Beacon Broadside

Dissenting: A View from the 1930s

Today's post is from Mark Tushnet, author of I Dissent: Great Opposing Opinions in Landmark Supreme Court Cases. Tushnet is William Nelson Cromwell Professor of Law at Harvard Law School. Previously a professor of law at Georgetown University and University of Wisconsin, Tushnet is the author of numerous books, including A Court Divided: The Rehnquist Court and the Future of Constitutional Law.

I've been doing some research on the Supreme Court during the 1930s, and have run across some interesting comments from Justice Harlan Fiske Stone on dissenting. Stone was a progressive Republican appointed to the Court by Calvin Coolidge. He served as an Associate Justice under Chief Justices William Howard Taft and then Charles Evans Hughes, before Franklin Roosevelt appointed him Chief Justice in 1941.

During the 1920s, Taft ruled the Court with a firm hand, and strongly discouraged dissents. And, even after Hughes took over, it was common for a justice to dissent with a simple notation: "Agreeing with the court below, I dissent," or the like. As the 1930s went on, though, the number and length of dissents increased.

The reason, pretty clearly, was that liberal and progressive dissenters were increasingly dismayed at what they saw as the majority's radical conservatism. Yet, that explains dissenting but not really writing long dissents. And Stone, in private correspondence, fumbled around for explanations for his practice.

Tragic Shooting at Knoxville Church

Everyone here at Beacon Press is deeply saddened by the deadly shooting last Sunday at the Tennessee Valley Unitarian Universalist Church in Knoxville, in which two people were killed and seven others injured. Police reports indicate that the shooter targeted the church for its "liberal leanings."

We extend our deepest condolences to the families and friends of the victims, to the congregation and to the Knoxville community. The Unitarian Universalist Association has created this page to provide updates. Chris Walton at Philocrites and many other UU bloggers have been providing extensive coverage and commentary on this tragic assault.

Link Roundup: Foreclosures, Swing Voters, Farmers Sharing the Bounty

At the Root, Kai Wright discusses the hit black homeowners are taking in the mortgage foreclosure crisis, a topic he addressed earlier in this excellent article at The Nation. Kai has previously contributed to Beacon Broadside on gay teens and James Baldwin.

David Moore deconstructs some sloppy NYTimes poll analysis on Obama and the racial divide at the Huffington Post.

Mark Winne continues his blogging at Slow Food Nation, discussing a program in Bellingham, WA, where volunteers harvest surplus produce to help stock the local food banks. The Nashville City Paper had this review of Winne's Closing the Food Gap last week.

At the Boston Globe, Howard Zinn reminds John McCain and Barack Obama that "no one wins in a war." Also at the Globe, a new religion blog from Michael Paulson. (Thanks, Michael, for the link to our post from Forrest Church.)

University of Wisconsin math prof Jordan Ellenberg, at his blog, Quomodocumque, challenges John Tierney's dismissal of the gender gap in the sciences. Maybe Tierney, who seems to think that "women on average just aren't as interested as men are in these disciplines," should read about Maria Mitchell.

We missed this when it originally posted, but just after Independence Day the LA Times had this article on the Jefferson Bible:

The big question now, said Lori Anne Ferrell, a professor of early modern history and literature at Claremont Graduate University, is this:
"Can you imagine the reaction if word got out that a president of the United States cut out Bible passages with scissors, glued them onto paper and said, 'I only believe these parts?' "

And in the department of "Wow, I feel old," the naked baby on the cover of Nirvana's Nevermind is now 17. They grow up so fast!

What's Wrong with Gay (or Straight) Parents Raising Gay Kids?

Today's post is from Matt Kailey, the author of Just Add Hormones: An Insider's Guide the Transsexual Experience (Beacon Press, 2005), the editor of Focus on the Fabulous: Colorado GLBT Voices (Johnson Books, 2007), and the managing editor of Out Front Colorado, Colorado's oldest and largest GLBT publication.

Another anti-homosexual brouhaha is brewing. Psychologist Trayce L. Hansen has reviewed nine studies that examined the sexual orientation of children raised by same-sex parents and has concluded that children raised by same-sex parents "have a 4 to 10 times greater likelihood of developing a non-heterosexual preference than other children."

I'm not going to try to debunk Dr. Hansen's limited findings. Basically, what she did was examine studies that found few, if any, differences between children raised by same-sex and opposite-sex parents (and those differences that were found tended to favor the children raised by same-sex parents) and deconstructed them in order to find some flaw. I have no doubt that someone will deconstruct Dr. Hansen's own methods and find some flaw as well – this is what researchers do. And Dr. Hansen, who has written before about the "problems" of children raised by same-sex couples, and who appears to be a psychological darling of the religious right set, seems to have entered into her current project with an agenda already in place, making her "findings" suspect at best. However, none of that matters.

Let's just say, for one brief, hallucinatory moment, that Dr. Hansen's findings are correct and that children raised by same-sex parents do have a "4 to 10 times greater likelihood of developing a non-heterosexual preference than other children." So what?

Rev. Forrest Church on Love and Death

Today's blog post is our first from Rev. Forrest Church, author of Love & Death: My Journey Through the Valley of the Shadow. Rev. Church served almost three decades as senior minister and is now Minister of Public Theology of All Souls Unitarian Universalist Church in New York City. He was educated at Stanford University, Harvard Divinity School, and Harvard University, where he received his Ph.D. in early church history. He has written or edited numerous books, including Life Lines: Holding on and Letting Go; Lifecraft: The Art of Meaning in the Everyday; So Help Me God; and Freedom from Fear.

Death is central to my definition of religion: religion is our human response to the dual reality of being alive and having to die. We are not the animal with advanced language or tools as much as we are the religious animal. Knowing that we must die, we question what life means. The answers we arrive at may not be religious answers, but the questions death forces us to ask are, at heart, religious questions. Where did I come from? Who am I? Where am I going? What is life's purpose? What does all this mean?

All of these questions obviously have special urgency for me now that I have been told I have only months left in my life. Hearing word of my diagnosis of terminal cancer, a longtime parishioner, who has known her full share of death, wrote me of her heartache. "My heart has been broken again," Camille wrote, "and for that I am overwhelmingly thankful; without love this would not be possible." She had it just right. And she and others in my congregation made me think that I needed to write one last book, one that would consolidate my thoughts on love and death. Fighting the most convincing deadline of my life, I none-the-less experienced great joy writing Love & Death. I discovered, in confronting my diagnosis, that death is not life's goal, only life's terminus. The goal is to live in such a way that our lives will prove worth dying for. This is where love comes into the picture. The one thing that can't be taken from us, even by death, is the love we give away before we go.

The Perils of Parables

Today's post is from Frederick S. Lane, author of The Court and the Cross: The Religious Right's Crusade to Reshape the Supreme Court. Lane is an expert witness, lecturer, and author who has appeared on The Daily Show with Jon Stewart, CNN, NBC, ABC, CBS, the BBC, and MSNBC. His next book will be People in Glass Houses: American Law, Technology, and the Right to Privacy (Beacon 2009). For additional information, please visit www.FrederickLane.com.

It is no secret that the evangelical wing of the Republican Party has some strong reservations about the presumptive Republican presidential nominee, Senator John McCain. The "agents of intolerance" charge that McCain leveled at Pat Robertson and Jerry Falwell during the 2000 primary, for instance, has not been forgotten. Nor were evangelicals pleased when McCain so quickly disavowed two prominent evangelical preachers, the Rev. John Hagee and the Rev. Rod Parsley, for making controversial statements about Islam, Hitler, and the Holocaust.

The coolness of evangelical voters towards Senator McCain is so pronounced that his opponent, presumptive Democratic nominee Senator Barack Obama, senses a rare political opportunity. Despite some profound policy differences, the Obama campaign believes that it can make some inroads in the evangelical community. Senator Obama has a lot of room for growth: a recent Calvin College poll gave Senator McCain a 57%-25% edge among evangelicals.

Two separate initiatives are under way to help Senator Obama narrow the evangelical gap. A couple of weeks ago, David Brody of the Christian Broadcast Network (home of Pat Robertson's The 700 Club) announced that the Obama campaign was planning to launch a grassroots initiative dubbed "The Joshua Generation" to target young evangelicals and Catholics. The phrase hearkens back to the Bible's Book of Joshua, in which the Lord spoke to Joshua and said "Moses my servant is dead; now therefore arise, go over this Jordan, thou, and all this people, unto the land which I do give to them, even to the children of Israel."

Link Roundup: Slow Food Nation, Black Conservatives for Obama, Faith-Based Initiatives

Mark Winne, author of Closing the Food Gap: Resetting the Table in the Land of Plenty, will be participating in Slow Food Nation, "the first-ever American collaborative gathering to unite the growing sustainable food movement and introduce thousands of people to food that is good, clean and fair," and he's also contributing to their blog. In his first post, Extraordinary Food for All, he contrasts a prospective college student wowed by the amazing selection of food in the Bowdoin dining hall with a shopper at a New Mexico food pantry.

Not to give this young gentleman a hard time – if my choice was to eat at Bowdoin or the pantry, well… – but choice is what it comes down to in America's food system. For the nation's "haves," things couldn't be better. Cosmopolitan cuisine is at our beck and call, locally and organically produced food is virtually everywhere, and a super abundance of culinary skills are making extraordinary magic of it all.

But for the "have nots" it's a different story. Hunger and food insecurity plague 36 million Americans, obesity and diabetes are rampant posing greater threat to the poor than to the affluent, and "food deserts" – places with few healthy food choices – are a common feature of our urban and rural landscapes.

Kevin Ross is a black conservative and identifies as a Republican, but this November he'll be voting for Democratic nominee Barack Obama. Listen to this exchange between him, Michael D. Cobb Bowen, and Beacon's own Christopher Bracey (Saviors or Sellouts: The Promise and Peril of Black Conservatism, from Booker T. Washington to Condoleezza Rice) on NPR's News and Notes. You can also hear Christopher Bracey commenting on Rev. Jesse Jackson's crude reference to Senator Obama on yesterday's News and Notes. And you can read Christopher Bracey's Beacon Broadside post on the Black conservative tradition in American politics here.

Frederick Lane, author of The Court and the Cross, has posted several times on Beacon Broadside about the tricky intersection of politics and religion. Alternet published an excerpt from his book last week about the Bush administration's policy of handing big bucks to Faith Based Organizations. Bilgrimage, a blog by theologian William Lindsey, posted a thoughtful response here.

While it's not quite as comprehensive as musician Art Garfunkel's list of every book he has ever read, Eboo Patel, in an appearance at the Unitarian Universalist Association's General Assembly, shared his list of favorite Beacon Press books. Patel is the author of Acts of Faith: The Story of an American Muslim, the Struggle for the Soul of a Generation, and he recently posted here about pluralism on college campuses.

Before I was a Beacon writer, I was a Beacon reader.  Several books that Beacon published, or brought back into print, literally changed my life. In college, I wrote a major paper on Cornel West's Race Matters. Geoffrey Canada's Fist Stick Knife Gun helped me see how one person's life story could become an organization that transformed lives. Acts of Faith is very much written in the model of Canada's book - how my own life story inspired me to start the Interfaith Youth Core. 

I remember reading the last couple hundred pages of Gandhi's autobiography, which Beacon recently brought back into print, straight through in about 24 hours while staying in an Indian village.  A colony of voracious bedbugs helped keep me awake. Frankly, I was grateful to those bedbugs because the story was so inspiring that interrupting it with sleep would have been a damn shame! 

I consider Diana Eck's Encountering God to be one of the great books in the field of interfaith relations and progressive religion. 

I literally had a stack of the books I cite above on my desk as I wrote Acts of Faith. When I realized that they were all published by Beacon, I couldn't help a flush of pride.  What an honor to join such august company! 

Is Talking About Age "Ageist"?

There are many differences between the two presidential candidates, but age is one of the most obvious. Beacon Broadside invited Lillian Rubin, author of 60 On Up: The Truth about Aging in America, to offer her perspective on whether discussing John McCain's age amounts to "ageism."

What is it with us anyway?  Why is it that every time we coin words like racism, sexism, ageism – words that describe something real about prejudice and discrimination against a social group – we wind up applying them so frivolously that they lose all meaning?  If commenting on Hillary Clinton's pants suits is sexist, what do we call the guy who waves a sign that shouts "Iron My Shirts"?  If it's racist to say that it took President Lyndon Johnson to make Martin Luther King's dream of equality before the law come true, how do we characterize the 3 in 10 Americans who say they would have trouble voting for a black man for president? 

Certainly, there are sexist and racist undertones in American life, and the discourse in this election campaign has highlighted them.  But when every slight, sling, and barb, from the benign to the malignant, is indiscriminately tarred with the same epithet, it substantially weakens the case for the real thing.  Which brings me to the question of age. 

The McCain campaign and its supporters cry foul when anyone even whispers that, if elected, he will be 72 years old when he puts his hand on the bible to take the oath of office.  But if it's ageist to ask whether a 72-year-old has the mental, emotional, and physical stamina to take on what is undoubtedly the biggest and toughest job in the world, what label do we give to the common corporate practice of not hiring people over 50?  Ageism-Plus?   And what to the real prejudice that reduces the old to caricatures from whom we want to turn away lest they somehow contaminate us with their "oldness?"  Ageism-Squared? 

Colombia Hostage Rescue Cause for Joy and Sadness

Garry Leech is an independent journalist and editor of Colombia Journal. In August of 2006, he was briefly held captive by the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia (FARC), an experience that frames the narrative of his forthcoming book, Beyond Bogota: Diary of a Drug War Journalist in Colombia. After last week's rescue of fifteen hostages, including former Colombian presidential candidate Ingrid Betancourt, from FARC custody, Beacon Broadside invited Leech to share his perspective with our readers. 

The news that the Colombian military had successfully rescued 15 hostages held by the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia (FARC) spread quickly around the world. The story was deemed newsworthy by most mainstream media outlets because the leftist guerrilla group's four most high-profile hostages—former presidential candidate and Colombian-French citizen Ingrid Betancourt, and three U.S. military contractors—were among those liberated. The liberation of the hostages has conveniently shifted media focus away from yet another political scandal in which the administration of Colombia's President Alvaro Uribe finds itself mired.

In recent years, there have been many international efforts to negotiate a prisoner exchange between the FARC and the Colombian government. Envoys from the French government have repeatedly sought the release of Betancourt. The past eight months has seen Venezuelan President Hugo Chávez achieve the unilateral release of six hostages held by the FARC. The latter case is particularly interesting because the leftist Chávez's success was beginning to prove embarrassing to Colombia's right-wing president. Consequently, Uribe declared that Chávez was no longer authorized to negotiate with the FARC and within weeks successfully shifted the focus away from the plight of the hostages when he killed the FARC's second-in-command, Raúl Reyes, in a cross border air strike into Ecuador that caused an international incident but sent his approval ratings skyward.

Remembering a Founding Mother on Independence Day

In honor of Independence Day, Beacon Broadside invited this contribution from author Nancy Rubin Stuart about founding mother Mercy Otis Warren. Stuart is the author of The Muse of the Revolution: The Secret Pen of Mercy Otis Warren and the Founding of a Nation, and is an award-winning author, journalist and writer-producer who specializes in women and social history.

Should we think that our current problems as a nation—the falling value of the dollar, a perilous dependence upon overseas products, an administration that favors the wealthy over the ordinary man, and an edgy attitude towards women in politics—are unique to 2008, they also worried a nearly forgotten Founding Mother over two hundred and twenty years ago.

Her name was Mercy Otis Warren (1728-1814), America's first female playwright and historian, fervent patriot and close friend of John and Abigail Adams. Years before the Democratic presidential primary that brought Hillary Rodham Clinton to the brink of nomination this spring, I was intrigued by Mercy Otis Warren's spunk, her close association with leaders of the American Revolution and her determination to promote core patriotic values. That woman's voice in politics was forbidden—indeed, considered a scandal—Mercy refused to accept, exemplified by her popular and prolific, anonymously bylined plays, poems and essays.

Like many successful career women today, Mercy had a father who encouraged her to excel, which in colonial America meant she was tutored alongside her Harvard-bound brother James "the Patriot" Otis. Alas, for the brainy, literary Mercy a college education was impossible. Instead, she was expected to spend her life as a conventional colonial woman, cooking, sewing, making soap and candles, and eventually to marry and bear children.

Her husband, James Warren, apparently understood the "inner" Mercy from the start for he filled their Plymouth, Massachusetts home with books and encouraged her to read and write. Especially the latter. During the tense pre-Revolutionary years, in between birthing and raising five sons, Mercy began by writing poetry. In that, the first outpouring of her heart about the joys of nature, family events and musings upon human destiny, Mercy revealed herself in the full flower of womanhood, grateful for her sons, her husband, domestic felicity and the warmth of friends.

Historians have written little about that young, womanly Mercy. Today she is largely celebrated for her anti-British and anti-Tory plays, essays and especially her life's work, the 1805, three-volume, History of the Rise, Progress and Termination of the American Revolution which extolled the patriotic values that spawned that extraordinary democratic experiment. While long encouraged to that task by her old mentor, John Adams, it was, ironically, the only Jeffersonian interpretation of the Revolution published in that era.

Those who read Mercy Otis Warren's works often struggle with her high-toned style, but as I studied her life I became impressed with her tender, feminine side. As she witnessed the outbreak of violence in 1775 in Massachusetts and the subsequent hardships the British occupation caused its residents, that womanly side grew increasingly protective, hidden under a steely insistence upon the democratic principles of the early patriots. By then, Mercy had already begun to speak out in a series of popular, widely published, often plagiarized anti-British and anti-Tory propaganda plays. To protect her both from British persecution and colonial mockery as a woman writer, her identity was kept secret.

Mercy's primary concern in 1775-1776, as she often wrote to her husband James, then President of the Provincial Congress, was his safety and that of her sons. Nevertheless, a future where her family and fellow citizens' "natural rights" would be compromised was equally unthinkable. Self-sacrifice was imperative if the patriots were to triumph over oppression.

Later, during the heady, materialistic days of the new republic, Mercy continued to remind her fellow Americans of the dangers of forgetting the core values that sparked the Revolution –fair play, honesty, thrift and national self-sufficiency.

By the late 1780s, Mercy's tolling messages in print became a reality for, by then, the young republic was mired in an economic depression. Faced with a towering national debt, a falling currency system, swamped with imported luxuries and lacking many basic commodities, America was veering towards the type of disaster, Mercy, her husband James and other "old-fashioned patriots" of the Revolution had repeatedly predicted.

Could Mercy return to the United States today, she would doubtless feel dismayed once again, especially since many of those excesses she lamented in the early Federal era were seemingly resolved before her death in 1814.

Nor did the first draft of the U.S. Constitution in late 1787 relieve Mercy's anxieties. Admittedly, the young nation stood "in need of a strong federal government that would support the prosperity and union of the colonies," but, as Mercy wrote, had not the first patriots "struggled for liberty" for all men?

In reaction, Mercy published (once again anonymously) an influential treatise in May 1788 entitled "Observations on the New Constitution," arguing for the necessity of a list of "natural rights" to protect the ordinary man. Among the key rights Mercy advocated were freedom of speech, freedom of the press, trial by jury in civil cases, and restrictions on the power of the executive branch of government by the judicial and legislative bodies—points which, eighteen months later, became part of the Bill of Rights.

This Fourth of July is also celebrated as Mercy Otis Warren Day at the Barnstable County Courthouse in Massachusetts, where a statue of Mercy Otis Warren stands with one arm raised holding up the Bill of Rights to which she was an unsung, but recently discovered, contributor.

For me, as for any student of American history, that statue is a powerful reminder of a Founding Mother's immortal warning about the human tendency to abuse power, but also the potential we have as individuals to make our voices heard.

Further reading: Boston Globe review of The Muse of the Revolution by Nancy Rubin Stuart and The Road to Monticello by Kevin J. Hayes; reviews in the Plymouth Bulletin and Augusta Metro Spirit; and Renée Bergland's post on another neglected woman of history, Maria Mitchell.

Why Dissent?

Today's post is from Mark Tushnet, author of I Dissent: Great Opposing Opinions in Landmark Supreme Court Cases. Tushnet is William Nelson Cromwell Professor of Law at Harvard Law School. Previously a professor of law at Georgetown University and University of Wisconsin, Tushnet is the author of numerous books, including A Court Divided: The Rehnquist Court and the Future of Constitutional Law.

The end of the Supreme Court's term gives me a chance to reflect on some of the dissents that the justices wrote. The question I want to explore – which I deal with in some of the essays accompanying the opinions I've reprinted in I Dissent – is this: Why bother to dissent, especially at great length?

Let's begin with a case that was almost overlooked because it was decided on the day of the Second Amendment decision. A majority on the Court struck down the so-called Millionaire's Amendment to the federal campaign finance law. The Amendment increased the amount donors could contribute to campaigns by people running against millionaires who financed their own campaigns. The obvious purpose was to do something to equalize the playing field between rich and not-as-rich candidates. The Court said – as it had in the past – that you can't limit campaign contributions in the name of political equality. So the Amendment was unconstitutional.

Justice Stevens wrote a dissent. Its first paragraph included the line, "I completely agree with the [lower court's] opinion," but it then went on for nine more pages. If the lower court was completely correct, why bother to ramble on? I've been doing some research on the Supreme Court in the 1930s, and dissenting opinions then rather often simply said, "I would affirm on the basis of the lower court's opinion," or the like. Why not do the same in this case?