Grassroots Dictatorship

Our little controversy here in Montgomery County is about a couple of health classes in the public schools. That, in itself, isn't much to get excited about. But the war for the soul of America is going to have to be fought one insignificant battle at a time, and this is where we put our foot down.

These are historical times like I've never seen in a bunch of years of living. Just looking at the news today, you see America has made some bad decisions.

Yesterday they busted Claude Allen, the guy who until last month was Bush's top domestic policy advisor, ripping off the Target in Gaithersburg. This guy was picking up merchandise, then bringing it to the service desk for refunds, using fake receipts. Stop. Let that soak in. Last month, top guy in government; this month, arrested for stealing stuff at Target. It looks like he's been doing it at least since October. Imagine leaving your office at the White House, "Bye George, by Dick, see ya tomorrow," and then driving out to the suburbs and stealing things.

Allen left the White House last month. Why? Here's what the Christian site Agape Press said:

The Capitol Hill rumor mill says Allen, a strong pro-family Christian advocate, resigned because his advice was being ignored by the Bush administration. Rob Schenck of the National Clergy Council says it often happens that "Christians in the highest levels of government ... are not taken seriously or they are pressured out or put outside the loop." He says believers can sometimes be thwarted by those in the administration who do not share their values or principles. That leads to frustration, Schenck contends, and causes some people of faith working in government to feel that "they're no longer making a contribution; they need to leave. So this could be one of those situations where we have another Christian as a casualty of the culture wars in our country." This is what many Washington insiders believe happened with Claude Allen."

You see, the problem was he was "too Christian" for the Bush administration.

Also in the news today, the Secretary of the Interior, whose connections to Jack Abramoff and bribery involving the Indian casinos have been recent news, has suddenly announced she's stepping down. Turns out $25,000 would buy a meeting with her, and suddenly she needs to spend more time with her family, too.

And that's just this morning's paper. In other news, America tortures innocent people, detains people around the world in despicable secret prisons without charging them with any crime, conducts surveillance on its own citizens without warrants or any legislative or judicial oversight, the leaders of the majority party in both houses of Congress, plus various high-level Republicans in Congress and the White House, are either indicted for corruption or under investigation. Defense contracts are offered for sale by congressmen. We attack foreign countries at random without provocation and without a plan for winning, desert our poor and shovel treasure into the hands of rich, and are completely unprepared for any catastrophe, whether it is a natural disaster or terrorist attack, because unqualified cronies are appointed to powerful positions.

To hear our leaders talk, you'd think abortion was our country's biggest problem, with the possibility that teenagers would use condoms running a close second. Oh, and there's no global warming.

This was an administration that sold itself on its religion. It was the "family values" voter who elected these guys, remember? On "moral" principles. The President said that God spoke to him, and many good-hearted but naive people were impressed with his piety. The goons surrounding him learned to talk that way, too, and they joined up with influential religious extremists to promote the idea that they were the "culture of life," the good guys in the struggle to make life good in America.

Another breaking news story: the head of Christian Coalition, Ralph Reed, one guy who really learned to play this tune, was a top guy in the Abramoff bribery enterprise, taking Indian casino millions and getting favors from the federal government. And whose name is in the emails, who was trying to trim back support for one Indian casino so that the one paying the bribes would prosper? Why, it's none other than Focus on the Family's anti-gay crusader James Dobson.

We have corruption at the top levels of our government, to a degree unknown to American history. And you might ask, how did this happen? How did it happen that the very people who promised the country they were principled and moral, the very ones who claimed the highest standards of virtue, turned out to be the dirtiest, lyingest bunch of rats America could have possibly chosen to run things?

I'm afraid that's just how it works. Everybody thinks they're on the side of goodness, everybody wants to believe they do the right thing. Honor among thieves, remember? So it's the easiest thing in the world to exploit, all people are vulnerable because all people want to be good. And it is so easy, just incredibly easy, to flap your jaw and have some pious sounding junk come out of your mouth. And people, being the trusting souls they are, will believe you.

Normally I don't write about these things, a lot of this happens at a level above our little controversy here. Well, shoplifting at the local Target, maybe not so high-level, but a lot of it we don't really have much to say about. These sorts of thing are just going to happen as long as these guys are in charge, and we only have a million voters in our county, we can't vote them out of office on our own, and it's only related to our controversy as iceberg is related to tip.

A news story from yesterday has motivated this post. It is just so unusual, it has been rattling through my head all day and all night, and I wanted to say something about it.

Sandra Day O'Connor was nominated to the Supreme Court by Ronald Reagan, the first woman on the court. She was known through the years as moderate, fair, nonpartisan, her vote on a case was often hard to predict, and her decisions made the difference a number of times. She retired last year.

This week she gave a talk at Georgetown University. The speech was not recorded, but NPR's Nina Totenberg attended and reported on it. From Raw Story's transcript:

Nina Totenberg: In an unusually forceful and forthright speech, O’Connor said that attacks on the judiciary by some Republican leaders pose a direct threat to our constitutional freedoms. O’Connor began by conceding that courts do have the power to make presidents or the Congress or governors, as she put it “really, really angry.” But, she continued, if we don’t make them mad some of the time we probably aren’t doing our jobs as judges, and our effectiveness, she said, is premised on the notion that we won’t be subject to retaliation for our judicial acts. The nation’s founders wrote repeatedly, she said, that without an independent judiciary to protect individual rights from the other branches of government those rights and privileges would amount to nothing. But, said O’Connor, as the founding fathers knew statutes and constitutions don’t protect judicial independence, people do.

... Pointing to the experiences of developing countries and former communist countries where interference with an independent judiciary has allowed dictatorship to flourish, O’Connor said we must be ever-vigilant against those who would strongarm the judiciary into adopting their preferred policies. It takes a lot of degeneration before a country falls into dictatorship, she said, but we should avoid these ends by avoiding these beginnings.

This is extraordinary. Who could imagine, in the land of the free, that someone of O'Connor's status and intellect, a person who is known across the land for her integrity and ability to make sharp distinctions, would be warning us about the dangers of dictatorship?

All Americans need to contemplate this question. Could America become a dictatorship? Should it? Is that what you want?

It doesn't happen by the actions of one guy, or even one guy and a handful of aides. To take over a country of three hundred million people, you need the complicity of a hundred million of them or so. That's you and me.

Look here in our state of Maryland. Recently a judge ruled that the state marriage law was unconstitutional, and that gays could legally marry. OK, controversial decision, any idiot can see that. And a hard decision, too. So what is the radical right's first thought? Delegate Don Dwyer, a CRC spokesman and player in our local scuffle over sex-ed, demands that they recall the judge.

He doesn't want to use the Constitutional legal system we have spent a couple hundred years developing, he wants to throw it out.

When the Montgomery County Board of Education unanimously voted to adopt a new sex-ed curriculum, what did the radical right do? They immediately organized to throw out the whole board, with their website RecallMontgomerySchoolBoard.com and all the rhetoric and personal attacks that went with that.

This isn't how a democracy works. This is grassroots dictatorship.

There are of course many opinions and points of view about how something like sex-ed should be handled, and we can talk about it. Maybe nobody gets everything they wanted, but in the end we can work out something. It won't work if one side demands that the other side be removed from the discussion. Not if one side insists that it is a hundred percent right, with the approval and support of God Himself, and that the other side represents sin and moral degradation. That can't work, you can't make any decision like that.

These are amazing times in our country: America seems in danger of losing its soul. Some people are convinced that their way is better than the rule of law, that their deities speaking to them supercede the secular Constitution that has empowered this diverse country for these centuries, and they work very hard to see that their will is imposed on the rest of us.

Some people might be comfortable bathing in the warm womb of dictatorship -- America certainly wouldn't be the first country to go that route. Some people are just as happy having their choices handed to them, being told what to think, submitting constantly to authority.

I grew up thinking we were a different kind of country from that.