The Weekly Sift: Belief and Reality

Thinking one’s religious beliefs are substantially burdened—no matter how sincere or genuine that belief may be—does not make it so.

-- Sonia Sotomayor

This week's featured article: "How Threatening Is the Hobby Lobby Decision?"

This week everybody was talking about the Hobby Lobby decision

The majority opinion claimed to be narrow; the dissent said it was sweeping. I'm coming to look at it as a narrow gate into a vast new realm of judge-bestowed rights for some people and burdens for others.

I tried to cover the legal landscape in "How Threatening Is the Hobby Lobby Decision?". That already ran so long that I didn't want to extend it with the many satires of the decision. Here are a few: "Supreme Court Rules JCPenney Allowed to Sacrifice Employees to Appease Cthulhu", "My Breakup Letter to Hobby Lobby", and "Supreme Court Upholds Little Caesar's Right to Feed Christian Employees to Lions".

A point I didn't get around to making there is that not everything you don't want to do is a violation of your religious rights, even if you share your distaste with the members of your church. Compare a conservative-Christian baker who doesn't want to make a same-sex-wedding cake to a black waitress who doesn't want to serve a table of guys wearing Confederate-flag t-shirts. One has a religious justification for his distaste and the other doesn't, but I contend the two situations are more similar than different, and the feelings affronted are more tribal than spiritual. Each feels his/her identity threatened by being required to serve members of an opposing tribe.

and the Fourth of July

If you've ever wondered what it would be like to fly through a fireworks display, this drone did it for you.

[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=a9KZ3jgbbmI#t=133]

If flag-waving and fireworks isn't your style of patriotism, consider re-affirming your commitment to democracy. Lawrence Lessig has started the Mayday PAC, a SuperPAC to end all SuperPACs. It supports candidates for Congress who are committed to reforming the way we finance political campaigns.

and the 50th anniversary of Freedom Summer

In the summer of 1964, about a thousand college students from all over the country descended on Mississippi to help black citizens register to vote, to educate black children about subjects their Jim Crow schools wouldn't touch, and to challenge the right of an all-white delegation to represent Mississippi at the Democratic National Convention.

It's worthwhile to be reminded that, back in the day, freedom was a liberal word. It pointed to the desire of traditionally oppressed peoples to be listened to, to vote, to have the equal protection of the laws. Today, by contrast, freedom typically means the right of corporations and wealthy individuals to exercise their power without government restraint or consideration of the public interest.

If you want to educate yourself about that summer, a lot of good stuff is out there.

PBS' American Experience did a Freedom Summer episode. Some clips and further interviews are available online.
The movie Mississippi Burning about the investigation into the murder of three civil rights activists at the beginning of the summer. Like most mass-market movies, it's not entirely historical, but it does capture the sense of time and place. It was a best-picture nominee in 1989.
The documentary Neshoba, about the attempt to prosecute one of the people responsible for the murders, forty years later.
Episode 5 of CNN's The Sixties, "The Long March to Freedom".

It's easy to forget the sheer terrorism that dominated Mississippi in those days. The whole point of sending white students down there wasn't that they had some special voter-registration magic, it was that if they were beaten or killed, the country would notice; white supremacists had been killing uppity blacks for a long time and Northern whites didn't care. But as the Neshoba murders showed, the whites weren't safe either. Not everyone had a headline-grabbing experience, but a lot came home with stories like this:

I was walking along a road. We were told never to leave the place we were staying, by ourselves. They jumped out of the car. They started calling me "Hey, nigger lover! We got you. We finally got you. We ain't killed ourselves a-a white girl yet. You're going to be the first." They get this lynch rope. It really was a noose like you see like I had seen in the pictures of the hangings, right? They put this noose over my head. And this is attached to a long rope. They jump back into the car, and I just saw myself being dragged to death. I'm walking like this. And they're laughing and calling me all kinds of names. And then they moved along, slowly, a little bit faster. I'm walking faster. And it was like, "Okay, this is it." And then they dropped the rope. And I just stood there. Because we had to wear skirts. We weren't allowed to wear pants in those days, so we all had our little shifts on and everything. I peed all over myself. Just stood on the [road], and just peed.

and you also might be interested in ...

One thing we've learned from the seemingly endless series of mass shootings is that a shooter is most vulnerable while reloading. So if gun magazines hold fewer bullets, maybe fewer people will be killed before shooters are stopped. It seems worth a try.

The New Jersey legislature tried it, and Wednesday Governor Christie vetoed it. I can't see this pander to the NRA winning him many votes in New Jersey, so I think it means he still sees himself as a presidential contender.

I've been ignoring BridgeGate for the last several months. The legislature's investigation continues, but hasn't yet turned up a smoking gun with Christie's fingerprints on it. The U.S. attorney's investigation seems to be the important one, but it's also the hardest to keep tabs on. We won't really know what they have until they start issuing indictments, and no one knows when that might be.

If Christie isn't indicted, and if none of the people who are indicted hang their defense on blaming him, then he's probably a viable candidate again. What he lost in bad publicity he can regain by appealing to the far Right's delusions of persecution.

Interesting article in the NYT Magazine: "Can the G.O.P. Be the Party of Ideas?" In other words, can the Republican Party stop saying "no" to everything and instead come up with localist and free-market plans to help solve the problems ordinary people face? And if they could, would the base of the party go for it?

Salon published an amazing conversation between Thomas Frank (What's the Matter With Kansas?) and Barry Lynn (Cornered) about the hidden monopolization of our economy, what it has to do with inequality, how it happened, and what can be done about it. Something they agree on is that completely unfettered markets are unstable; they lead to private monopolies that then make the markets unfree.

When the open-carry folks show up in the same shops and restaurants you frequent, what should you do? PQED advises that you just walk out with your food on the table and your bill unpaid. Carte Blanchfield disagrees, arguing that the armed crazies might then shoot you. Both are discussing what philosophers call the problem of other minds: You know that you have good intentions and aren't threatening anyone else, but they don't know that. The problem of judging other people's intentions becomes very important when deadly weapons are involved. Tom the Dancing Bug also addresses that issue: