” Dreher tweeted, “churches and schools that discriminate against LGBTs stand at risk of losing tax-exempt status, per the Bob Jones ruling. Hard to overstate the magnitude of this loss for religious conservatives.”



But GOP operative Ralph Reed, an evangelical political organizer and lobbyist with a long history of fighting for socially conservative causes, sought to downplay the significance of LGBTQ rights victories to the Christian Right. Per the Washington Post, he said: "Religious freedom and abortion just rise far higher in the hierarchy of concerns of faith-based voters.” He even went so far as to state, “Ultimately seeing a reckoning on Roe vs. Wade looms so much larger in the psyche of the right that I don’t know that this is a de-motivator.”

We need not take either man’s claims at face value, as both are heavily interested parties and old hands at spin. But the overturning of Roe, which would do immense harm to women’s rights and public health, is well within the realm of possibility. Given the importance white evangelicals place on ending legal access to abortion, Democrats should assume high white evangelical turnout to vote for Trump in 2020. Nor can we be sure that Bostock means LGBTQ protections will be safe from further court challenges by right-wing Christians.

Imani Gandy, Senior Legal Analyst at Rewire.News, dismissed Dreher’s alarmist handwringing, saying she did not believe conservatives had “anything to worry about when it comes to losing tax exempt status.” She added, “Roberts expressly left open the question of whether or not the First Amendment or RFRA would permit discrimination against LGBT people if that discrimination is couched as a religious belief.”

Seidel agreed with Gandy, adding that we can expect to see further attempts to undermine the separation of church and state via legal battles over religious exemptions.

“That fight is coming to the court very soon, and I doubt we’ll be able to rely on Gorsuch and Roberts to do the right thing. In fact, I think that inevitable future question is part of the reason Gorsuch wrote such a clear opinion. No doubt that the text of the Civil Rights Act demanded this decision, but misguided and weaponized notions of religious freedom will allow the conservatives to walk back some of these gains later.”

Andrew L. Whitehead, coauthor with Samuel L. Perry of Taking America Back for God: Christian Nationalism in the United States, suggested that there is some truth to Ralph Reed’s claim that LGBTQ rights are not as urgent a concern for the Christian Right as they used to be. Public opinion has shifted on the issue, he said, pointing out that even “those Americans who most strongly embrace Christian nationalism have liberalized significantly. In 2007, 7 percent [of them] supported same sex marriage. In 2017, 25 percent did.”

Seidel was not so sanguine. As authoritarian Christians have framed it, “religious freedom” entails the “right” to discriminate against members of the LGBTQ community in as many areas as possible. “If they are able to convince this Supreme Court that the First Amendment guarantees a right for a religious believer to act on their belief, regardless of the law, they will have won,” said Seidel. He added: “It’s no wonder Reed cares more about that fight than the others. If they can redefine religious freedom—weaponize religious freedom—they will have a right that guarantees them substantial wins in every other fight.”

If America is to achieve a functional democratic future, the public must embrace a liberal vision of pluralism and reject the idea that religious freedom, properly understood, could ever be in conflict with the promise of equal rights for all.

 
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The Christian Right, the Bostock decision, and the struggle to define religious freedom

by Chrissy Stroop

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    [post_content] => Father's Day elicits painful and happy memories about a now aged father.

The words that best describe my father all start with the letter “r”: rogue, rapscallion, renegade, rascal.

Also: Rage. I have been scorched many times by his verbal outbursts; for years at a time, I’ve just had to keep my distance, emotionally singed by the last blast. I have wished often for a father who was calm and consistent. Someone for whom I could find the right Father’s Day card.

My father has four children by four women. I’m the oldest, the only child of his first marriage to my mother, an American he met in the south of France and married a few months later in her native New York City. He took her to his hometown, Vancouver, where they had a glamorous life: they opened an art gallery, and she modelled part-time. Later, they moved to London.

The second oldest is a half-sister I’ve never met and someone, for decades, he didn’t even know existed; I’ve spoken to her once by phone. The next oldest, who I know, is ten years my junior, a successful entrepreneur. The youngest, a man 23 years my junior, is the only child of his second marriage. None of us ever shared a home and only the two half-brothers have a relationship. The two not raised by my father resent those who were.

I lived with him from the age of 14 to 19. My parents had divorced, and my mother’s mental illness became overwhelming. I moved into his home with his girlfriend; she was too old to be a sister, too young to be a mother, and a tough cookie who, at 28, didn’t really know what to make of an unhappy 15 year old. He was often far away for a month at a time, filming, leaving two ill-suited young women alone to make it work.

When he was home in those years, though, he made up for it, and gave me a lot of time with him, alone. We skied and played squash and went for long walks in the country. When I was bullied at school, he tried his best to help me. Our Christmases were lavish. We played Scrabble for hours in front of the fire, the cat scrambling our letters as we drank tea and ate chocolate cookies.

This was the mid 1970s. Second-wave feminism was blooming and he never once, then or later, pressured me to be conventionally pretty or to follow the traditional path of marriage and motherhood. I’ve always appreciated that. Being smart, talented and competitive mattered most to him. He raised me, basically, as a boy — to be fearless, intellectually confident, eager to explore the wider world.

The summer I was 15 we drove across Canada together, just the two of us. We slept most often in a tent, once awakened by a farmer looking down on us from his tractor.

That road trip is one of my happiest memories. We drew, took photos and played endless games of 20 Questions as we drove across the tedious prairies. We dipped south into the United States and attended a pow-wow in one of the Dakotas, where a bag of sugar and some meat were left at our tent door, a welcome for everyone there. That’s typical of the best of my father — always curious, always seeking the next adventure.

That’s the part of him, still healthy and living alone at 91 in the countryside, that I still like and admire. Through his travels making documentaries, I glimpsed tantalizing bits of a larger world. He brought me home bits of it: badges from the Tokyo 1964 Olympics, a caribou rug and sealskin gloves from the Arctic, a woven Afghan rifle case. Much as it was difficult being left alone with his girlfriend—later his wife—I knew he loved his work and understood that his long absences were the price we paid for that. His pursuit of adventure and career influenced me profoundly in my choice of career; I became a journalist, digging up my own stories to share.

But those loving teenage years came to an abrupt end when, in my sophomore year of university, he abruptly sold the house and told me, without warning, to find a new place to live; he and his girlfriend were going to live on a boat in Europe. I was on my own for good, with some money from a grandmother but not a dime from him for tuition, books, or living expenses. Long before the internet or cellphones, the only way to contact my father was by poste restante.

That year was disastrous. I slept around, starved for male approval and attention. I was attacked in my ground-floor apartment where I lived alone, at the back of an alley in a dicey neighborhood—a place no attentive or protective father would have allowed. My grades, previously straight As, plummeted. I moved again and again until finally, that summer, I found safe shelter on the top floor of a spacious house on a treelined street in a much nicer neighborhood, in a sorority filled with other women, one of them my best friend.  Life calmed down and took a turn for the better.

That was the summer I started writing for national magazines, which was exciting but also a source of tremendous pressure.

I was running on fumes when my father sent me a ticket to join them on their small boat in France and I mailed a long letter explaining how fragile I was. Attending university full-time, while also freelancing, had been exhausting. I was thrilled to be taken seriously by national magazine editors, but was emotionally raw, barely a few weeks after having been grabbed through my bathroom’s low open window and hit on the head while bathing. The assailant took off and I never reported it.

My father never got the letter—so he had no idea. And he never welcomed weakness and fear.

That visit ended very badly, with a shouting match in a French parking lot at midnight. I was proud of my writing success which, somehow, he found dubious. Why, he raged, would anyone take me, then just turned 20, seriously?

Well, why not?

I had arrived desperately needing a relaxing break but, as usual, I disappointed him for reasons that made no sense to me. He wasn’t paying for university or any of my living costs and I didn’t need him financially. I sure didn’t need him emotionally if this was to be my lot.

For the first time in my life I stood up to him and flew home early.

They came back and re-settled in a small town 1,200 miles away from me, and I tried again, in my mid-20s, another summer vacation visit. They now had a son who was five or six.

There was another explosion of rage at me, and my father flung a heavy glass goblet into a metal sink, shattering it. I didn’t leave that time. Why was he always so angry with me? I rarely spent time with him and his second family, and had become a successful young journalist any parent would normally take pride in.

In the decades since, I’ve been the brunt of his anger —verbal, never physical—too many times. There’s never an apology, just the assumption this is the price of admission to our relationship. He’s had quieter arguments with my husband. After each one, we withdraw for months or years and hope he’ll be civil the next time.

He was wonderful at our wedding in 2011, terrible when I got breast cancer in 2018. He came out to support me at a successful event I organized, elegant in jacket and tie, beaming with pride – then a few years later excoriated me in front of others for a minor mistake.

He was cordial in our most recent conversation, just before his birthday. Relieved, I enjoyed it and wondered how many years we even have left to mend fences for good before it’s too late.

But, let down too many times when I really needed his help or support, I never know what to expect and learned not to rely on him years ago.

I keep trying because he’s my only parent.

Because his own father, a self-made businessman who died before I was born, was apparently very tough—and who knows what he learned to become?

Because I just do.

People wonder why I persist and so do I—how can a woman who considers herself a feminist keep tolerating such abuse?

I don’t have a tidy answer.

I just know that one day I won’t miss his anger—but I will miss the best of him.
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A daughter reflects on a volatile father who brought out her best and hurt her the most

by Caitlin Kelly

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    [post_content] => By failing to invest in child care, the U.S. government is placing mothers in an impossible position.

Ashley Patrick was thrilled to land a full-time position at a prestigious publishing house in July 2016. The job came with smart, bookish colleagues, opportunities for advancement, a regular salary, and health insurance. For a Brooklyn-based writer and editor, it was a rare and valuable opportunity.

At the time she had two young sons, a husband who also worked full-time, and no flexibility. By the end of 2018, Patrick and her husband had three children. The combined monthly cost of full-time daycare for the baby and after-school programs for the boys was an unaffordable minimum of $3,250. In February 2019 she made the painful decision to leave her job.

“A big part of my decision to leave was the cost of child care,” Patrick told me in a recent phone conversation. “Which was a great disappointment because I was on an upward trajectory in the company.” She had been promoted shortly before the birth of her youngest and was on track for another promotion in the next year and a half. Getting that second promotion “would have made a big difference in terms of mobility from one publishing house to another.”

The kids are now nine, seven, and 18 months old. Patrick has managed to carve out a thriving freelance business, but, with schools and daycares closed due to the pandemic, she is now trying to work and supervise her boys’ online lessons from her small apartment. Her husband, who had been earning a good salary at a major company, was laid off eight months after she quit her own job—in part, Patrick suspects, because he took the family leave he was entitled to when their third child was born. She does not know what they’ll do when schools reopen—there is still no ideal option for the baby, and the boys attend schools in different neighborhoods with different start times, making pick-up and drop-off complicated and time-consuming.

Patrick and her family are hardly alone in finding the demands of child care and full-time employment increasingly unmanageable.

According to the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD), there are only four countries in the world where couples with young children who earn the average wage spend more than 30 percent of their salary on child care: New Zealand, the U.K., Australia, and the United States. In Korea, Austria, Greece, and Hungary, the average couple spends less than four percent of their income on child care. Mothers in Sweden, France, and Canada report being satisfied with the overall quality, availability, and cost of child care in those countries, all of which have government-run or heavily subsidized child care systems.

Erika Gubrium, a professor at Oslo Metropolitan University who has two sons, ages eight and 11, explained in response to questions sent by email that child care in Norway is offered through a mix of public and private day cares partially subsidized by the state. The cost of a full-time spot at a daycare in Oslo is approximately 3,100 Norwegian krone per month (around $302 USD). Some families pay reduced fees if they earn less and in some areas, day care is completely free for children of certain ages. In Gubrium’s words, “There is NO opposition to government funding of child care, as there is strong sentiment across the political board that the state should support measures that enable both parents to work full-time.”

When child care is consistent, affordable, and easy to access, more women work outside of the home. Quebec’s government-subsidized child care program led to a workforce participation rate of 85 percent for women ages 26 to 44—the highest in the world, according to University of Quebec at Montreal economist Pierre Fortin. The increased tax revenue covers more than 100 percent of what the government spends on child care. “In other words, it costs zero, or the cost is negative,” Fortin told CityLab in 2018. The program also saves money by reducing the number of families on public assistance.

Hannah Selinger, a freelance writer in East Hampton, New York, has two sons, ages three and one-and-a-half. Finding convenient child care for both, she said in a phone interview, has been a “nightmare.” She quit her well-paid job to be a stay-at-home mother when she became pregnant with her first child because her partner’s salary was double what she made. Since then her freelance writing career has taken off, requiring more of her time, but the logistics of child care are making that nearly impossible. The fee for her eldest son’s preschool is $12,000 per year for three half days per week, and it’s a 30-minute drive from her home, meaning she spends six hours per week driving him (and his little brother) there and back.

Carolina Gonzalez-Villar lives in California’s Bay Area with her husband and their four-year-old son. Her father, who is retired, took care of her son until he was 18 months old. Without her father, she said, her family would have had to bear the expense of a nanny. She and her husband decided they couldn’t afford another child, given that child care where they live costs up to $2,500 per month.

A shorter workweek would reduce both child care costs and parental stress. “We have doubled productivity since the 1960s; there is no reason we shouldn’t make the same money or better and work fewer hours,” said Erin Mahoney, who lives in Queens with her 2-year-old child. Mahoney described the search for child care as one of the most stressful parts of her pregnancy. “A month before my maternity leave ended, I was still trying to figure it out.”

The burden of navigating America’s patchwork child care system falls disproportionately on mothers. Ashley Patrick recently wrote on Facebook, in response to a comment about child care centers refusing to disclose their fees until parents have scheduled a tour, “The last thing I wanted to be doing while uncomfortably pregnant and frantically prepping at work for maternity leave and scheduling and attending a zillion doctor’s appointments was making still more phone calls and sending more emails to check tuition fees.”

Liz Grefath, a mother of two young sons who lives in Brooklyn, recently wrote on Facebook that “people use words like ‘challenge’ to describe [the search for adequate child care] but that is such a neutral word.” What most U.S. parents are really engaged in, she added, is “all-out scavenging, plotting, and survivalism.”Another problem with the U.S. system is that child care providers and preschool teachers are among the worst-paid workers in America. As of 2018, 58 percent of child care workers in California were paid so little that they qualified for public assistance. Some cannot afford to have children of their own.

“One thing I find really frustrating about child care is that it’s almost prohibitively expensive for parents yet the teachers are paid close to minimum wage,” Arielle Harrison recently wrote on Facebook. Harrison, who lives in Connecticut with her husband and their two young sons, continued: “I don’t see how the economics work without some form of government subsidy.”

The U.S. provides limited subsidies to low-income families, she acknowledged, but providers are still grossly underpaid.

Historically, the U.S. government has found the money for child care when it needed women to work. President Franklin Roosevelt used funds from a wartime infrastructure bill to establish a national network of child care centers for women who took factory jobs to support the war effort (remember Rosie the Riveter?). The centers were shut down under the Truman administration, despite a battle waged by mothers, social welfare groups, unions, early childhood educators and social workers to keep them open. That was the last time the United States offered universal child care.

In May 1971, two New York congresswomen—Shirley Chisholm of Brooklyn and Bella Abzug of Manhattan—introduced a bill that would have set aside billions of dollars in federal funds for child care. A watered-down version eventually passed the House and the Senate, only to be vetoed by Nixon, on the advice of his special assistant Pat Buchanan. Nixon described the bill as “radical,” “family-weakening” and tantamount to endorsing “communal” childrearing as opposed to “the family-centered approach.”

Jen Sunderland, a child care provider and mother of a 14-year-old in New York City, pointed out in a phone conversation that the U.S.’s “family-centered approach” is the problem. Instead of acknowledging that the entire society benefits when children are well cared for, our system places “all of the burden of that work on individual families.”

For women, child care decisions are inextricably tied to stagnant wages and unequal pay. The majority of mothers who “choose” the work of childrearing over a paying job do so because they would earn less or only marginally more than they would have to spend on child care if they worked.

The situation is even more dire for single parents. Nearly a quarter of U.S. children live in single-parent households, the vast majority of which are headed by women. Single parents earning an average wage spend 52.7 percent of their income on child care, which surely contributes to the fact that 30 percent of single mothers live below the poverty line.

Child care was a campaign issue in the 2020 presidential election cycle for the first time since the 1970s. Elizabeth Warren was the first to unveil a plan; Bernie Sanders’ plan was the most comprehensive. Joe Biden has not presented one. Earlier in 2020, he told Fortune that, under a Biden administration, children will be able to attend “high-quality, universal prekindergarten at no cost” and parents “will get up to $8,000 in tax credits” to offset child care costs. In 2016 the Center for American Progress, which advised Hillary Clinton’s presidential campaign, recommended offering child care tax credits of up to $14,000 per child.

The pandemic has brought the U.S.’s deepening child care crisis into even sharper relief. Daycares are closed and many schools will not reopen until the fall. Millions of parents are now either seeking work or attempting to hold onto their jobs while caring full-time for young children. In states where businesses are reopening, many now face a choice between returning to work and leaving their kids who knows where, or staying at home with their kids and losing their jobs or part of their income.

In a 1981 op-ed headlined “Congress is Subsidizing Deterioration of Family,” Joe Biden argued against expanding a child care tax credit to include families with higher incomes and labeled day care centers and nursing homes “monuments to our growing unwillingness to accept personal responsibility for those to whom we owe the most.”A lot has changed since 1981. What hasn’t changed is the need for the government to treat child care as a social responsibility, not a personal one.

Whatever happens in November, the U.S. will almost certainly end up with either a President Trump, who has agreed to spend more on child care block grants for low-income families and doubled the federal child tax credit to $2,000, or a President Biden, who has talked about “making sure that every single solitary person needing child care gets an $8,000 tax credit.” The average American family spends nearly $15,000 a year on child care.“We dread the idea that our day care might not come back from [the pandemic],” Josef Szende, who grew up in Canada and lives in New York City with his wife and their 15-month-old son, told me via Zoom. “We don’t know what we would do…we’d move from that lucky whatever percent who somehow made it work in New York City into the majority for whom it’s not working.”

Congress voted to invest billions in child care nearly 50 years ago. It’s past time to make good on that promise.
    [post_title] => The United States cannot put its economy in order unless it invests in child care
    [post_excerpt] => The United States is one of only four countries in the world where couples earning an average wage spend more than 30 percent of their income on child care. Women are paying the highest price.
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The United States cannot put its economy in order unless it invests in child care

by Raina Lipsitz

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    [post_date] => 2020-06-05 00:59:27
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    [post_content] => “We built this country, and we can burn it down." — BLM protester in Washington D.C.

In my Black Lives (Don’t) Matter class, I teach students that the revolution BLM demands cannot be humanized. Rather, the movement asks us to burn down our ideologies as well as our structures—to burn them all the way down—in order to make a different society. Because the system isn’t broken; it was intentionally designed to exclude black persons from human recognitions and protections. And that system isn’t reducible to a nation-state built on slave labor and indigenous genocide.

It is a commonly accepted truth that black people built the infrastructures of what is now called the United States. Many also acknowledge that the exclusion of black people from our imagined community is what makes possible our superstructures—i.e., our culture, values, and power relations. We are less likely, however, to acknowledge that the entire enterprise of liberal humanism was built by black people, even or especially as they cannot participate in it.

Public officials in the Los Angeles judicial system routinely used the acronym NHI—short for “no humans involved”—to describe the black people who showed up to protest the Rodney King decision in 1992. The state’s response then, like its response to the BLM protests today, is to plow through what they perceive to be a black mass of flesh that is at once subhuman (like chattel) and superhuman—or, as ex-police officer Darren Wilson described Ferguson resident Michael Brown, like a “hulk.” Both messages serve to communicate that black persons are mindlessly and mercilessly aggressive and that the rest of us should fear for our lives.

The perception that black people are somehow bestial or not-quite-human serves but one purpose: to justify the innumerable ways in which nonblack people, including nonblack people of color like ex-NYPD officer Peter Liang, gratuitously police and kill back people—not just on the street, as George Floyd experienced, but also in the park, and even in their homes.

The American writer and activist Audre Lorde explained that “there is no rest” from anti-black violence. It “weaves through the daily tissues of [black] living—in the supermarket, in the classroom, in the elevator, in the clinic and the schoolyard, from the plumber, the baker, the saleswoman, the bus driver, the bank teller, the waitress who does not serve us.” Antiblackness, in other words, is atmospheric. It is the air that nonblack people need to breathe and which makes it impossible for black people to also breathe.

Rather than acknowledge the vulnerability that black people experience, nonblack people continue to treat them as an ongoing threat. According to this logic, black people must be taken out back and shot like a dog and then left on the street to die—in the case of Michael Brown, for four hours—like roadkill.

When Enlightenment thinkers like Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel, Immanuel Kant, and David Hume defined ‘the human,’ they could only ever arrive at a definition of what the human is not— i.e., the black African. They defined ‘the human’ as transcendent, of sound mind, in a state above nature, with the ability (and agility) to control the unruly instincts of his material body. In contrast, they imagined the black African as so irrational, so carnal—indeed, so bestial—that she could not pull herself out of a state of nature. She was unable to transcend the impulses of her flesh and climb the ladder of ‘the human,’ which is the ladder of whiteness. Hegel, Kant, and Hume suggest that this is also the ladder of civilization, modernity, progress, and history.

The racism expressed by these Enlightenment philosophers is not a thing of the past. Richard Spencer, the notorious alt-right spokesperson, argued in a November 2016 interview with African-American journalist Roland Martin that the black people who built the human world as we know it did not contribute to the making of human society—because they simply do not have access to the “genius” required to “create [human] systems.”

The fact that black lives don’t seem to matter is a problem not only for the settler colonial state in need of surplus labor—whether on the plantations of yore or the prison-industrial complex of today. It is also or primarily a problem for what the Jamaican critic and essayist Sylvia Wynter describes as the “genre of Man”—a racist and institutionalized standard of the human that (re)produces what feminist thinker bell hooks famously characterizes as “imperialist white supremacist capitalist (cis-hetero-) patriarchy.” The intersecting structures that hooks enumerates and which makes possible our modern world pivot on antiblackness.

The same genre of Man that denies the humanity of black people determines whether or how sex and gender minorities, persons with dis/abilities, and nonblack persons of color can access human recognitions and protections. Hooks’ inheritor, scholar Hortense Spillers argues that black lives are the “zero degree” of Man’s “social conceptualizations.” In other words, antiblackness is the foundation of the house of white, cis, able-bodied humans and makes possible everyone else’s exclusion from humanity. It is the genre of Man, Wynter and Spillers suggest, that we must burn down in order to make black lives—and thus all lives—matter.

It is no coincidence, then, that black people and those of us who stand with them take pleasure in the burning and looting of a human world that was built to ensure that black people die—for no other reason than, as Lorde painfully describes it, they are black. Those of us who are not black but who, indeed, embody difference know that we are next if we get too close to or approximate the non-human characteristics that white supremacist humanism has assigned to black people. Our pleasure is derived not from bloodlust for white or human death. This is about destroying the concept of whiteness as it informs the antiblack standard of human being.

The revolution espoused by Black Lives Matter cannot be humanized, because the white people who defined the human never intended to know black humanity, and because they can only ever contingently recognize the humanity of all of us other Others.

By excluding black people from human recognitions and protections, the prototypically white human produces other oppressions, too. The black person’s presumed sub-humanity locates them in a time before human time, as the furthest point away from the white, cis, able-bodied standard of the human that we inherit from the Enlightenment. If black people represent absolute difference—the “zero degree” or foundation of everyone else’s oppression—then the genre of Man that excludes them is also responsible for producing this world’s other “-isms”—e.g., sexism, misogyny, homophobia, xenophobia, and ableism.

Stated another way, if humanism is a country, then antiblackness is the border that makes its other exclusions possible. BLM protestors who are burning it down know that the country they must dismantle is the world as it was defined by white men. If we are to make all lives matter, then we must question and, where necessary, destroy the structures and ideologies of the genre of Man. And we must remember, always, that the revolution we seek cannot be humanized.
    [post_title] => The revolution will not be humanized
    [post_excerpt] => “To be a Negro in this country and to be relatively conscious is to be in a rage almost all the time.” — James Baldwin
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The revolution will not be humanized

by M. Shadee Malaklou

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    [post_content] => The university's decision reflects a devaluation of the humanities and critical thinking among conservative white evangelicals.

Liberty University abruptly dissolved its entire philosophy department on May 11. The administration announced its decision in a letter to the department’s seven faculty members, which included Mark Foreman, who had taught there for 30 years. In a since-deleted Facebook post, Foreman wrote, “As of June 30, I am unemployed.” He added that he had been given no advance notice; his contract was simply not renewed. Liberty faculty are not eligible for tenure unless they teach in the law school, where it is offered in compliance with the American Bar Association’s accreditation requirement.

Foreman wrote in a subsequent post that he bore Liberty no ill will and had no desire to disparage the school. The university maintains that professors affected by the closing of the philosophy department will still be able to teach, online and perhaps on campus.

Liberty University’s president is Jerry Falwell, Jr., a powerful figure in the Christian right. Since succeeding his father as president in 2007 he has transformed the Lynchburg, Va., institution: it now has an endowment of more than $3 billion, while student enrollment (including non-residential) is over 100,000. The conservative Christian university wields considerable political influence. Donald Trump gave the 2017 commencement address at Liberty, and Falwell has become so close to Trump in recent years that even some Liberty students have expressed concern.

Falwell was the first leader in the Christian right to endorse Trump’s candidacy for the 2016 Republican nomination for president. Shortly thereafter, many prominent evangelicals shifted their support from Senator Ted Cruz, the son of an evangelical pastor, and threw it behind the thrice-married pussy grabber. According to 2016 exit polls, 80 percent of white evangelicals voted for Trump in 2016; their support remains unwavering in 2020. Trump has rewarded Falwell for his continued unstinting loyalty with regular invitations to the White House.

More recently, a series of scandals have exposed Falwell’s authoritarianism and hypocrisy. Several major media outlets have reported that former Trump lawyer Michael Cohen, who was recently furloughed from federal prison, claims that in 2015 he made some compromising photos of Falwell’s wife Becki disappear. Shortly after doing this favor for Falwell, Cohen asked him to endorse Trump’s candidacy. Separately, Politico published a lengthy investigative report that quotes senior Liberty University officials who accuse Falwell of committing grave financial improprieties.

Under Falwell’s leadership, Liberty University has become known for extreme censorship and hostility to outsiders. Last month, he announced that arrest warrants had been issued for New York Times and Pro Publica reporters who covered the university’s widely criticized decision to hold on-campus classes after spring break, despite the COVID-19 pandemic.

Given this context, Falwell’s quiet shuttering of the philosophy department in the face of declining student interest might seem insignificant. But there is a story here—one about the devaluation of the humanities and of critical thinking that speaks to why white evangelicals have consistently been, and remain, the most pro-Trump demographic in the United States.

Christianity has historically had a fraught relationship with the discipline of philosophy and its general ethos of free intellectual inquiry. Early theologians such as St. Augustine did adopt a great deal from Platonism and Stoicism, but modern philosophy developed as a discipline increasingly distinct from, and often at odds with, orthodox theology. Some authoritarian leaders view it as a threat. Tsar Nicholas I, for example, shut down the philosophy departments in Russian universities in 1850, following the 1848 revolutions that rocked Europe, lest students absorb socialist ideas that might turn them against his repressive regime.

Modern apologists, such as C.S. Lewis and the less well-known early twentieth-century Russian religious philosophers, have tried to employ the tools of philosophy in defense of essentially orthodox versions of the Christian faith. Prominent philosophers in academia generally view these attempts as failures. According to a 2013 survey of professors in leading philosophy departments in North America, Europe, and Australia, 72.8 percent of respondents identified as atheists.

Meanwhile, the fiction of the “evil godless professor” eager to corrupt the minds of Christian college students has become a staple of the American Christian right. The 2014 Pure Flix release “God’s Not Dead,” a movie nearly universally panned by critics, is perhaps the most well-known version of this trope. The villain of that modern morality tale is a philosophy professor. The trope itself is ubiquitous in conservative, mostly white evangelical subculture, whether found in a tract that blames school shootings on the teaching of evolution or in contemporary Christian novels.

One of the defining features of fundamentalist religion is the construction of what scholars call enclave communities, where the fundamentalist group’s sacrosanct “alternative facts” can go unchallenged by inconvenient modern knowledge. This is certainly true of American evangelicals. Institutions that promote their views include the controversial Museum of the Bible, in Washington, D.C., which was founded and is funded by the evangelical Green family, owners of Hobby Lobby (notorious for refusing to provide their employees with health insurance that covers contraception); and the Creation Museum in Petersburg, Kentucky, which bases its explanation of Earth’s beginnings on a literal interpretation of the Bible. There are also Christian bookstores, the contemporary Christian music and movie industries, and, of course, Christian schools, colleges, and universities—as well as homeschooling groups and curricula.

Many of these institutions promote the idea that the “Christian alternative” to the scholarly consensus on matters such as evolution, or the reliability of the Bible, is just as intellectually sound as the consensus in what Christian fundamentalists refer to as “the world”—that is, everything that exists outside their bubble and their control. But the fear that these Christian alternatives might not withstand scrutiny lurks just below the surface. Christian educational institutions, for example, are so hostile to academic and personal freedom that they require faculty, staff, and students to sign very specific, very conservative “lifestyle statements” and statements of faith.

We see this fear at play in this moment of far right-wing backlash, in the evangelical embrace of Donald Trump. Trump pursues evangelicals’ agenda of remaking the United States so that it conforms to their worldview, which is why I have occasionally remarked over the last few years that it feels as though the entire country is turning into a Christian school. In modern democracies, the existence of pluralism is simply a fact; but to authoritarian evangelicals, it is a threat. If they can eliminate the need to accommodate those who are different from them, they will.

Liberty University’s decision to eliminate its philosophy department might still seem odd, inasmuch as it undermines the school’s aspiration to intellectual seriousness. And let me be clear—some Christians are perfectly capable of intellectual seriousness. I find a great deal to criticize in Catholic theology, but today’s Catholic Church does at least teach that evolution and faith are compatible. Nor would I would deny the intellectual discipline and rigor it takes to become a Jesuit. Meanwhile, Liberty is not only dumping its philosophy programs, but also touting a new right-wing “think tank” in partnership with the notorious troll Charlie Kirk, founder of Turning Point USA.

Asked about the situation at Liberty, Professor Karl Giberson, who became an Episcopalian after he was pushed out of his community for teaching evolution at an evangelical college, ticked off the names of Stonehill, Boston College, and Georgetown—all Catholic universities, which regard philosophy as a critical conversation partner in “a school that values the Christian tradition.” A serious institution of higher education does not eliminate its philosophy department because student interest in the humanities is declining.

Jack Panyard, who graduated from Liberty University last year, was appointed editor-in-chief of the student newspaper in 2017, only to see the position eliminated entirely after he refused to submit to Falwell’s censorship. Interviewed for The Conversationalist, he said, “It's enormously irresponsible to have a university without a philosophy department, but LU has built its base enough that they know they’ll get by.” Panyard sees the recent and current changes as part of a process of prioritizing, by which Liberty is becoming “less of a Christian university” and more of a “Republican conservative evangelical” institution.

Scott Okamoto, a former English instructor at Azusa Pacific University and a keen observer of trends in evangelical higher education said, “Philosophy eats evangelical minds for breakfast. No self-respecting evangelical would ever want to study ‘worldly’ thinking that deeply—or very few.”

Evangelicals have never had a Christian intellectual tradition comparable to that of the Jesuits, but they do often pretend to intellectual seriousness. Liberty’s decision to drop the pretense is perfectly in keeping with the Trump era, when all sorts of masks are coming off.
    [post_title] => Liberty University eliminates its Philosophy Department, furthering the Christian right's anti-intellectual backlash
    [post_excerpt] => Liberty University, says one recent graduate, is becoming “less of a Christian university” and more of a “Republican conservative evangelical” institution.
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Liberty University eliminates its Philosophy Department, furthering the Christian right’s anti-intellectual backlash

by Chrissy Stroop

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    [post_content] => An exhibition at the Guggenheim Museum challenges conventional wisdom about the role cities play in modern society.

We tend to focus on cities when we look for the sources of creativity and learning in our modern civilization. Think Paris and Milan for fashion; London and New York for literature and theatre; Los Angeles and Mumbai for films. The countryside, meanwhile, seems to represent a simpler time, when most people lived off the land. But a provocative new exhibition at New York City’s Guggenheim Museum suggests that some of the most radical changes affecting global society are, in fact, taking place in the countryside. 

In Countryside, The Future, Dutch architect and urbanist Rem Koolhaas challenges the widely held belief that the city is the future. In the catalogue for the exhibition, he rejects the idea of total mass migration to urban centers, asserting that “the countryside must be rediscovered as a place to resettle, to stay alive.” 

This message is particularly urgent with the outbreak of the coronavirus pandemic, which of course means that the Guggenheim, like all museums and most public gathering places, is closed— although part of the exhibition can be experienced online. 

In the age of the Covid-19 pandemic, the sheer concentration of people that once made cities so attractive is now a threat. The rapid spread of the virus between people who live in close proximity has raised awareness of the divide between the city and the countryside. This is why Countryside, The Future is both highly relevant and completely inaccessible. 

Koolhass and Samir Bantal, with whom he co-directs the think tank OMA, created an exhibition that begins with a single premise. According to the UN, more than 50 percent of the world’s population lives in cities today. This number is difficult to comprehend. The Earth is vast but, according to estimates, only around 20 percent of its surface area is habitable. Out of that area city dwellers are living in what accounts for only 2 percent of the landmass. What is happening outside of those urban territories, on the rest of the planet?

Koolhaas decided to tackle this issue when he realized that the Swiss village in which he has been vacationing since the mid-1980s had undergone a drastic change. Old houses were being renovated with a certain aesthetic to appeal to a wealthier clientele in search of quietude. There were no cows to be seen wandering around the village’s green pastures. Most of the farmers were not locals, but people from different backgrounds and ethnicities who had become disillusioned with big city life. The village was growing in physical size, but its population was dwindling, even with newcomers who had migrated from urban areas. 

To understand what is going on globally outside of cities is a complex process. Along with the Harvard School of Design, Koolhaas and his team looked at diverse case studies and anecdotes from around the world in the past, present, and future. In a style reminiscent of his seminal book, Delirious New York (1978), Koolhaas created a narrative that is highly personal and non-linear. It’s based on facts and research, but the exhibition feels like the creative documentation of a dissertation with an abundance of text, images, and graphs covering up the spiraling walls of the museum.

In some respects, the exhibition suggests, the way we live now has not changed significantly in 2,000 years. Even as far back as the 2nd century BCE, major civilizations had separated the city and the countryside by social function. The Greeks and Romans called the countryside otium, a place for contemplation and cultural endeavors, and the city negotium, the opposite of otium, a place for work and commerce. The Chinese term xiaoyao denotes “the liberation of an individual’s spirit, a state of wandering in absolute freedom, of living in tune with nature, and of blissful repose.” The difference between now and then lies in the fact that the countryside is no longer a refuge. It’s either a peripheral territory subjugated to meet the escalating demands of the city or a place of leisure that only the wealthy can afford. 

Over the centuries, there have certainly been attempts to bridge this gap by bringing certain elements of both the city and the country together. Charles Fourier, the nineteenth century French philosopher who founded utopian socialism, built factories based on the blueprint of Versailles in an attempt to improve the living conditions of the working man. These “social palaces,” as he called them, were precursors to the 1960s hippie communes. Machines did most of the work in Fourier’s factory, leaving workers plenty of time to enjoy leisure activities, and follow “liberated passions,” which included sexual relations unrestricted by marriage or monogamy.

Fourier’s utopia did not last long, but Countryside, The Future tells the stories of various twentieth century leaders who attempted to restructure rural areas and mobilize residents for national economic enterprises. Some, like the Soviet Union’s plans to turn the Russian steppes into farmland, failed. But others succeeded: the Autobahn network that the Nazi regime built to to connect urban and rural areas is still in place; and so is the Jefferson Grid in the United States.

In the twenty-first century, technological advances and social change are transforming rural regions.

In China, farmers living in urban-adjacent skyscraper farms grow fresh produce to feed tens of millions of people. Customers can connect to the farmers and see the produce they are purchasing in real time. 

In Kenya, the solar and wind-powered town of Voi just outside of Nairobi is one example of ruralization. The town, which is connected to nearby urban and rural centers via railroads; is one of several tech hubs that have become a magnet for recent university graduates. 

But what about nature, the most prominent aspect of the countryside? Twenty-first capitalism offers one solution in Patagonia, where the eponymous outdoor equipment brand has purchased vast swaths of land and made them into protected lands,  in order to stave off deforestation. 

The final part of the exhibition employs technology to ask if we can liberate ourselves from our Cartesian way of thinking. Instead of focusing solely on efficiency, can we make a shift toward healthier cultivation of the land? Can pixel-farming robots invoke ancient Mayan traditions to be easier on the soil by planting crops that are beneficial to each other? Will photosynthesis scanners be able to grow equally perfect produce by making sure each plant is receiving enough light? How will architecture adapt in designing spaces solely for robot workers? 

As I wandered through the thought-provoking exhibition, I had no idea that, in just a few weeks, the Covid-19 pandemic would force the museum to close. New York is now the epicenter of the global pandemic; at the time of writing, over 100,000 Americans have died of the virus. In Delirious New York, Koolhaas proclaims, “Manhattan is an accumulation of possible disasters that never happen.” Now as I type these words from my bed, quarantined for over two months in Brooklyn, distracted by the relentless ambulance sirens and the constant news updates, that sentence strikes a deeper chord. 

The global lockdown was caused by a catastrophe, but it also brought some hope for a better future. With the decline in travel by car and by plane, the air is cleaner and the water clearer. For many, being forced to work from home has brought the welcome corollary of having more time to spend with family, or to just slow down and think.  

I wonder, when this ends, how many of us will continue living in cities, especially in metropolises that are hit the hardest by this outbreak. How many of us will try to become more self-sufficient by learning about permaculture and growing our own food? How many of us will slow down, stop fetishizing travel, and lower our carbon footprint by taking fewer trips? Will architects keep furthering urban sprawl and putting more strain on existing infrastructure? Will we keep eating animal products and ignore the deforestation perpetrated by cattle ranchers in the Amazon? 

The message brought by the virus is that we are all connected to one another and to nature in ways we have never even been aware of. If we fail to internalize this understanding, we will not have a future as a species on this planet—whether we live in the city or in the countryside.
    [post_title] => Are cities really all that? A provocative exhibition takes a new look at the countryside
    [post_excerpt] => An exhibition at the Guggenheim Museum, now closed due to the Covid-19 pandemic, asks if the future lies in the countryside. The question now feels prescient.
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Are cities really all that? A provocative exhibition takes a new look at the countryside

by Hande Oynar

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    [post_content] => The search for home can sometimes clash with the need for security.

Like many Canadians, I grew up with my nose pressed to the window of American life.

This was especially true in my case, because my mother was born in New York City and her mother in Chicago; my great-grandfather was a Chicago developer who built one of the city’s first skyscrapers. My American cousins intimidated me: they included an ambassador, a Harvard archeologist, even a bullfighter. One of them was married to a woman who flew her own small aircraft.

I wanted to be like them — bold, adventurous, successful — and to understand what made them tick; I wanted to flee the quiet, polite country I was born and raised in, where ambition and strong opinions were frowned upon.

Canadian newsstands offered 80 percent American content and I knew the names of Buffalo’s suburbs, Lackawanna and Cheektowaga, because their television broadcasts reached Toronto. I caught deeper glimpses of American contradictions while attending University of Toronto, during a life-changing exchange week at the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill. We attended a black Baptist church service where the preacher inveighed against abortion and the ladies waved paper fans. We listened to a black UNC administrator describe his life there…and begin to weep.

As someone from a multicultural city, Toronto, and a country where abortion isn’t demonized, both were shocking. Nor had I before imagined the daily toll that racism could play. It all deepened my curiosity about the U.S. even further, making me more determined to find a way to live there.

At 25, I won a fellowship to Paris, traveling Europe for eight months, then was a newspaper reporter in Toronto and Montreal, where I fell in love with a McGill medical student from New Jersey, soon to graduate and return south for residency.

I was able to follow him to the United States, although we were not married, because I was the daughter of a U.S. citizen, applying for “better work opportunities.” After I had taken an AIDS test, undergone a security check and been fingerprinted, an official at the consulate in Montreal interviewed me. I wrote, for a column in the national daily, The Globe and Mail, in 1988:

“The vice-consul asked me surprisingly little. When she approved my visa, after a brief but lively conversation, her enthusiasm and warmth were infectious. Even the guard wished me luck. I felt I’d been invited to a terrific party. I was handed a brown envelope, stamped, signed and sealed. My future was in my hands.”

And so I left behind a perfectly good country, one with excellent and heavily subsidized university education, cradle-to-grave healthcare, a wide, deep social safety net, and a Constitution that promised “peace, order and good government” rather than “life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness.”

For years, Canadians had often guessed I was American, which is a veiled insult that means too bossy, too direct, too nakedly ambitious. I wanted faster decisions and a wider playing field, not the endless foot-shuffling of risk-averse fellow Canadians and a career limited to a handful of major cities.

I’d thought American was more egalitarian than it is, but that turned out to be silly idealism. When I dared suggest to someone at Dartmouth that I audit classes there, since we were in the middle of nowhere for the next four years, pre-Internet, the university administration refused. How about part-time study? Also no.

As I began to try to make sense of my new home, I read two seminal works of the early 1990s that explained the shadowed side of John Winthrop’s 1630 vision of America as a much-admired “city on a hill”: the first was Alex Kotlowitz’s There Are No Children Here, about two boys growing up in a decrepit Chicago housing project during the 1980s; the second was Jonathan Kozol’s Savage Inequalities, a study of two school districts, divided by wealth and class, which were allotted wildly unequal resources by the American way of funding education through housing taxes. This was a key difference between my experiences in Toronto and Montreal.

In Hanover, a local social worker told me about the grinding poverty she saw on muddy backroads, the battered trailers with plastic on the windows, while Dartmouth’s most privileged students raced their shiny sports cars through town and dropped enormous sums in its few stores. There is poverty in Canada; this is particularly true for the shamefully neglected Indigenous people. But the shocking inequality of the United States, where the three wealthiest Americans collectively own more wealth than the bottom half of the population (while the middle class struggles to pay for healthcare and university tuition), is absent; Canada has its billionaires and millionaires, but they tend to be more discreet about their good fortune.

First American lesson: Prove you’re rich! Income inequality be damned.

I wanted my career back, so we moved to suburban New York, where I’ve lived ever since. After two years of marriage, my husband left and I started my American life yet again, without children. I’d insisted on a pre-nuptial agreement, which enabled me to survive financially and keep my home.

Second American lesson: Know your legal rights and be ready to fight hard for them.


Third American lesson: A tough lawyer is often your new best friend.

Single and lonely, in 1998 I answered a personals ad in a local alternative weekly — which brought a convicted con man into my life, who wreaked emotional havoc and cost me several thousand dollars.

Fourth American lesson: In a country so diverse, re-invention is easier. In a huge and mobile country, less fussy about one’s origins, he simply traveled east and started victimizing anew.


Fifth American lesson: Some Americans are wildly impressed with self-confidence and happily defer to material signs of success; before he was caught in Chicago, the conman had posed as a doctor and as a lawyer.

In the decades since, I’ve often wondered about my “ghost life.” What if I’d stayed in Canada? When I visit, I find that I miss the civil conversation, the more generous public policies and, most of all, a national culture that is not poisoned by right-wing terrorism.

In 2002 and 2003, while researching my first book, I traveled to Ohio, New Orleans, Massachusetts and Texas to interview 104 men, women and teens about women and gun use, asking whether they owned a firearm or whether one had shattered their life. I spent three days learning how to fire a Smith & Wesson 9mm pistol, which gave me the street cred to speak with suspicious gun owners; their first question to me was always the same: Do you believe in the Second Amendment?

Sixth American lesson: It’s as if the Constitution’s ink were still wet, so often is it cited. And every time I ask someone about their concomitant responsibility to the common good I might as well be speaking Greek, so hollow does the phrase ring in a nation addicted to the primacy of individual rights.

I survived the financial crash of 2008, thanks to my second husband’s secure job and my work in a part-time retail position for $11/hour, an experience that was the subject of my second book. In two-and-a-half years, while selling $600 ski jackets, my hourly wage was raised by only 30 cents. The store’s wealthy customers recoiled in shock if I replied to them in French or Spanish. They automatically assumed anyone working at a low-level job couldn’t possibly be as well educated or well-traveled as they.

Seventh American lesson: A low-wage job de facto signals low status. One customer tossed a quarter at us, barking: ‘Go to college!” Every one of our 15-member staff had done so, and two were military veterans. I saw firsthand what $11/ hour could buy. Almost nothing. With college costs so high, how could anyone flee? 


Eighth American lesson: The stunning cost of American post-secondary education breaks as many as it helps. Two of our friends in their early 30s, both from blue-collar families, are crippled by their college debts of $60,000 and $100,000. My annual tuition in mid-1970s Canada was $660 a year; today, it would be $6,000.

In a country professing such deep allegiance to “liberty,” American workers have no right to paid vacation, sick leave or paid maternity leave. Union membership is low, and the federal minimum wage has been stagnant for decades.

Since Donald Trump’s election, our Canadian friends have shifted from asking: “Will you come home?” to “When will you come home?”

I struggle to find a response, even as I realize that most of my reasons for staying are predicated on privilege. I am an educated white woman, in good health; I have work, savings in the bank, and a gainfully employed husband who is also in good health. If I were poor and lived in a rural area, Canada’s social safety net might appear much more appealing than it does from a pretty and prosperous town within easy distance of New York City.

Until we can afford to retire we need well-paid work, which, even in the worst of times, is more plentiful for us where we live now. My experience of trying to do business with Canadians has been frustrating: often they murmur encouragingly and then disappear, true to an aspect of the national character that places value on avoiding potential conflict.

The U.S. feels more foreign now than it did when I first made it my home, nearly 30 years ago. It is tainted by mass incarceration, racism and daily violence. Shooters armed with automatic weapons have massacred thousands and schoolchildren practice “active shooter drills.” In a nation that never shuts up about “productivity,” retailers sell us scented candles to relax. No one seems to notice the contradiction.

Soon, there will be more than 100,000 dead from COVID-19; meanwhile, the White House administration’s chaotic responses are a deadly roulette wheel.

I love our historic, lovely Hudson River town and its ready access to the pleasures of Manhattan --- although they are temporarily off limits during the pandemic. The fact remains; unless we move to a rural, isolated area with poor medical access, we can’t afford comparable Canadian housing and my home city, Toronto, has become both violent and expensive, with tiny teardown houses selling for $1 million.

I loathe Trump and fear four more years of this nightmare.

I enjoy our life here— while knowing how deeply its systems punish so many others.

It’s a moral thorn.

Stay?

Go?

I still don’t know.
    [post_title] => America is home but Canada is safer: after 30 years, and despite a fulfilling personal life, is it time to leave?
    [post_excerpt] => In the decades since, I’ve often wondered about my “ghost life.” What if I’d stayed in Canada? When I visit, I find that I miss the civil conversation, the more generous public policies and, most of all, a national culture that is not poisoned by right-wing terrorism.
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America is home but Canada is safer: after 30 years, and despite a fulfilling personal life, is it time to leave?

by Caitlin Kelly

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    [post_date] => 2020-05-14 22:00:58
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    [post_content] => A scientist-turned-businessman believes he can make a profit by harvesting carbon dioxide from the atmosphere and turning it into synthetic limestone.

In 2006 Brent Constanz, a marine biologist who had studied corals for over 20 years, founded a company called Calera to produce cement with carbon dioxide. Constanz believed he could make a profit from harvesting toxic emissions to make the world’s most in-demand product with a method that was not only environmentally sound – but which actually helped reduce carbon emissions. He later thought using carbon dioxide to create concrete was the way to go and in 2012 launched Blue Planet, with the aspiration to pull 25 billion tons of carbon dioxide annually out of the air’s foul breath and turn it into synthetic limestone. Blue Planet manufactures synthetic limestone out of carbon dioxide – the toxic gas that is an industrial byproduct.  Synthetic limestone, when broken down into small pebbles and added to water and cement, becomes concrete, the second largest commodity in the world after water.

Today, carbon in the atmosphere has hit 415 parts per million—the highest level in the 800,000 years for which we have reliable data. In the pre-industrial era, it was below 300 parts per million. The excess carbon in the atmosphere traps heat on Earth, turning up the global thermostat.

Sanjeev Khagram, dean of the Thunderbird School of Global Management at Arizona State University, said that Blue Planet’s method of turning carbon into synthetic limestone was an effective means of reducing carbon dioxide emissions in the atmosphere. While presenting a paper on the subject at the Davos World Economic Forum this year, Khagram said that “carbon farming” was an opportunity for entrepreneurs to “turn a profit of $1 to $10 trillion” per year.

“Blue Planet’s is indeed a market-based approach to tackling climate change,” said Rick Parnell, CEO of the Foundation for Climate Restoration,  an organization that aspires to restore atmospheric CO2 levels to pre-industrial levels by 2050. Parnell also advocates private sector initiatives like that of Constantz’s. “You can't wait for the governments to act, we need to act now,” he said. His partner, MIT graduate Peter Fiekowsky, said that until now Bill Gates was the only person funding carbon removal. He added that recent government initiatives were “at one tenth the scale we need.”

Carbon farming on a large scale would indeed solve a major environmental issue while creating a whole new industry, said Casper Ohm, a data scientist in the field of environmental sustainability. Ohm is editor-in-chief of Water Pollution, an online resource about water and the environment. “The investment to pull 25 billion tons of C02 per year would require a huge amount of capital,” he said.  “It all depends on money.”

For other experts, carbon trading is controversial for ethical and environmental reasons.

“It is kind of like enabling other companies to release more carbon carbon dioxide [so that] another company can take it out of the atmosphere, [which allows] the first company to keep creating more carbon dioxide,” said Lisa Schaefer, a systems engineer who founded Thinq.tv, a video streaming platform developed at Arizona State University that hosts live grassroots conversations about current events.

The first company, explained Schaefer, could be investing in making its infrastructure and processes greener, but instead will now pay a contractor to clean up what they are putting out into the atmosphere.  Schaefer also believes the amount of carbon Blue Planet promises to pull out of the atmosphere might have the counter-productive effect of encouraging the production of more concrete.

“Only 10 billion tons of concrete are produced every year, not including the recycling of old concrete and other cheaper materials for making concrete,” she said. There appears to be no demand for 25 billion tons. She added: “We certainly don't want to encourage companies to manufacture more concrete even if it is a ‘green one.’”

Constantz was, until January 2020, in discussions with a wide range of industrial emitters, including cement and steel plants about initiatives to establish manufacturing plants around the world. The Covid-19 pandemic has brought those discussion to a temporary halt, but Constanz expects them to resume once the crisis has passed.

But even in these times of insecurity, global stasis, and introspection, Fiekowsky, who invested in Blue Planet years ago (Leonardo DiCaprio and  Don Kennedy, the former president of Stanford University, are also investors), says there are parallels to be drawn between how different countries are addressing climate change and Covid-19.

“Singapore and South Korea decided they wanted to control the virus. The US and the UK said, well, let's just minimize the impact of the virus,” Fiekowsky said. As of this writing, the US has reported 1,259,108 cases and 75,781 deaths and the UK 207,977 cases and 30,689 deaths, while South Korea reports 10,822 cases and 256 deaths and Singapore 21,707 cases and 20 deaths. “Obviously, it's horrible. To just minimize what you really want to get rid of,” said Fiekowsky.

Governments were giving short shrift to the urgent need for policy to deal with climate change before the pandemic, which has since drowned out the conversation about the issue.  Constanz pointed out that while the United States government has allocated $2 trillion to address the Covid-19 emergency, far more will die from climate change.

Ismail Serageldin, the former  Vice-President for Environmentally and Socially Sustainable Development at the World Bank, famously said in 1995 that "if the wars of [the twentieth century] century were fought over oil, the wars of the [twenty-first] century will be fought over water — unless we change our approach to managing this precious and vital resource."

Climate change will continue to ravage the Earth even after a vaccination for the Covid-19 virus becomes available. It is thus a crisis that we cannot afford to sideline, even during a global health crisis. To that point, climate expert Professor Robert Devoy of Ireland’s Coastal Marine Research Center issued a stark warning in a 2015 interview. “The last time the planet warmed this much,” he said, “88 percent of life disappeared.”

 
    [post_title] => Can private industry save the environment with for-profit green initiatives?
    [post_excerpt] => Harvest carbon and turning it into synthetic limestone could be an effective means of reducing carbon dioxide emissions in the atmosphere.
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Can private industry save the environment with for-profit green initiatives?

by Stav Dimitropoulos

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    [post_date] => 2020-05-14 21:23:43
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    [post_content] => The dynamics of gentrification among the middle class are complicated, but Covid-19 has brought some painful clarity.

On January 24, the day I went into labor, only two people in the U.S. had been diagnosed with the coronavirus that still had no name. That afternoon, I stumbled out of our Brooklyn apartment building under the watchful eyes of whichever neighbors happened to be in the courtyard or peering out their windows at that moment. In recent months, as I started growing more and more rotund, neighbors who had generally offered no more than a passing nod in the elevator or by the front gate began holding doors for me, inquiring about my pregnancy, and telling me tales of their own. I started to enjoy shifting my distinguishing characteristic in the building from my whiteness, which marked me as a gentrifier in a borough of gentrification, to my belly, which marked me as a beleaguered woman in a world of beleaguered women.

The demographics inside my 120-unit apartment building on the border of two Brooklyn neighborhoods—one already thoroughly gentrified, another well on its way—reflect the demographics on the street. In the building, longtime black residents get replaced, vacancy by vacancy, with mostly white, highly educated newcomers like myself, whose rent-stabilized apartments are still a bargain at twice the price many of the older families are paying.

The dynamics of gentrification among the middle class are complicated, particularly in a city like New York, where racial differences persistently track onto income levels and health outcomes, and whole communities get displaced by predatory developers. My also-white partner is an artist and I’m a graduate student. As far as annual income is concerned, many of the longtime residents are probably in better shape than we are. But as is playing out so blatantly during this crisis, social class isn’t just about income. This lesson has never been clearer than from where I write this, perched under a skylight at a friend’s childhood home in Connecticut, where we have been hiding out for the last six weeks.

We spent the first four weeks of my son’s life in the normal self-isolation of new parenthood. The news about the spread of the virus was ominous, but felt distant. Family visited, friends brought food. The only visitors we restricted were my aunt and uncle, who had returned in mid-February from a cruise in the Far East. All others were welcome, as was the friendly up-close cooing of our neighbors. When I was finally able to move around again after a few weeks of what is euphemistically referred to as postpartum “discomfort,” I delightedly walked down the block to my favorite coffee shop and down a couple more to another, just because I could.

But soon the three of us came down with a cold and again began receding from the world. It was just as well, because days later, on March 4, a Covid-19 cluster surfaced just north of the city. As we monitored our temperatures and the baby’s cough—which is one of the saddest and scariest sounds I have ever heard—and gradually nursed ourselves back to health, the city got sicker and sicker all around us.

A neighbor posted to the building’s invite-only Facebook page, which is populated almost exclusively by the building’s gentrifiers, expressing concern for elderly residents and for the woman who cleans the hallways and takes out the trash. Ideas were circulated about how to help: sign-up sheets, phone calls, pros, cons.

At the same time, discarded latex gloves started littering the streets and sidewalks like a dystopian second autumn. At first we spotted just one or two each time we took the dog out for a walk, but soon there were scores of them clustering in slow-moving eddies.

Headlines forecasting calamities bled into each other across all our devices, the drumbeat growing louder and closer, and the warm exchanges we had been having with neighbors gradually fizzled into a mutually fearful, distanced dance when negotiating doorways in common spaces. The streets began feeling empty. Normally coveted parking spots opened up as people with means packed up and drove away. At the same time, the building’s Facebook page went curiously quiet. Had the other gentrifiers left the premises?

Since we had no country house to flee to nor the means to indefinitely rent one, we figured we would just stay put. We signed up for new internet service that week; if we were going to stay, we were going to do it with high-speed broadband.

But what might have been even more contagious than the virus so many were fleeing was the panic it induced. When close friends also with a newborn and also without a country house announced their decision to flee the city, we finally accepted that the postpartum back-to-work routine we had so meticulously planned and were started to look forward to implementing had become obsolete. So had the need for a new internet provider. The elevator, which we needed to ride up and down twice a day with our 12-year-old dog, started to feel like a death trap. High-touch zones like the front doorknobs seemed to glow, radioactive. The day Governor Cuomo finally announced the closure of public schools, I started feeling desperate. We tapped into our networks, learned that a friend’s parents had left behind an empty house in the suburbs when they decamped months earlier to the Virgin Islands, and that they would let us have it. Two days later, we made our first of several car trips to the midcentury house on a wooded road which would become our temporary home.

After hearing that we were leaving, friends in our building who had been planning to ride it out decided that they would follow suit. As they wheeled their suitcases packed with dried beans and all-season clothing through the lobby, a young black resident standing with a friend by the elevator muttered after them: “Have fun in the Poconos.”

Our friends, who are also white, weren’t going to the Poconos, and we weren’t going to the Virgin Islands. But what difference does it make? Whether their family’s empty suburban condo or our friend’s empty suburban house, we have options because the people in our communities have options. And the fact that neither we nor our friends are even paying for our temporary housing only underscores the inequality of our opportunities.

Packing up the car in front of the same neighbors who saw us off to the hospital just two months earlier is not an experience I will soon forget. As we crossed one bridge out of the city and then another, leaving the dimmed skyline behind, we found ourselves arguing about the dynamics of our departure. Ethically speaking, by most accounts, fleeing to an empty house with two weeks’ worth of groceries was the best thing to do. Three fewer people in the building means three fewer disease vectors, and three fewer hospital beds to take up if we fell ill. Our presence helped no one and was only a risk, and a potential resource drain.

And yet. Leaving behind the neighbors whose outpricing our presence only accelerated felt like a betrayal. Not that anyone seemed sorry to see us go. Maybe, just maybe, some felt a certain satisfaction at being right: that we might be friendly, we might move secondhand furniture ourselves out of our 15-year-old Honda, and we might hold doors whenever there isn’t a pandemic, but at the end of the day, we have choices, and many of them do not. The virus itself might be equal opportunity, but the crowded conditions and impossibility of remote working are not.

Maybe in the end it’s just as well the Facebook group never really integrated. If our good intentions didn’t bear fruit, at least their transience could go largely unnoticed. Except, that is, by those of us who spoke and then fell silent.
    [post_title] => Escaping pandemic Brooklyn? You're probably white, even if you have less money than your Black neighbors
    [post_excerpt] => As we crossed one bridge out of the city and then another, leaving the dimmed skyline behind, we found ourselves arguing about the dynamics of our departure.
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Escaping pandemic Brooklyn? You’re probably white, even if you have less money than your Black neighbors

by Ilana Sichel

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    [post_date] => 2020-05-08 04:35:54
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    [post_content] => Americans are vulnerable to disinformation because they believe in their own exceptionalism.

The Trump-Russia scandal has created an entire cottage industry of disinformation experts in the United States and beyond, but not all of those purported experts are reputable. I know the pandemic is depleting much of our energy, but I am going to ask you to dig deep and find a bit more, because disinformation is a very serious problem; and if we are going to save our democracy, we need to understand how it works.

The definition of “disinformation” is false information that is deliberately introduced into the discourse in order to create doubt and chaos. This is different from misinformation, which refers to false information spread out of ignorance. But do these distinctions actually matter when the man sitting in the highest office in the land picks up and spreads false information? 

The president of the United States uses his very powerful position to disseminate information that is unverified at best—and deliberately false at worst. He recommends dangerously false “cures” for COVID-19, most notoriously when he suggested that people try injecting bleach. His goal is to calm the populace and shore up his base. His motive is to be re-elected in November. Whether he believes the lies he spins is beside the point. 

As CNN reported, Trump got the idea for injecting bleach from a Florida-based ultra-fringe church group, called the Genesis II Church of Health and Healing, which has for years advocated using potentially lethal chemical “sacraments” to cure illnesses. All Trump did was change the disinformation vector: he amplified a marginal idea advocated by a fringe group, and suddenly it was broadcast into the homes of millions of Americans. 

While we Americans think of ourselves as exceptional, the truth is that what Trump is doing to us is something that the Kremlin has been doing for years — except that Trump does it in a chaotic and uncontrolled manner. The Kremlin is much more strategic by comparison; that’s not a compliment to the Kremlin, but an expression of horror at just how badly Trump is bungling the disinformation game.

When I was working in Moscow, in 2014, I witnessed firsthand how false narratives about the shootdown of flight MH17 over Ukraine  were created and disseminated. I filed this article for the Guardian in the immediate aftermath of the shootdown, showing that there was no coherent narrative coming out of Moscow. Days later, the official propaganda machine deflecting blame from Russia was already in full swing, and as my colleagues over at the award-winning investigative platform Bellingcat note, it continues to churn to this day, even as we find more evidence linking Russian officials to the tragedy. Russian officials, of course, are not particularly happy with us.



If the tone seems familiar — it should. As should the disdainful little nickname that Russia’s second diplomat to the UN just made up for us at Bellingcat.

Trump loves making up little nicknames for his opponents— think “Sleepy Joe,” for Joe Biden, or “Crooked Hillary.”  The power of nicknames, as explained in this Columbia Journalism Review analysis, is derived from the linguistic trick in old fairy tales; they stick in your head and appeal to your inner child—and that child’s desire to see cartoonishly evil villains in the world. Trump has a predator’s instincts for wielding power, and they are working for him here. 

The idea of elite convergence, the idea that a society’s powerful people will come to resemble each other even if they hail from different political camps and or preach different ideologies, is not exclusive to American domestic politics. Trump ingratiates himself with so many foreign authoritarians, Putin included, because he sees them all as part of the same club he is in — the international club of rich, powerful, and ruthless (or, in the case of Trump, hysterically reactionary) men. 

Capitalism has made sure that these men all love the same luxury products and enjoy similar lifestyles, whether covertly or overtly. Trump’s overriding allegiance is to status, and authoritarians display their status unabashedly. You can’t shame someone like Trump into abandoning his tactics,because  they are part of a package he finds immensely attractive. 

Americans are vulnerable to disinformation because they believe in their own exceptionalism. They are no less vulnerable than Russians, who have been imbibing state-generated disinformation for more than a century. Russians swallow lies because they’re too busy surviving/navigating a treacherous political and social landscape to care, while Americans who are privileged enough to drive policy have largely been shielded and insulated from the effects of corrupt power. Think, for example, of which ethnic and racial subcultures of the U.S. population are more likely to be targeted by dirty cops — and then think about the people who actually lead us today. There is a gulf between these groups.

Trump and the pandemic are nevertheless tearing away the insulation that privileged middle class white people have taken for granted. Whether the president is babbling about fake “cures” or undermining Democratric governors with calls to reopen based on shoddy science—or, for that matter, having the feds simply snatch supplies and then staying mum about it, his lies and obfuscations, and the lies and obfuscations of all officials who enable him, have become a matter of life and death. 

The first step to fighting back is understanding that there is no such thing as “harmless” disinformation. Especially during a public health crisis. And if you think that Republican officials aren’t following Trump’s lead and spinning this disaster in whatever way is more beneficial to them — you are wrong. Trump’s shamelessness is infectious and destructive, but the bills will come due. After all, you can’t reason with a virus. Neither can you bully it into submission.
    [post_title] => If you care about saving democracy, you must learn how to deal with disinformation
    [post_excerpt] => Americans like to believe they are exceptional, but the truth is that the Kremlin has for years been doing to Russians what Trump is now doing to Americans.
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If you care about saving democracy, you must learn how to deal with disinformation

by Natalia Antonova

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    [post_content] => Want to stop a conversation cold? Tell someone you haven’t spoken to your mother in a decade. Then tell them you’re her only child.

The annual Mother’s Day frenzy culminates with the actual celebration this Sunday, with a sentimental blizzard of flowers and cards that included, in pre-pandemic times, restaurant tables often filled with happy mothers and daughters celebrating their love for one another.

On social media, there will be endless tributes to mothers who have died, recently or decades ago, still much missed and deeply mourned.

That won’t be me.

My mother died suddenly this year, at 85, sitting in her nursing home armchair watching television—in a city a seven-hour, cross-country international flight from me.

I hadn’t seen her in years nor tried to re-connect. I knew better, even though others repeatedly urged me to, including my father, 50 years divorced from her but lately back in touch.

“You’ll regret it!”

“What if she dies?”

“Just go!”

“You never know…”

But they didn’t know the full story.

Every year I sent her a Christmas card filled with the past year’s news, but never received a reply, not even in 2018, the year of my early-stage breast cancer, surgery and radiation. When she had had a mastectomy decades before, I’d flown from New York to Vancouver to get her back home and re-settled.

A few years ago, she told my best friend, a local who went to visit, to tell me to stay away.

How does one end up so estranged?

More easily than you’d think.

Yet no other relationship carries as much emotional freight as the mother-daughter bond.

The very word, mother, is a verb as well as a noun, implying loving attention, an open heart and arms, a ready ear. A welcoming place to run back to whenever you need comfort and solace.

But that’s just not everyone’s experience.

She left my father when I was seven. I was sent to boarding school, and every summer to camp, my battered blue trunk shuttling between them. I shared rooms for years with four to six other girls, summers in a raw wooden bunk, winters in a brown metal bed.

At school, we were shouted at routinely by ancient housemothers, women who’d been widowed or never married, old enough to be our grandparents, to whom we were nothing more than a name on a checklist and someone to discipline, but never to hug or console.

I saw my mother on weekends and holidays. She did throw great, lavish birthday parties for me, with cakes and sparklers and lots of my pals.

There were adult years when she and I got along well, and even traveled together, with adventures in Fiji, Peru, Costa Rica and Colombia as I flew in to visit her, mid-journey. She had inherited enough money to travel as long as she liked and lived frugally. Later, I visited her home in British Columbia a few times.

But her alcoholism worsened, and her bipolar illness blitzed my life repeatedly, usually without warning. That meant hospitalizations, worldwide, and I learned to dread the inevitable phone call detailing the latest mayhem – when, manic and acting out wildly in public, she landed in foreign jails and hospitals or trashed her rental apartment, sometimes many time zones distant.

At 19, living alone and attending university full-time in downtown Toronto, I had no idea what to do. You really can’t turn to someone in your Chaucer seminar and ask for that kind of help. My father, also away traveling the world with his soon-to-be second wife, showed no interest.

And talking about any of it, rough enough for me to handle privately, felt like telling tales out of school. Who could possibly understand, sympathize or help? She would just keep doing whatever she pleased anyway, consequences be damned.

The worst moment for me was when she ended up in a locked London psychiatric ward. I had just finished the happiest year of my life, on a Paris-based journalism fellowship. Her illness, a trio of frosty English doctors told me, could be inherited, while offering me no advice or comfort. I was a young, ambitious journalist with a growing career, now terrified my mind was potentially as susceptible. In a small, highly competitive industry, I couldn’t risk anyone wondering if I would be next.­­

Her weary friends gave up.

Her three American cousins, living many miles away, fed up with her late-night calls and wild-eyed visits, gave up.

No one really knew what was going on but me.

I had fled her care after a terrifying manic breakdown that occurred when I was 14, when we lived in Mexico. She drove a van carrying me and two others down a major highway with the headlights turned off, ending up crashed in a ditch at midnight in a city we’d never seen before. For two weeks it fell on me to care for a friend who’d just arrived from Canada to visit.

A few weeks later, I returned to Canada and moved in with my father and his girlfriend. I never lived with my mother again.

No one ever discussed her illness with me, or offered me tools to cope with it, even though I knew the name of her psychiatrist. Later in life, I intellectually accepted that mental illness is an illness, but at 14, I was too scared and angry at having been so endangered. Nor was this the first time I’d been subjected to a manic breakdown; she had one when I was 12 when we stayed at a friend’s house. I awoke to find a massive potted plant spread at the bottom of the stairs --- but remember nothing after that. I have some gaps in my memory, likely protective.)

Yet, for decades, like a broken robot, I did keep visiting her, hoping, naively and childishly, for the kind of mother so many others took for granted – healthy, loving, reliable, attentive. Too often, I endured another drunken rage.

So, I too, gave up.

Only in the weeks after her death, that little flickering pilot light of hope for eventual reconciliation finally extinguished, did I realize that I’d won more than I’d lost.

Without her, I’ve created and navigated a successful life, living and working in five cities and three countries. A life filled with loving friends, a strong marriage and a successful writing career.

No one taught me how to dress or apply make-up or cook or any of the skills mothers traditionally pass on to their daughters, let alone how to handle finances, work or relationships. I learned, even as a teenager, to rely on a few others, happy to help me out when needed.

The more I figured stuff out, most of the time successfully, the more self-confidence I gained. I didn’t need a lot of direction or advice.

I learned to challenge authority – or, more crucially – not genuflect to it in the first place. Would my mother disapprove of my choices? She’d never even notice. That itself offered  substantial freedom when I see so many women miserably buckling, sometimes deep into middle age, under the weight of their mothers’ disapproval --- of their bodies, their partners, their work or their parenting.

And I learned to celebrate my own triumphs.

When I graduated university, all of which she’d missed while traveling, she refused to attend my graduation, even in a huge hall with thousands of others, because I’d also invited my father. So, I asked him to stay home; when I called her back, she’d already committed to the graduation of a friend’s daughter instead.

So, friends became my  closest family.

The Christmas Eve my mother threw her gifts around my living room in a drunken rage, I fled the next day to a friend’s home in Pennsylvania, racing from my New York home down the highway to a place I knew for sure --- never having met his parents -- would be calm and kind. As usual, the homes of others were my refuge.

When I married for the second time, a friend stood in as my witness and helped me with  the last-minute primping every bride craves before heading down the aisle. For decades a friend 10 years my senior welcomed me into her home, year after year, whether I was single, divorced, re-married.

The world, I learned, is full of other mothers.

 
    [post_title] => On Mother's Day, I feel no desire to pay tribute to my mother
    [post_excerpt] => The very word, mother, is a verb as well as a noun, implying loving attention, an open heart and arms, a ready ear. A welcoming place to run back to whenever you need comfort and solace. But that’s just not everyone’s experience.
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On Mother’s Day, I feel no desire to pay tribute to my mother

by Caitlin Kelly

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    [post_date] => 2020-04-30 13:59:50
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    [post_content] => How to explain the Christian Right's unshakable loyalty for Donald Trump, a twice-divorced man who has been credibly accused of sexual assault by numerous women? 

White evangelicals have consistently been Donald Trump’s most supportive demographic since his 2016 victory. Even as the president’s overall approval numbers decline after the initial “rally ‘round the flag” effect from the COVID-19 pandemic that he is egregiously (and arguably criminally) mishandling, white evangelicals remain steadfastly by his side. The pandemic has itself become a site of the culture wars that the anti-democratic U.S. Christian Right has been waging relentlessly for four decades as it attempts to hold back the progress of civil rights and equality in America. And Trump, who has demonstrated his willingness to pursue their culture wars agenda, can count on unwavering support from white evangelicals in the upcoming presidential election. Our analytical focus should be on why and how authoritarian evangelicals have managed to gain so much power and what can be done to fight back, as opposed to hand wringing over their willingness to partner with an impious strongman.

Pundits who do not understand right-wing evangelical subculture have over the last few years frequently suggested that certain tipping points might shake evangelicals’ loyalty to Trump. Early on, many naively believed that shaming evangelicals over their hypocrisy in supporting a thrice-married man credibly accused of sexual assault by numerous women would be an effective means of peeling some of them away. More recently, some commentators claimed hopefully that outgoing Christianity Today editor Mark Galli’s December 19, 2019 op-ed, “Trump Should be Removed from Office,” was evidence of significant dissent over support for the president within the evangelical camp.

Trump did initially seem concerned about Galli’s op-ed, tweeting angry responses and launching an “Evangelicals for Trump” initiative. He needn’t have been. His evangelical base remains unwavering in its support for one simple reason: Trump gives authoritarian Christians practically everything they want. He validates their worst culture warring impulses and pursues the Christian Right’s agenda more comprehensively and vigorously than any previous president, including George W. Bush. Not only has Trump been stacking the federal courts and the federal bureaucracy with young far right ideologues; he also moved the United States Embassy in Israel from Tel Aviv to Jerusalem to play to evangelicals “end times” beliefs.

Far from revealing that there is significant division among white evangelicals over Trump, the responses to Galli’s op-ed showed that Christianity Today, while certainly a conservative publication, is no longer the evangelical flagship magazine. Instead, the periodical that Billy Graham, “America’s Pastor,” founded in 1956 is now out of step with an increasingly radicalized white evangelical demographic, one in which the racial animosity that has always been a part of this kind of Christianity is now closer to the surface than many of the “genteel” readers of Christianity Today might wish.

Meanwhile, the prominent Southern Baptist leader Rev. R. Albert Mohler Jr., who was once critical of Trump and refused to vote for him in 2016, now says he regrets that decision and will vote for him in 2020. In his statement, Mohler bragged that he thinks Trump may see an even higher share of the white evangelical vote this time around than the 80 percent he got in 2016, and he may well be right. The case for any shift of evangelicals away from Trump thus further crumbles.

To be sure, a small minority of white evangelicals remains critical of Trump, but only 16 percent of the white evangelical vote went to Hillary Clinton in 2016, and the current polling data does not show  Joe Biden gaining a greater share. The realities of American polarization have become so stark that the coveted swing voter is now essentially a thing of the past, at least according to the analysis of political scientist Rachel Bitecofer, which I find convincing. National elections thus become a contest of turning out the base, and white evangelicals vote disproportionately to their numbers. Although they are down to 16 percent of the U.S. population, they still made up 25 percent of the electorate in the 2018 midterms.

And Trump continues to deliver for them. Most recently, he pulled money from the World Health Organization, the kind of international institution right-wing authoritarians despise for their “elitism” and “globalism,” and redistributed some of it to the evangelical missionary organization Samaritan’s Purse, which has somehow been allowed to set up a 68-bed field hospital in New York City’s Central Park despite legitimate concerns about its ability to provide an equal standard of care to all patients.

Samaritan’s Purse is headed by rabid homophobe and Islamophobe Franklin Graham—Billy Graham’s son; the organization requires staff to sign a statement of faith that reads in part, “we believe that marriage is exclusively the union of one genetic male and one genetic female.” In addition to Samaritan’s Purse, Graham also heads the Billy Graham Evangelistic Association, which is deliberately seeking to capitalize on people’s fears of the novel coronavirus in order to drum up conversions. Graham has, naturally, been one of Trump’s most outspoken prominent evangelical supporters since 2016.

But it’s not all bad news for those of us who support democracy and human rights. Trump’s supporters do have some reasons to worry about the president’s reelection prospects. The economy has historically played a decisive role in American presidential elections, and the staggering unemployment numbers caused by quarantine during the pandemic would normally sink any incumbent’s prospects. This may be one key motivation of the recent protests calling for an end to quarantine restrictions on economic activity. (By the way, the phrase “reopen the economy” is a partisan right-wing talking point, and journalists should avoid using it as a supposedly neutral descriptor for these actions.)

As some states such as Georgia move to ease quarantine restrictions and allow certain businesses to reopen, Trump continues to talk out of both sides of his mouth—for example, rebuking Georgia’s governor for planning to ease restrictions too early after tweeting a demand to “LIBERATE” other states where anti-quarantine protests had taken place. Meanwhile the anti-lockdown protestors direct their anger at Dr. Anthony Fauci rather than at Trump.

While it would be wrong to dismiss these protests as mere “astroturf” campaigns, they do have backing and funding from a wealthy and well-connected right-wing network that includes billionaire Robert Mercer and Secretary of Education Betsy DeVos. But if those of us who value democracy and equality choose to ignore the protests, labeling them as top-down initiatives with no deep grassroots support, we risk missing their potential political impact. A number of commentators made the same mistake with the appearance of the Tea Party, which was backed by many of the same members of the donor class. Another mistake was to view the Tea Party as distinct from the Christian Right, which it is not. We must avoid repeating that mistake.

Indeed, the cab of a semi used in the protest in Harrisburg, Pennsylvania on April 20, was emblazoned with the phrase “Jesus is my vaccine,” rhetoric similar to that used by pastors who defiantly continue to hold in-person church services despite shutdown orders meant to contain the pandemic. Although there is no legal precedent for the exemption of churches from quarantine, a number of right-wing organizations have now taken up the cause under the rallying cry of “religious freedom” that they have effectively employed in recent years to impose a theocratic agenda with respect to matters such as abortion, birth control, and same-sex marriage. Meanwhile, new conspiracy theories are being spread via social media, including the apocalyptic assertion that the coronavirus vaccine will be the “Mark of the Beast” associated with the “end times,” literally damning those who receive it.

Such beliefs are harmful to both democracy and public health, and, while it remains to be seen what impact they might have on the 2020 election, it is worth remembering that in 2013 a full 20 percent of Republicans believed with certainty that Barack Obama was the Antichrist. The Electoral College, as well as America’s problems with gerrymandering and voter suppression, favor the Right, but at the same time, the spectacle of Christians behaving badly in the face of the coronavirus pandemic will most likely have a negative impact on evangelicals’ reputation, and, by extension, Trump’s.

In any case, with the Christian Right and the GOP desperate to cling to their disproportionate power, we can expect a bumpy ride to November. Democrats will need to make every effort to turn out their base in order to defeat the GOP.
    [post_title] => “Jesus is my vaccine”: culture wars, coronavirus, and the 2020 election
    [post_excerpt] => The Trump supporters who protested the pandemic lockdown have support from billionaires like Robert Mercer and Betsy DeVos. But if we label them as top-down initiatives with no deep grassroots support, we risk missing their potential political impact.
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“Jesus is my vaccine”: culture wars, coronavirus, and the 2020 election

by Chrissy Stroop

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