Beacon Broadside

Carole Joffe: An Open Letter to Bart Stupak: All Violence Should be Condemned

Dear Congressman Stupak,

As a citizen of this country, I was deeply distressed to learn of the abusive behavior and threats of violence that you, your family and a number of your Congressional colleagues have suffered since you and others voted in favor of health reform. A fellow member of Congress screamed “baby killer” as you were speaking on the floor of the House. You have received death threats. I heard on television some of the phone calls you received and they were truly sickening. I understand why your wife has been so tormented by these threatening phone calls, that she has taken the phone off the hook.

Protestors showed up at the home of the brother of Congressman Tom Perriello of Virginia mistakenly thinking it was the Congressman's home, and cut a gas line. Congressman Anthony Weiner of New York was mailed a letter purporting to be anthrax (this turned out to be a hoax, but a very time consuming and frightening one, as workers in Weiner's office had to be decontaminated). Other members of Congress have expressed fears for their families' safety in the wake of the health reform vote.

In a civilized country, no one should be subject to these kinds of actions because of his or her political beliefs. It is not too much to say that what you and other Congressional officials have experienced constitutes authentic domestic terrorism. I'd like to point out to you that there is another group of Americans who have long been terrorized in ways similar to what you and your colleagues have experienced. I refer to members of the abortion providing community. There are literally thousands of documented instances of death threats, anthrax threats, aggressive picketing at providers’ homes and places of worship, and harassment of family members, including children, that this community has suffered. Eight members of this community have been assassinated.

In the wake of the threats that you have received, you have spoken out forcefully against this kind of unacceptable behavior. I truly sympathize with you when you say those threats had made your life a "living hell."

I wonder, however, if your own experience has made you more empathetic with abortion providers, who have for years endured similar behavior from the same antiabortion extremists who have now targeted you?  Though obviously you and the provider community do not agree on the abortion issue, perhaps now you can agree with them that the disagreements over this issue must remain civil. How can we call ourselves a democracy if we cannot express political beliefs without fear of violence?  Congressman Stupak, I respectfully call on you to disavow violence against all Americans, not just elected officials.

Thomas N. DeWolf: Traces of the Trade, Reparations, and Goodwin Liu

Thomas Norman DeWolf is the author of Inheriting the Trade: A Northern Family Confronts Its Legacy as the Largest Slave-Trading Dynasty in U.S. History. DeWolf was born in California and educated at the University of Oregon. He served as city councilor, county commissioner, and for nine years on the Oregon Arts Commission. His years of public service focused on literacy, children's issues, and restorative justice. This post originally appeared at his Inheriting the Trade blog.

I did not see this one coming.

President Obama has nominated Goodwin Liu, an Associate Dean and Professor of Law at UC Berkeley School of Law, to serve on the 9th Circuit Court of Appeals. Opponents have seized upon comments Liu made during a panel discussion on May 6, 2008 following a screening of Traces of the Trade at the Newseum in Washington, DC that was sponsored by the Council on Foundations (I wrote about the event here).

The distinguished panel was moderated by Harvard Law Professor Charles Ogletree and PBS Senior Correspondent Judy Woodruff. Panelists discussed the major themes in the film and how they connect to the world of philanthropy; how foundations can effectively facilitate discussions on race, the legacy of slavery, and the need for healing. When government lacks the capacity–or will–to lead the way in creating a more just world, how can we best encourage grass roots leadership in undoing racism and other forms of oppression.

Goodwin Liu’s comments were right in line with these themes. Yet if you Google "Goodwin Liu, Traces of the Trade" you'll find several links to a YouTube video clip, just over 2 minutes in length, titled "Obama Appeals Court Nominee – Goodwin Liu – on Reparations for Slavery." You’ll find an article by Ed Whelan, prominent conservative legal analyst and blogger, in which he claims Liu "... would make those who were not complicit in slavery pay the price of his grandiose reparations project." You’ll find many other bloggers chiming in.

But if you watch the entire discussion (which you can download here) you’ll find that what Liu was advocating in saying that each of us has a moral duty to make things right is that,

...instead of looking for the single national strategy, which is what everybody always looks for, think about what you can do on a much smaller scale in much smaller communities, around specific problems that people face, whether it’s in their schools, in their workplaces, access to health care, in their housing; whatever it may be.

For far too long we have allowed extremists and the media to define "reparation" for historic slavery as that "single national strategy" in which people who never enslaved anyone pay the price for checks being written to people who were never themselves enslaved. Such a definition serves well those who rely on division and controversy to serve their own ends. But it isn't helpful to those who want to make a positive difference in the world.

Video: Bruce Rich on Universal Health Care in Ancient India

In To Uphold the World: A Call for a New Global Ethic from Ancient India, author Bruce Rich contemplates the rule of the Indian emperor Ashoka over 2,200 years ago, whose philosophy of tolerance, conservation, nonviolence, species protection, and human rights still have much to teach us today. One of the many programs established by Ashoka was a system of universal health care for people and animals which, once established, served the Indian empire for close to a millennium. Rich discusses Ashoka's health care system in this video. 

Bruce Rich is a Washington DC based attorney who has served as senior counsel on international finance and development issues for major environmental organizations such as the Environmental Defense Fund and the Natural Resources Defense Council. Rich has published extensively in environmental and policy journals, as well as in newspapers and magazines such as The Financial Times, The Nation and The Ecologist. He is the author of Mortgaging the Earth, a widely acclaimed critique of the World Bank and reflection on the philosophical and historical evolution of the project of economic development in the West. He has been awarded the United Nations Environment Program 'Global 500 Award,' the highest environmental prize of the United Nations, in 1988, and also won the World Hunger Media Award in that year for the best periodical piece on development issues.

Nancy Polikoff: Same-Sex Marriage and the 2010 Census

Nancy D. Polikoff, author of Beyond (Straight and Gay) Marriage: Valuing All Families under the Law. Polikoff is a Professor of Law at American University Washington College of Law, where she teaches Sexuality and the Law and has taught Family Law for more than 20 years. For more, read her Beyond (Straight and Gay) Marriage blog.

If thinking of yourself as married to your partner turned you into husband and husband or wife and wife, then we wouldn't need a marriage equality movement, right? So imagine my puzzlement to find gay organizations instructing us to fill out the 2010 census based on how we think of our relationships. The Williams Institute, to whom I turn for all things demographic about gay men and lesbians, offers this advice, which other groups are repeating:

Same-sex couples who have been legally married or consider themselves to be spouses should identify one person as a "husband or wife".

Other same-sex couples may be more comfortable using the term "unmarried partner". In general, this designation is designed to capture couples who are in a "close personal relationship" and are not legally married or do not think of themselves as spouses. (emphasis mine).

Now I understand the census is an imperfect instrument (very) for counting our relationships. If a couple does not live together, they will not be counted, because the census counts households and the relationships of the people in each household. There is also no option for those who are registered as domestic partners or in civil unions. I applauded when the Williams Institute and others won from the Obama administration the right to be counted as same-sex spouses when they were same-sex spouses.

But now it appears that labeling the person you live with your husband or wife is actually not going to measure the number of same-sex married couples but rather the number of couples who consider themselves spouses, whatever that means -- and I truly do not know what it means.

Jay Wexler: “Under God” and the Religion Clauses

Today's post is from law professor Jay Wexler, author of Holy Hullabaloos: A Road Trip to the Battlegrounds of the Church/State Wars. He studied religion at the University of Chicago Divinity School and law at Stanford, and worked as a clerk to U.S. Supreme Court justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg. Wexler teaches at the Boston University School of Law, and he blogs at holyhullabaloos.typepad.com.

The First Amendment's religion clauses raise a lot of hard questions about how much intermingling of church and state is constitutionally acceptable in our religiously diverse nation, but whether the Pledge of Allegiance is constitutional is not one of them. The Pledge, in its current form, in which children of impressionable age declare that they live in "one nation under God," clearly violates the First Amendment. The practice of leading kids in reciting the Pledge violates every one of the Supreme Court's tests for what passes constitutional muster: it endorses a specific and controversial religious viewpoint, coerces non-believing youngsters into declaring their belief in a single god, and undeniably has a religious purpose. When Congress added "under God" into the Pledge in 1954, it did so specifically to proclaim our superiority to those awful godless communists of the Soviet Union.

This is not to say, however, that those of us who believe in church-state separation or who are personally offended by the idea that our nation purportedly exists under the gaze of a single supreme being should be too upset by a recent 2-1 decision of a federal appellate court that the Pledge is constitutional. At least we can look forward to not watching an embarrassing replay of what happened the last time the appeals court heard the question, when nearly the entire House came onto the steps of the Capitol to hold hands and sing "God Bless America" in protest. We also likely don't have to worry that the Supreme Court, which last time around dismissed the case on procedural grounds not present here, will take the case and decide it in a principled fashion, thereby instigating a movement to amend the Constitution to declare us a Christian Nation.

The dissent in the case, penned by Stephen Reinhardt, the most minority-rights-friendly judge remaining on the federal bench, is a judicial masterpiece. In over 130 pages (the length of the opinion might explain why the court waited over two years since oral arguments took place to release the decision), Judge Reinhardt carefully tears apart all of the arguments advanced by the majority and then some. The opinion should be required reading for anyone who cares deeply about the Constitution and the protection it provides minorities in a diverse democracy.

David Bacon: We Need a Better Alternative for Immigration Reform

Today's post is from David Bacon, author of Illegal People: How Globalization Creates Migration and Criminalizes Immigrants. Bacon spent thirty years as a labor organizer and immigrant rights activist. His articles appear in The Nation, American Prospect, Los Angeles Times, and the San Francisco Chronicle, and he hosts a weekly radio show on KPFA-FM in Berkeley, California.

Senators Charles Schumer and Lindsey Graham announced Thursday their plan for immigration reform. Unfortunately, it is a retread, recycling the same bad ideas that led to the defeat of reform efforts over the last five years. In some ways, their proposal is even worse.

Schumer and Graham dramatize the lack of new ideas among Washington powerbrokers. Real immigration reform requires a real alternative. We need a different framework that embodies the goals of immigrants and working people, not the political calculations of a reluctant Congress.

Maggie Kast: The "R" Word, Slang, and Sensitivity

Today's post is from Maggie Kast, whose story "Joyful Noise," appears in the anthology Love You to Pieces: Creative Writers on Raising a Child with Special Needs, edited by Suzanne Kamata. Kast is also the author of and The Crack between the Worlds: a Dancer's Memoir of Loss, Faith and Family (Wipf and Stock, 2009). Her essay, "No Pity," appears in the anthology Gravity Pulls You In: Perspectives on Parenting Children on the Autism Spectrum, edited by Kyra Anderson and Vicki Forman (Woodbine House, 2010).

Browse this book

Qty:

Rahm Emanuel's recent use of the "r" word to castigate conservative Democrats has created a flurry of comment about the word, both as slang for incompetent and as derogatory term for people with developmental disabilities. Sarah Palin demanded he be fired, and Rush Limbaugh called Rahm's meeting with advocates for the mentally handicapped a "retard summit at the White House." Questioned about Rush's rant, Palin called his use of the word, "crude and demeaning," although she later excused it as "satire."

This current publicity merely highlights a longstanding problem and efforts to solve it. In March, 2009, the Special Olympics held a youth summit, and this group of young people conceived and launched a campaign to "Spread the Word to End the Word," designed to eliminate "retard" both as epithet and descriptor. Several governors have endorsed this campaign and forty-eight states have replaced "mental retardation" with "developmental disability" or a related term in their laws and departmental designations. A bill known as "Rosa's law," currently before Congress, would change the term "mentally retarded" to "intellectual disability" in several federal statutes.

As the parent of a child who failed to sit up, walk or talk when expected, I faced the question of what to call his condition. Never fond of euphemisms, I still dreaded the harsh sound and still harsher meaning of the "r" word and yearned to call my son anything else. At the same time, I wanted to say the word before it was said to me. More than anything, I hoped my son would never hear it, would never know this cruel fact about himself. One night in the '70s, as I listened to reports of Nixon's wrongdoing on the radio, my son propped on his hands on the kitchen floor, and repeated to myself: "retarded, retarded," coming down lightly on the "r's" and the "e" and clipping the "t" and the "d's," trying to improve the sound of the word and get myself used to it. Accepting the term was part of my facing difficult facts, and my regret was matched by

Tom Hallock: Beacon Press Heading to a New Distributor

Today's post is from Tom Hallock, Associate Publisher of Beacon Press.

Last week, Beacon announced a change in its distribution from Houghton Mifflin Harcourt to Random House Publisher Services which will be effective July 1, 2010.

It's a big change and one we’re excited about. The new partnership encompasses all formats and channels. Random House will be selling Beacon books, audios, eBooks and audio downloads to US, Canada (as of 1/1/11), and other English language markets. We will also have the support of Random House in the academic, library, school and special sales areas. We think this new partnership will serve our authors and their books-- and enable us to reach a wide audience through a variety of channels in a variety of formats. We also think this will enable us to focus on building our lists and exploring the new publishing and marketing opportunities of the digital age.

Although we won't start shipping books until July 1, our work with RHPS started in December and it's been exciting to see things take shape. We launched our fall 2010 list, including our first graphic book (an adaptation of Geoff Canada's Fist Stick Knife Gun), at sales conference last week. We've already started working with our new distributor on Book Expo, ALA, and the London Book fair and are especially excited about their support in bringing Eboo Patel (Acts of Faith) to the Freshman Year Experience conference in January 11.

The change also means we’re saying goodbye to two distributors who have served us well over the past decade. Houghton Mifflin Harcourt has been with us-- and looked out for our interests-- through some tough times, including the recent economic downturn. They helped us launch Michael Patrick MacDonald's All Souls, Meredith Hall's Without a Map and many new titles by Mary Oliver including her first audios. We'll miss having a distributor across the Boston Common, with whom we could talk through the issues of the day over lunch at the Beacon Hill Bistro. We'll also miss working with Beth Ineson and the all the great reps at HMH. We leave with a sense of gratitude to them and to Gary Gentel, Laurie Brown and the HMH management team for all they've done for the press in the past ten years.

We'll also be saying goodbye six months later to our wonderfully independent Canadian distributor, Fitzhenry and Whiteside. Among the things I have loved about working with them is that I can always get their President, Sharon Fitzhenry, on the phone and that I was greeted at the door by their resident cats. (It reminds me of my days at FSG when a monstrously ill-tempered cat named Maizy inhabited the sales and marketing floor. The Fitz cats always treated me well, however.) And I want to give special thanks to Fitz's Michael Davis who educated me about many things Canadian and did yeoman’s work on our list.

We enter this period of change with a sense of excitement and optimism about the future. We think technology is giving us ways to reach new readers and fulfill our mission in new ways. And we feel like we've found the right partner for these times in Random House Publisher Services.

David Chura: Juvenile Justice? Send ‘Em to Boot Camp!

Today's post is from David Chura, author of I Don't Wish Nobody to Have a Life Like Mine: Tales of Kids in Adult Lockup. Chura has worked with at-risk teenagers for forty years. His writing has appeared in the New York Times and multiple literary journals and anthologies, and he is a frequent lecturer and advisor on incarcerated youth. This post originally appeared at his Kids in the System blog.

By now I thought the shocked reactions to the Department of Justice's report on sexual abuse of juveniles in detention centers would've disappeared. But articles and editorials from across the country continue to appear as states grapple with shocking numbers that won't go away. Will all this worry and lament translate into change? Who knows?

The one thing I'm pretty sure won't change is America's fear of these new barbarians marauding our streets in hordes (except today we call them "gangs.") Because that fear seems ingrained in our culture, kids will continue to be shut away in the very horrible places we condemn.

But if you're going to continue putting kids in some kind of detention I have a solution: boot camp.

For several years during my ten year tenure teaching high school kids at a New York county jail I had the privilege (strange as that sounds) of teaching in a boot camp for teenagers serving county time.

When I was first approached about the assignment I turned it down.

They had the wrong guy. After all, I'd been a conscientious objector during Vietnam, and to this day am a staunch pacifist. The military approach to anything is not one I can, or will ever be able to endorse. Young guys? Put in a boot camp? To be screeched at? Humiliated? All in the name of "helping" them?

I wanted nothing to do with it.

Until I finally gave in and visited the boot camp on which county corrections would model theirs.

What I saw knocked the protest sign out of this old pacifist's fist.

Jonathan M. Metzl: The Language of Addiction in the Bombast of the Right

Analyzing the colorful language of two of the right's loudest voices is Jonathan M. Metzl, author of The Protest Psychosis: How Schizophrenia Became a Black Disease. Metzl is associate professor of psychiatry and women's studies and director of the Culture, Health, and Medicine Program at the University of Michigan.

Has addiction become the new rhetoric of the right?

Glenn Beck suggested as much in his in his recent keynote address to the Conservative Political Action Conference when he parlayed his own history of substance abuse into a critique of so-called big government. "I'm a recovering alcoholic," Beck explained. "I screwed up my life six ways to Sunday." Beck argued that his experiences as an alcoholic privileged him to critique the seemingly different "addictions" to government perpetuated by progressives and liberals. "It is still morning in America," he decried. "It just happens to be kind of a head-pounding-hung-over-vomiting-for-four-hours kind of morning in America."

For much of the following week, Rush Limbaugh used his own, well-publicized addiction to prescription painkillers—"Have you ever had a genuine addiction to something? Well I have and let me tell you about it"—as a jumping off point into full-throated damnation of President Obama and his "liberal" followers. "Liberals," Limbaugh told his radio listeners, "their lives are basically meaningless, their addiction to power and dominance and control is what drives them."

Such language is, of course, a savvy political construction. Beck and Limbaugh paint the fight against addiction, and by extension against liberalism, as a redemption narrative in which the fallen overindulge earthly sin and then disavow it in what Beck calls "come to Jesus" moments. Beck literally dropped to his knees during his CPAC speech to demonstrate how "I was completely out of control," then rose to show how "I'm going to stand up on my own two feet, figure it out, and because of that failure I can stand here today." Addiction testimonials do the dual work of appealing to a presumed base of religious conservatives and placing the ex-addict, like the convert, on higher moral ground. Former President George W. Bush, who to his credit would never dream of using his own substance issues to critique others, employed such salvation to enhance his evangelical credentials. Riding Bush's coattails, Beck and Limbaugh craft the angry, white, male addict in remission as the embodiment of a new American conservative ideal.

Carole Joffe: The Billboard Circus and the Abortion Wars

On International Women's Day, we offer this post from Carole Joffe, author of Dispatches from the Abortion Wars: The Costs of Fanaticism to Doctors, Patients, and the Rest of Us. Joffe is professor of sociology at the University of California-Davis and a Professor at the Bixby Center for Global Reproductive Health at the University of California-San Francisco, and she contributes to the blog at RHrealitycheck.org.

The abortion wars rage relentlessly on, in the United States and elsewhere.

Consider the various abortion-related items in the headlines these first days of March. After months of wrangling and immense concessions from abortion rights supporters, abortion still has the capacity to derail Congressional passage of a health reform bill, as some House antiabortion legislators remain dissatisfied with the actually quite onerous funding restrictions of the procedure in the Senate measure. A woman in Nicaragua, the mother of a ten year old girl, is denied an abortion even though she is a suffering from cancer, and is not allowed to start chemotherapy as long as she is pregnant.

And antiabortion fanatics in state legislatures continue to pass laws that are truly hard to parody. The latest of these is a Utah measure which would permitted life imprisonment for a woman "whose intentional or reckless behavior" caused the death of her fetus—if implemented, this bill which would have the effect of making suspect every miscarriage occurring in that state. (Though the bill passed in the Utah legislature, its sponsor withdrew it for revision in the face of massive national criticism.

Indeed, one of the few genuine abortion parodies around-- the Onion's hilarious account of a law requiring women seeking abortions to first name the baby and paint the nursery-- is actually not that far removed from a real-life incident I recount in my book, Dispatches from the Abortion Wars. In this case, a pregnant woman with the life threatening condition of DVT (deep vein thrombosis, a blood clot in the leg), was scheduled for an in-hospital abortion. While hospitalized for a flare-up of her condition several days before her abortion, she was forced by an anti-abortion doctor to tour the newborn nursery!

Robert Kunzman: Political Asylum for German Homeschoolers

Today's post is from Robert Kunzman, author of Write These Laws on Your Children: Inside the World of Conservative Christian Homeschooling. Kunzman spent ten years as a high school teacher, coach, and administrator and is currently an associate professor in the Indiana University School of Education. He is also the author of Grappling with the Good: Talking about Religion and Morality in Public Schools.

Homeschooling's phenomenal growth in the United States has attracted the attention of policymakers and politicians in recent years. Now homeschooling threatens to cause an international scene—or at least some uncomfortable moments—between the U.S. and Germany. The news that a Tennessee immigration court granted political asylum to a homeschool family from Germany had been making the rounds in homeschool circles for several weeks, but immigration officials' decision to appeal the ruling earned it notice in this week's New York Times.

German parents Uwe and Hannelore Romeike, concerned about the public school environment and wanting to provide religiously-based instruction (the two most common reasons for American homeschoolers as well), decided to homeschool their five children—despite the fact that such a practice is illegal in their native land. What followed were over $11,000 in fines and threats that the Romeikes would lose custody of their children.

The Virginia-based Home School Legal Defense Association (HSLDA), the largest and most influential homeschool advocacy organization in the world, saw the opportunity to push back against the German system by helping the Romeikes apply for political asylum. The family moved to rural Tennessee in 2008, and this January they were granted asylum because of persecution for their homeschooling beliefs—an apparent first in U.S. immigration history. According to HSLDA, immigration judge Lawrence O. Burman offered a blistering critique, asserting that Germany violated "basic human rights that no country has a right to violate" and describing German policy as "repellent to everything we believe as Americans."

The Romeike case—and Judge Berman's critical comments—highlight a fundamental difference between how the United States and Germany view the relationship between families and the state, and the role the government should play in educating citizens. From its founding, America has sought to limit the reach of government, and suspicion of government intrusion is obviously alive and well today. While Germans (and other Europeans) certainly argue about the ways in which the state should regulate and serve the public, there exists a far greater acceptance of the idea as a whole.

Ruthanne Lum McCunn: Excerpt from Thousand Pieces of Gold

A fantastic interview with Ruthanne Lum McCunn over at Bookslut (and also posted at the Smithsonian Bookdragon blog) made us think that you all should read a sample of her completely amazing novel, Thousand Pieces of Gold. The book is a biographical novel about the life of Lalu Nathoy, aka Polly Bemis, a Chinese woman who was auctioned as a slave in San Francisco and later bought her freedom and became a pioneer legend. Here is an excerpt of the novel we're sharing on Scribd. You can find a reader's guide to the book on the Beacon website.

An Excerpt from Thousand Pieces of Gold by Ruthanne Lum McCunn