The Not-so-Innocent Fruits of Bigotry

If nothing else, Bob Vander Plaats and his FAMiLY LEADER have made life easier for comedians.  They help in many ways, starting with a refusal to capitalize the “i” in their name.  Odd.

Yesterday, they helped troubled laugh makers again when Vander Plaats took to the steps of the Iowa Statehouse to release a pledge the group is asking primary candidates to sign, the Marriage Vow – a Declaration of Dependence upon MARRIAGE and FAMiLY (the “i” in marriage, not in family?).  Let’s dive into this precious farce, shall we?  For those interested in following along at home, the heavily footnoted document including a preamble and the candidate vow may be found here in its entirety.

Michelle Bachmann was the first to sign the pledge.  This is slightly surprising.  One might have thought this year’s only announced female presidential hopeful would have belted Vander Plaats after reading the Vow’s second line which states marital fidelity between one man and one woman protects, in part, “vulnerable women” and “the rights of fathers.”  Another woman seeking to be the Leader of the Free World might have found it offensive to hear her entire sex labeled vulnerable and that the rights of fathers are thought to be different than, if not above, those of mothers.  If Bachmann didn’t see the sexism here, she had other chances.

The vow calls for the “prompt termination of military policymakers who expose American wives and daughters to rape or sexual harassment, torture, enslavement or sexual leveraging by the enemy in forward combat roles.”  I am not exactly sure what sexual leveraging is, but I will join in condemning it and everything listed. I wonder if Vice President Dick Cheney was thinking about his need to be terminated as he pinned the Distinguished Flying Cross on Chief Warrant Officer 3 Lori Hill in 2006 because his policies put her fragile female sensibilities at risk.

Some Innocent Fruit of Conjugal Intimacy

The bullet point above the one about women in uniform is another favorite.  It calls for the “humane protection” of women and the “innocent fruit of conjugal intimacy.”  They mean children, for those of you who cannot put a hand on a copy of Oxford’s Dictionary of Biblical-sounding Pomposities.  A friend’s daughter said it was OK if her mom introduced her as an IFoCI as long as she got to be the strawberry.  Another friend indelicately asked if a child conceived on a beach would be considered a less intimate innocent fruit of conjugality.  I told him Vander Plaats need not know what happened years ago in Ft. Lauderdale on Spring Break.

The Vander Plaats crew’s oddest reference comes in the first bullet of the preamble.  According to the All in the FAMiLY cast, an African American child born into slavery in 1860 was more likely to have been born into a two-parent home than an African American child born after the election of the first African American President.  I am thinking those figures didn’t include the children who were the product of master raping the mother or the fact the happy two parent home numbers dip a bit if the timeline is stretched to include the families split when its members were sold to the Plantation owner a state or two away.

The FAMiLY wants candidates to recognize the cost of divorce.  OK, that may not be a bad idea.  But, they fail to see when they say, “”married people enjoy better health, better sex, longer lives, greater financial stability,” most of us are screaming “which is why people should be allowed to marry regardless of gender!”  If I may, Archie, – sorry, I couldn’t let the All in the FAMiLY reference die, yet – sex is better when a person loves his partner, not because a bureaucrat handed him a piece of paper.  The official raised seal on a marriage license isn’t sought because it is sexually titillating, but because it provides legal benefits once denied to many couples in Iowa.

There is also a bullet point about recognizing “robust childbearing and reproduction is beneficial to the U.S. demographic, economic, strategic and actuarial health and security,” but I am not going to address it as it may interfere with amorous thoughts some have planned for this weekend.

I have saved a personal favorite for last: “Support for the enactment of safeguards for all married and unmarried U.S. Military and National Guard personnel, especially our combat troops, from inappropriate same-gender or opposite-gender sexual harassment, adultery or intrusively intimate commingling among attracteds (restrooms, showers, barracks, tents, etc.)”

How is it they make everything sound so dirty and what in the world is an “attracted?”  Here’s the thing.  As a people, we have a responsibility to protect everybody.  There is no need to spell out a difference between men and women, the married and unmarried, or combat troops and those toiling behind the lines.  Everybody deserves the same protections.  Thankfully, the U.S. and Iowa Constitutions protect all of us, not just those the FAMiLY highlight in their silly pledge.

Oh, another point, I am certain 99.9% of the Americans who sign up to serve their country do so out of a sense of duty, honor and respect.  Believe it or not, FAMiLY, they don’t enlist to get a peek at somebody in the shower or with a hope they will “commingle” their underwear with a fellow Marine on the wash line at a forward post in Afghanistan.

In the end, I appreciate the efforts of the FAMiLY folks to keep stand-ups knee deep in fertile material during these difficult times, but they can stop now.  Once we stop snickering about the nonsense they spew, it is painfully clear they really aren’t that funny after all.

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Graham Gillette can be reached at grahamgillette@gmail.com

This entry was first published as a Des Moines Register blog entry.

The Worst President Ever!

I spent months tallying data to definitively determine the worst President of the Unites States ever.  The answer: Grover Cleveland.

OK, he wasn't the worst ever, but I did hear an interesting story on NPR this morning about how Cleveland snuck away for five days in the summer of 1893 to have a cancerous tumor removed from his mouth.  The whole procedure was performed aboard his friend’s fishing boat to keep the surgery a secret.  True story.

Times change.  In 2011, President Obama couldn't sneak away for five hours without cameras catching the President and a short-panted Speaker Boehner playing golf.

Yet, some things stay the same.  In every campaign season we reach a point when there seems no shortage of those willing to reduce mountains of data into neat sound bites to show indubitably they are on the side of right and the other side is not only wrong, but possibly evil.  We may have reached the crazed phase of speaking in partisan absolutes a bit early this election cycle.

A case in point is Jeffrey H. Anderson’s current blog at the conservative Weekly Standard.  Anderson takes a bunch of actual facts, strips away a cluster of others and sprinkles in a dash of political rhetoric to brew up his argument that the Obama Administration is a failure.

Taking numbers from a report by the White House’s Council of Economic Advisors, Anderson writes the economic stimulus package pushed by President Obama has cost $666 billion to date.  (Anderson may not have appreciated the happy coincidence that 666 is a popular Biblical reference to evil and the Antichrist, but something tells me a number of his readers did.)   He then divides that by 2.4 million, the number of jobs some have estimated were created or saved by stimulus spending, to create this tasty morsel, “In other words, the government could simply have cut a $100,000 check to everyone whose employment was allegedly made possible by the ‘stimulus,’ and taxpayers would have come out $427 billion ahead.”

The problem with his construct is one has to ignore the fact the "stimulus" program wasn't just about jobs.  A portion of the money expended went for non-job items like the tax credit 110 million working families received, the $27 billion in small business loans 110,000 small businesses received, and the more than 75,000 projects that improved some of the country’s infrastructure. Jobs are important, but the improved roads and other assets the government will own and use long into the future need to be calculated if an analysis of the impact of the stimulus expenditure is to be taken seriously.

I have to admit it is kind of fun to ponder what would have happened if 2.4 million Americans would have received checks for $100k, but I tend to agree with a tenet long espoused by many of the writers and readers of the Weekly Standard that entitlement programs have a limited place in good government.  And, handing out whopping checks to a few individuals would have done nothing to improve the bridges, ports and countless other pieces of infrastructure seen as vital to Republicans, Democrats and Independents alike.

In Anderson’s rush to condemn the stimulus and the President’s policies, he played with the facts and hurt his own argument.

Just as important. one can’t evaluate history before it has occurred.  Like whiskey, history must be distilled.  Both are complex compounds containing a vast range of ingredients and neither can be assessed fully while still being made.  It takes a long while before anyone can evaluate either with any objectivity and it is not possible to strip away individual ingredients from the final brews.  History, like whiskey, has to be evaluated on the whole.

There were no shortage of people willing to pontificate about how President George W. Bush was taking a direct route into the history books to destination “worst ever” while he was Commander in Chief.  And, there seem to be at least as many who are willing to sum up President Obama’s record before the facts can be written as well.  Time will tell and by then partisans like Mr. Anderson will be trying to creatively interpret the historical record of some other politician long before it has been written.

We have a long way to travel before the 2012 election.  I, for one, am going to do my best to recognize the difference between what is fact and what is a half-truth partisan absolute.  I hope most of my fellow voters will do the same.

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Graham Gillette can be reached at grahamgillette@gmail.com

This entry was first published as a Des Moines Register blog entry.

The Elephant in the Room

Iowa Supreme Court Justice Mark Cady gave the State of the Judiciary speech to the General Assembly yesterday.  Many in the chamber sat on their hands during his address.  When he addressed the Court’s ruling on same sex marriage, the Chief Justice explained how the Court “worked hard to author a written decision to fully explain our reasoning to all Iowans.”  He went on to say, “Courts serve the law, not the demands of special interest groups.  By serving the rule of law, courts protect the civil, political, economic, and social rights of all citizens.”  The silence from half of the hall was chilling, especially when I consider some among them want to impeach Cady for how he carries out his duties.

by Rosie O'Beirne

A few hours later and some 1,400 hundred miles away, President Barack Obama stood in front of a crowd of approximately 13,000 Arizonans and addressed the nation at a ceremony to celebrate the lives of the victims of Saturday’s senseless shooting.  He seized the moment to acknowledge the current caustic rhetoric infesting our political discourse.   He said, “But at a time when our discourse has become so sharply polarized – at a time when we are far too eager to lay the blame for all that ails the world at the feet of those who happen to think differently than we do – it’s important for us to pause for a moment and make sure that we’re talking with each other in a way that heals, not in a way that wounds.”

Both men refused to ignore the widening political divide fueled by outrageous and, at times, hateful speech.  They looked into our eyes and took the issue head-on.  We should follow their lead, for the time has come to stop tiptoeing around the elephant in the room.  (The elephant is a well-used metaphor for the big issue a group would prefer to ignore. I am not implying an exclusive link between the Republican mascot and the rotting, stinking, festering disease of vitriolic speech in the modern political arena. The metaphorical elephant can take the form of a donkey, a grizzly and any other mascot.)

I was taken by one particular line from the President’s remarks, “We recognize our own mortality, and we are reminded that in the fleeting time we have on this Earth, what matters is not wealth, or status, or power, or fame – but rather, how well we have loved and what small part we have played in making the lives of other people better.”

I posted this line on my Facebook page and within minutes a high school acquaintance posted a single word in response, “seriously??”  I responded I was and asked if she disagreed with the statement.  She informed me the President’s “agenda” made her discount everything he had to say.  The silent chill I felt during Chief Justice Cady’s speech swept down my spine again and left a shroud of disappointment in its wake.  Like all of us, my Facebook friend can disagree with Mr. Obama’s policies and a day will come when she can cast a vote for another vying to replace him.  However, for her to discount in total any and all things the President says or does is more than silly.  It is an example of the sickness of division that invades America.

Chief Justice Cady and his colleagues ruled on a case based on their interpretation of legal precedent, laws and the Constitution.  They executed their duties without any trace of malfeasance or impropriety.  Those who wish to impeach them because they think they should have reached a different conclusion display a complete lack of understanding of the balance of power in a democracy.  Americans and Iowans should not attack those who reach different conclusions.  They should utilize to the fullest the power of free speech to debate and build a consensus to pass laws and amend the Constitution in a manner that meets the judicial test the Chief Justice outlined in his address.  However, free speech comes with responsibility.  Suggesting that the Court overstepped when what is meant is that it ruled differently than one had hoped, and that all of its members be removed from office by a politically motivated elected body is dangerous and destructive to a free society.  Focus on the issue, not a witch-hunt to rid the court of those who see things differently.

The President urged his countrymen to strive to become the country our children imagine we can be.  In a country of 300 million, there is no doubt we will disagree about how to chart such a course.  One thing is sure, it becomes less likely we will ever get there if we refuse to even consider what the President, Supreme Court, or the guy down the street have to say, because they may support a different party, political mindset or philosophy.  The task ahead will take all we have.  If we waste energy bickering and claiming some are not worthy of thoughtful consideration because of our own preconceived notions, it is a given we will never become what our children want us to be.

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Graham Gillette can be reached at grahamgillette@gmail.com

This entry was first published as a Des Moines Register blog entry.