Tolerating Intolerance

In recent weeks, I have experienced a number of reminders of how difficult it is to overcome intolerance.  There is intolerance at the local level - exhibited by a "locals only" sign I saw in Santa Cruz which reflects a mentality embraced by surfers and high school students in my own beach community in southern California.  I remember when my children were in high school, and even into college, there was a running debate about whose city affiliation was better between students who lived in one upper middle class beach city and those who lived in an adjacent upper middle class beach city geographically indistinguishable from the first one.  The young residents of each city felt the need to exclude the others from social gatherings.  Locals only.

There is intolerance of religion.  Witness the heated and unsavory debate about the proposal to build a mosque two blocks from the WTC site.  Witness the Time poll that shows substantial prejudice in our society against Muslims:

Yet the survey also revealed that many Americans harbor lingering animosity toward Muslims. Twenty-eight percent of voters do not believe Muslims should be eligible to sit on the U.S. Supreme Court. Nearly one-third of the country thinks adherents of Islam should be barred from running for President — a slightly higher percentage than the 24% who mistakenly believe the current occupant of the Oval Office is himself a Muslim.

(I am not sure where Time got the 24% figure about Obama given that a Pew Poll today said the figure was 18%, still a disturbingly high percentage of people who are wrong about the President's religion.)

My son told me last night that, when he returned his junior year in high school to our local, upper middle class, white, suburban school, people called him a "Jew" and a "Nigger", the former because of his surname and the latter because he had picked up some dialect from friends at his more diverse former school.  Dr. Laura has been guilty of hurling the racial epithet recently and Sarah Palin supports her right to do so.

On May 1,1992 Rodney King said "Can we all get along?" as a plea to stop the violence arising from racial tensions here after the acquittal three days before of the police who were videotaped beating him.  Almost 20 years later, we show that we still cannot get along.  We show that we still do not tolerate those who are different from us. Our tolerance of intolerance continues notwithstanding efforts to change.  The Southern Law Poverty Center runs a program called Teaching Tolerance in an effort to educate our children to be open to those who are different  from them.   City College of San Francisco, itself a huge melting pot of over 100,000 students of every race, religion, socio-economic class and other persuasions, also has a wonderful website on teaching tolerance.  Unfortunately, notwithstanding all these efforts, our children do not seem to learn the lesson as evidenced by my son's experiences.  When will we all get along, if no one is really learning tolerance in our current educational system?  We can no longer afford as a society to continue tolerating intolerance.

A Page from the Bush Playbook

Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg was hospitalized this week reportedly in response to treatment for anemia. She has pancreatic cancer so one must believe that the anemia is associated with the disease or the treatments she is taking for the disease. As I have written before in this blog, I am very fond of Justice Ginsberg and although she says that she hopes to stay on the court for at least another 5 years, she may need or want to retire at the end of this term. Thus it is likely that President Obama will have to appoint another justice within the next year.

Obama is developing a reputation as a middle of the roader. See e.g. the Washington Post article by Rajiv Chandrasekaran. Obama's last choice for Supreme Court supports that reputation, as far as I can tell. However, he must break with this proclivity and appoint someone like Ginsburg to the next open seat. Obama needs to be more like W and appoint people with more definite values (this time left leaning) just as W appointed two (!) highly conservative justices during his administration.

Otherwise we will continue to suffer the fallout of the Bush administration. A May 2009 article in the New Yorker by Jeffrey Toobin demonstrates why. As Toobin wrote:

After four years on the Court, however, Roberts’s record is not that of a humble moderate but, rather, that of a doctrinaire conservative. The kind of humility that Roberts favors reflects a view that the Court should almost always defer to the existing power relationships in society. In every major case since he became the nation’s seventeenth Chief Justice, Roberts has sided with the prosecution over the defendant, the state over the condemned, the executive branch over the legislative, and the corporate defendant over the individual plaintiff. Even more than Scalia, who has embodied judicial conservatism during a generation of service on the Supreme Court, Roberts has served the interests, and reflected the values, of the contemporary Republican Party.

What that means for us is the potential loss of civil rights to which we have become accustomed. A Roberts dominated court could eliminate the following:

• rights of African- Americans-Roberts already signaled his intentions to cut protections to African- Americans in last term's case involving section 5 of the 1965 Voting Rights Act, which the Court ultimately upheld but narrowed such that local governments now have the option not to obtain Justice Department approval before making changes to their election laws or rules. As Toobin points out, these rules include "from the location of polling places to the boundaries of congressional districts." Roberts also supported the overturning of the Seattle School District integration plan in 2007 and found that the rights of white New haven firefighters were violated under Title VII of the civil rights act.


• abortion- six of the current nine justices are Catholic, in comparison to under 25% of the American population. Roberts already supported the upholding of the federal Partial Birth Abortion Ban Act in 2007.


• women's rights in employment- Roberts supported the decision in Ledbetter v. Goodyear which imposed virtually impossible standards on those suing for discrimination. In that case the woman plaintiff was seeking equal pay for equal work.


• rights to pursue torturers- Roberts dissented in Boumediene v. Bush, which upheld rights of those held in Guantanamo to a "prompt hearing" on challenges to detention. If the AG ever decides to pursue those who justified and allowed torture in the Bush Adminstration, we can safely predict where a Roberts led court would come out.

So, if Obama must name another justice in the coming year or so, I hope he recognizes what is at stake and takes pains to find someone who is ideologically like Ginsburg. Otherwise Bush's legacy of conservatism will rear its ugly head for a very long time in the Supreme Court.

Come Together Right Now

Since I have been reading a lot recently about the Bush administration's isolationism, I am probably more sensitive to and interested in certain news the past few days.  Obama has supported and other leaders have agreed for a permanent shift of international economic discussions from G7 to G20.  In addition, Obama garnered support from other nations to confront Iran on its secret nuclear plant filled with Pakistani centrifuges and located near Yum in a highly protected area.  Here are two instances, thus, where Obama shows his global view  in contrast to the last administration's blinkered view of the world where our nation's perspective was the only important factor. 

The shift to G20 only reflects the reality of the world.  The 19 nation member plus the EU reportedly represent 90% of the world's GDP.  It includes the new rising economies and according to the NYT:  

The member countries are Argentina, Australia, Brazil, Britain, Canada, China, France, Germany, India, Indonesia, Italy, Japan, Mexico, Russia, Saudi Arabia, South Africa, South Korea, Turkey and the United States. The European Union is also a member, represented by the rotating council presidency and the European Central Bank.

It makes sense to have this group meet rather than the traditional big industrial countries of the G7, United States, Britain, France, Canada, Italy, Germany and Japan.  We need to adjust to the reality that growth of economies throughout the world affects us all.

The second event reflects Obama's desire to approach problems with multiple allies rather than the show Bush put on to justify the desire to invade Iraq. Obama is trying to enlist a number of countries including Russia  and China to put pressure on Iran to come clean about its nuclear capabilities and comply with international nuclear proliferation treaties. Hopefully the international community will respond and not be affected by its experience regarding Iraq.

Moral Indignation

I read today that President Obama has intimated he would talk to the Taliban. Somehow the words "Neville Chamberlain" popped into my head. (oh no! I sound like McCain!) The Taliban for me are like the Nazis. They treat women like animals and insist on ignorance and fear as the foundation of their society and governance. It seems inconceivable that a compromise can be made that allows them to rule. I will try to keep an open mind but I am quite disturbed by this development.
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/03/08/us/politics/08obama.html?_r=1&ref=todayspaper
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/03/08/weekinreview/08COOPER.html?_r=1&hp

I also was offered two tickets to see Das Rheingold this week at the LA Opera. I used to go to the opera all the time and am toying with the idea of taking the tickets. I am not a big fan of Wagner's music (I recall squirming through Tristan and Isolde) but I had not considered other reasons not to see the opera until my husband refused to go based on ideological objections to Wagner's anti-semitism. So what to do? I am honestly more worried about sitting for almost 3 hours without an intermission than I am about making a politically incorrect statement. If Daniel Barenboim can consider conducting Wagner, I can go see him. But to sit trapped in a long row of people and not have access to the bathroom for 3 hours??? Let's keep our priorities straight!