So, I never blogged a follow up to the Canadian election in October.  The Tories (Conservatives) won with Stephen Harper as Prime Minister.  The Liberals were licking their wounds and their leader, Stephane Dion (no relation to Celine), looked like he was on the way out.

Canadian politics is usually fairly bland (although, what do I know, eh?), ever since Pierre Trudeau left office.  Part of the political lore up there is Trudeau’s “fuddle duddle” incident, where he mouthed obscenities to the shock and horror of those on the business end of such conduct: 

Well, things are heating up and it all started with Stephen Harper riling the other parties by threatening to cut Federal public campaign funding, framed as a cost-cutting manœuvre.  Apparently, he didn’t learn from an earlier gaffe when his office went on record as supporting arts funding cuts in early autumn.  So, the perception has been building that Harper’s approach to solving financial woes is to cut funding to constituencies that don’t support him anyway.

When I was in Toronto last week, there was a huge buzz about the Liberals, NDP, and the Bloc Quebécois forming a coalition with the intent of ousting Harper.  He backed down on the campaign financing cuts, but it was too late.  Worries about the economy, which ironically helped the Conservatives win in October, fueled the opposition’s lack of confidence in Harper’s budget and economic plan in Parliament.

In just seven short weeks, Harper went from leading a minority government (plurality of seats, but not a majority), to being on the verge of getting ousted through a “no confidence vote,” which would effectively unseat him as Prime Minister.  What to do, oh what to do?  Would Harper be accused of crying to “mama and to television,” as Trudeau accused the Tories of in the early 70s?  What to do, indeed!

Lock the doors!

In a strange twist, he convinced the Governor General, Michaelle Jean, a role that is usually just ceremonial (tip of the hat to the UK monarchy), to suspend Parliament until the end of January, giving Harper time to stall a “no confidence” vote and to create an economic stimulus package.  This quote from an AP article notes:

“A governor general has never been asked to suspend Parliament to delay an ouster vote when it was clear the government didn’t have the confidence of a majority of legislators.

‘There is no precedent whatsoever in Canada and probably in the Commonwealth,’ Constitutional scholar and Queen’s University political scientist Ned Franks said. ‘We are in uncharted territory.'”

With Parliament suspended, the coalition cannot form and how Harper and the Conservative MPs (ministers members of Parliament) are scrambling on a massive PR blitz to gain support of the people.  Some might argue that the suspension is anti-democratic, while others are saying that it was unlikely that a stable coalition government could be formed by the Liberals (centre left), New Democrats (socialist), and Bloc Quebécois (Quebéc nationalists).

Of course, as someone from the US, I find all of this Governor General (GG) stuff odd.  My thoughts for a while have been to wean off the monarchy thing, particularly in light of Quebéc separatism sentiments.

It’s one thing to have QEII, but does Canada really want Charles’ mug on the legal tender?  Although unlikely, what if it came to this character as UK head of state?

I’m rather curious about how this turns out…

In honor of the Obama’s campaign’s decision to adopt a creative commons copyright license over a traditional copyright, I’ve added a video of the Health Care Transition Team responding to calls for citizen feedback on how to address the health care issue. The video includes former Senate Majority Leader and soon to be Health and Human Services Secretary Tom Daschle (BTW — I dig the red specs).

Matthew Burton is underwhelmed about the whole thing. I’m definitely whelmed (which apparently means the same as overwhelmed). While the clip fails to uncover the magic bullet solution to the health care crisis, it does something perhaps as important — it brings thousands of people into the conversation about the health care issue. The participatory potential for the web is not that it will turn every American into a policy wonk. God forbid! Seriously! The promise is that it will democratize the process of elite selection. All the participatory tools in the world are not going to yield more that a subset of Americans to be engaged in most policy issues. But having an additional 4,000 voices in a discussion can help policy makers identify blind spots that a handful of “experts” might overlook. This video has amassed 3,700 comments in 36 hours. The big question for those of us who think and write about stuff like this is what happens to those 3,700 after they have watched the video and posted a comment? Do they read the other posts? Are they promoting their own blog? What results from this semi-structured, popcorn popper of ideas, insults, and negotiations? Citizens!?!?!

The following guest post is from Barbara Trepagnier. Barbara is a Professor of Sociology at Texas State University-San Marcos and is author of Silent Racism: How Well-Meaning White People Perpetuate the Racial Divide (2006 Paradigm). She is also a member of the Texas Task Force on Racial Disproportionality, sponsored by Texas Child Protective Services and Casey Foundation.

Silent Racism refers to the negative thoughts and images in the minds of white people regarding African Americans and other people of color. This claim seems unremarkable except that, by “white people” I mean all white people, including those who care about racism and would never do anything intentionally racist. In the same vein, the claim that silent racism is more dangerous than acts of blatant racism like that of Thomas Cosby, who ran down a young black woman riding her bicycle along a sidewalk in Florida last summer, downright preposterous. But it is not preposterous if you know what I mean by “dangerous.”

Clearly Cosby’s attack was dangerous for Nekedia Cato—she could have been killed. Silent racism is dangerous because it is insidious: It is hidden, and yet silent racism contributes daily to the institutional racism that lowers the life chances of African Americans throughout the U.S., especially children.

We all learned silent racism growing up, but most of us don’t notice it because the oppositional terms Racist/Not Racist hide it. These racism categories are profoundly out-of-date: Before the Civil Rights Movement, people in the Not Racist category were few and far between, and took a courageous stand against segregation and unfair voting practices. Today, Not Racist is a default category—people must perform hateful acts or make patently racist statements to lose Not Racist status and earn the label Racist (think Don Imus)

The rest of us sit smugly in the Not Racist category claiming that we would never do or say anything racist. The Not Racist category allows us to see ourselves as “innocent” and therefore not responsible for—or even connected to—institutional racism and the resulting racial inequality.
Silent racism, because of its prevalence in white people, is a sociological issue. For example, decisions fueled by silent racism result in the overrepresentation of African American children—especially males—in the child welfare system, a system dedicated to protecting all children. These decisions are not intentionally racist; nevertheless, the decisions lower the life chances of black youth who all too often end up homeless or involved in the juvenile justice system when they reach 18.

We need to get rid of the racism categories and think about racism in a new way, such as a continuum labeled More Racist and Less Racist. This step alone would shift how well-meaning whites think about racism. We would stop worrying about whether we are racist, knowing that we are to some extent. We would be more likely to think about how we are racist, a much more productive line of thought.

In Off the Books, Sudhir Venkatesh offers us a compelling and nuanced look at the underground economy in the South Side of Chicago. His key insight is that the boundaries between the “legitimate” and “illegitimate” economy is blurred. He notes that legitimate businesses often engaged in illicit practices to supplement licit income:

Some, like Ola Sanders, are well-known proprietors whose businesses have suffered in recent years. They cannot resist the opportunity for immediate cash to supplement their legitimate earnings. So they rent out their space to a gang or another underground trader. They develop creative hustling schemes and do not report their income. They might even exchange services with each other off the books, letting barter replace taxable income altogether.

What struck me about Venkatesh’s description of the economy of the South Side neighborhood he studied was how much it mirrored my own experiences growing up in a Cuban-American enclave in Hialeah, Florida, a suburb of Miami. When compared to Blacks, Cuban Americans are often considered a “model minority,” but Venkatesh’s work could just as easily apply to my neighborhood where “hustling” was an essential part of the local economy.

This is the house I grew up in. Most of the houses on my block have “efficiency” apartments that homeowners would rent out in violation of city zoning laws. Many people in my neighborhood operated businesses out of their homes without licenses. It wasn’t unusual for people to have “free cable” or suspiciously cheap electronic goods in their homes. Nor was it unusual for people to get “arreglos” (fixes) from “gente de confianza” to get insurance companies to pay for hurricane damage that never happened or car repairs that were not caused by accidents.

Despite the fact that all this was going on, the people engaged in these exchanges were good folks who went to church, raised good children, and build a vibrant and thriving community. I appreciate Venkatesh’s perspective in describing the South Side economy he studied:

Despite the moralizing of some, we cannot truly understand the “shady” economy if we see it as a dirty, lawless world of violence and disrepute, one that tarnishes an otherwise pristine sphere where everyone pays their taxes, obeys the laws, and turns to the government to solve disputes and maintain order.

I could just be sympathizing with “my people,” but part of what I think is going on with these exchanges is not simply a lack of jobs in the inner city, but a lack of trust in the rule of law. In the example of my community, my family were Cuban exiles fleeing communism. This set of early exiles constituted an entrepreneurial class. This group, for good or ill, had strong anti-statist views. They perceive government to be corrupt and predatory. As a result, many people I’ve talked with in my old neighborhood see government as something to “get around.” At the same time, they were and are very pro-American and defend American ideals like the rule-of-law.

What do you think about underground economies. Are the things I described unethical? Are we in a position to moralize? Does any of this mirror your own experiences?

Earlier, I referenced this Wired article from last year on WikipediaScanner.  The site tracks edits of Wikipedia entries to known IP addresses within firms and organizations.  Wired has compiled a list of notable “salacious” edits from the past.  Here’s a news story discussing the PR and search engine optimization (SEO) implications of WikipediaScanner.

Vandalism And Wikipedia – 

While most edits are innocuous, some raise eyebrows.  

I’m interested in this because I feel that transparency will be increasingly important as Web 2.0 develops and we shift to 3.0, 4.0, etc.  Some of the things I’m working on is the implications of anonymity in social media and how it relates to business/organizational practice.  Some issues that aren’t well defined are:

• Policies regarding transparency versus secrecy (open source versus Apple)
• Managing public perceptions and organizational attitudes towards risk
• What are the proper features/applets (materialities of communication) that foster “collaboration and community” across different contexts?  Should these be staged?
• What are the preconditions for online communities be self-regulating?
• Nuances of online community culture self-reproduction

While anonymity and fluid identity was prevalent in Web 1.0, back when nobody knew you were a dog:

in Web 2.0, users are seeking the experiences of the 4Cs: conversation, community, commons, and collaboration.  I think in many instances that transparency facilitates the 4Cs through building social capital and trust.  Additionally, communitas and shared meaning systems, as well as the materialities of communications (applets, features, etc.), also foster/enable the experiences/practices in the 4Cs, but I don’t think all of these are invariant preconditions in all contexts.  

What are your thoughts on transparency?

Thanksgiving this year has special poignancy and meaning for me. Clearly, the election of Barack Obama as the 44th president of the United States has electrified the imagination and transformed American society. The ascension of a black American to the highest office in the land and, some would say, in the world, has rewritten history on the winds of change. Charles Johnson, African American philosopher and writer, has noted that Obama’s run for the presidency has posed the need for a new black American narrative.

Johnson, in an article that appeared in the Summer, 2008 issue of The American Scholar,
“The End of the Black Narrative” , says the old narrative of black victimization has run its course. That is not to say that race no longer plays a role in human affairs in the U.S., but that role is much more complex than the African descendants of the slaves brought to Jamestown four centuries ago fighting for their rights from the Euro-American descendants of the British settlers who brought the slaves to Virginia. Without repeating the details of Johnson’s argument, the background Barack Obama brought to the presidential race is emblematic of the very diversity of the U.S. black population. Blacks in this land can trace their heritage back to Africa through the peculiar institution of slavery, but also through immigration from the Caribbean, from West Africa, from East Africa, and even from Europe via the Caribbean. One of the writer’s friends (who has since passed away) is a black Briton whose father is an Afro-Cuban with roots in the British West Indies.

While Obama received some criticism for not mentioning Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. by name in his acceptance speech at the Democratic National Convention in Denver last summer, it is clear he owes part of his narrative and much of his symbolic language to Dr. King and the civil rights movement. However, as some commentators have pointed out, it would be unfair to characterize Obama specifically as a black leader. Obama enjoyed connections to the civil rights movement once removed in the person of campaign co-chair Jesse Jackson Jr. While the younger Jackson played an integral role in supporting Obama’s presidential bid, there were some old-line civil rights leaders, Jackson’s father among them, who not only backed Obama’s Democratic rival, Hillary Clinton, but wondered aloud if the junior senator from Illinois were black enough.

I suggest that a productive approach is to place Obama in a broader context, one consistent with Johnson’s call for a new black narrative. The anti-Apartheid Afrikaner artist and poet, Breyten Breytenbach, in a recent radio interview, drew parallels between Obama and Nelson Mandela. While his reason for making the comparison had to do more with the unifying efforts both leaders are noted for than for any Mandela-like deeds that the younger man has accomplished to date, mentioning them in the same breath supports a universalizing of the black narrative, communicating its broad human appeal. When Mandela emerged from prison in 1990, it was a moment no less earth-shattering than the fall of the Berlin Wall or the collapse of the Soviet Union. Nelson Mandela showed that no trace of bitterness remained from his years in prison. He was able to fashion a new nation and overcome intense racial bitterness with a message of reconciliation that no one else could have managed. Like Obama’s words, Mandela’s message easily crossed national borders and resonated globally.

I started this piece referencing giving thanks. I am thankful that my father, who at age 83, was able to vote for the first time for a black American candidate for the office of president. I am grateful that my sons, ages 24 and 22, were similarly able to cast their votes. My father came of age at the height of legal segregation and during the Great Depression and the Second World War. My sons are also coming of age during the greatest economic challenge since the Great Depression while the U.S. is fighting two wars. I am thankful that black women centenarians such as Dilla Burt and Ann Nixon Cooper were able to vote for a historic candidate. I am grateful that my African American wife was able to watch a victorious Barack Obama consciously symbolic cleanse and sanctify the ground at Grant Park on election night. This was the very same park where she and other demonstrators had to flee the rioting Chicago Police during the 1968 Democratic Convention as democracy suffered a near-fatal blow. I know that some American Indians view Thanksgiving as a commemoration of the first American holocaust, but the joyful tears of a new black, brown, red, yellow, and white narrative will help wipe away the pain. For that I am grateful to Barack Obama on this Thanksgiving Day, 2008.

I’ve spent the last several days at the National Communication Association convention in San Diego, exploring several themes in rhetoric and public affairs. It’s been a fitting moment to reflect upon this year’s election dynamics, and several panels on political communication have been wrestling with some of the data emerging on issues ranging from Obama’s oratory to the extraordinary use of the Web over the course of both campaigns. Rather than exploring any of these in depth, I’ve compiled a broad list of some heuristic points—what some political communication scholars consider the most noteworthy aspects of the campaign and key issues to continue exploring:

Most scholars seemed to agree that Obama’s speech on race in America was one of the most important speeches in the contemporary era. In a larger sense, several scholars noted that “Obama is a candidate made by oratory,” and this will remain a phenomenon in much need of further elucidation. Some noted that Obama’s campaign should finally put to rest for good any claim that oratory or rhetoric no longer matter. A couple of scholars argue that Obama has borrowed President Reagan’s rhetoric of the American Dream, but reconstituted it as a communitarian rather than an individual vision of political engagement (see the Quarterly Journal of Speech, Rowland & Jones, 2007).

McCain’s use of the term “maverick” was diffused during the election, as the key issues he was a “maverick” on (torture, immigration, and global warming) were all issues that didn’t play to the Republican base. As such, McCain’s campaign was in a difficult box. We also need to recognize that in presidential campaigns we have a history of admiring heroes and then not voting for them. “Hope” was not a theme of the campaign, it was the result of it (Rowland).

In this election, Saturday Night Live did a great job of showing that woman candidate A does not equal woman candidate B. At the same time, we need to look more into the way in which Palin’s maternal image affected many women. She became for many women what George W. Bush has proven to be for many men—the kind of person you could “go out and have a beer with.” In particular, this should lead us to seek out differences between how many women voters responded to Hillary Clinton versus Sarah Palin (Carlin).

We need to look at the overwhelming number of political ads used in this campaign. In the 2004 presidential campaign, both candidates created and endorsed (i.e. a count of “official” candidate ads) approximately 250 video ads. In this election, the sum was 850 (Louden)!

During every debate, Obama’s greatest asset was that he came off as steady, cool, and unflappable. McCain was very different in every debate. In Marshall McLuhan’s terms of hot and cool media, Obama was a cool candidate with a hot response (Anderson).

This election was a fusion of tradition and new politics, it was undoubtedly a realigning election of “Chicago precinct politics meets Web 2.0.” Obama came across as a pragmatist, following a line of political engagement stemming from John Dewey. We also need to know more about Obama’s remarkable consistency and message discipline during the campaign (Smith).

Obama’s use of the Internet to drive participation was extraordinary, in terms of both contacting voters and contacting them often. That the Obama campaign now has a database of 11-12 million e-mails to contact will remain a key resource in governing. A highlight in the campaign was when 630,000 new Obama voters gave to the Obama campaign in September, apparently in response to the Palin bump. The average donor gave $86 in the Obama campaign, half of which came in from the Internet (Hollihan).

The number of videos about Obama on YouTube totaled 112 million, the number of McCain videos totaled 25 million. Obama’s friend list on Facebook hit 3 million, compared to McCain’s 625,000. In October/November alone the Obama channel beat the number of hits on the Beyonce and Britney Spears channels on YouTube. Polls demonstrate that people were engaged in this election through the participatory media experiences that were offered by the campaigns. The study of media effects is on its way out, people are driving their own effect change now (Bennett).

In our second installment of ThickPod, Ken, Don and I muse about the sociopolitical significance of LOLCats, I thoroughly impress Don by showing him that I know who Marshall McCluhan is and Ken breaks out some Latin. Here are the posts we discuss in the podcast:

Ken – The Web 2.0 Election

Don – Facebook, Mass Interpersonal Persuasion, and the Public Sphere

Jose – Aren’t we the Change We’ve Been Waiting For?

Enjoy. And don’t forget to subscribe to the podcast RSS feed

I’ve been loathe to write anything regarding Proposition 8 because it is so personal and controversial an issue to many, myself included.  Jose convinced me, however, that if we can’t talk about social issues on a sociology blog, then we’ve surely gone wrong somewhere.  What follows are some of the questions about and objections to same-sex marriage that I typically get from students or colleagues, and my thoughts.  Being that much of it is personal opinion, I gladly invite all intelligent discourse that follows. 

Won’t allowing gay couples to wed make “a mockery of marriage” or in some way cheapen it for the rest of us?

I personally do not feel this is so, but people’s subjective reactions are not – or at least, should not be – at issue here (the issue, rather, is what is “right,” as elusive as that may be).  Many people have been allowed to “sully” the institution without penalty – myself, I blame Elizabeth Taylor (and other celebrities of her ilk); Hollywood has made more a mockery of marriage than any homosexual I know.  Indeed, one might reasonably suggest to simply remove the right to marry from anyone who has done so multiple times; that is, if you’ve already failed at being married (say, twice) and want to do it again, perhaps you shouldn’t be allowed the privilege.  I don’t personally disagree with this recommendation; I just know better than to try and legislate it.

Who is making a mockery of marriage seems to be a fairly fluid concept historically, and the answer is nearly always driven by an underlying ideology that the group in question is not deserving of the same rights as others.  Marriage may have suffered a number of insults at the hands of various peoples throughout time – everyone, apparently, from the Jews to the Blacks – but it nevertheless remains the overwhelmingly modal choice for Americans.  The right to wed should not be denied to certain individuals because others do not care to belong to the same group as them (i.e., “married persons”).  This is not equality or justice.

Is marriage even a right?

The 14th Amendment, section 1, promises that no State shall make or enforce any law which shall abridge the privileges or immunities of citizens of the United States; nor shall any State deprive any person of life, liberty, or property, without due process of law; nor deny to any person within its jurisdiction the equal protection of the laws. I don’t feel it’s a terrible stretch to imagine that these definitions of “liberty,” “due process,” and “equal protection” are meant to apply to gay Americans the same as anyone else.

In fact, Meyer v. Nebraska (1923) concluded that liberty “denotes not merely freedom from bodily restraint but also the right of the individual to contract, to engage in any of the common occupations of life, to acquire useful knowledge, to marry, establish a home and bring up children, to worship God according to the dictates of his own conscience, and generally to enjoy those privileges long recognized at common law as essential to the orderly pursuit of happiness by free men.” (see http://caselaw.lp.findlaw.com/cgi-bin/getcase.pl?navby=case&court=us&vol=262&page=399 ).

Isn’t Proposition 8 merely a “correction,” since Proposition 22 (defining the union of man and woman as the only valid form of marriage) was passed by a majority vote in 2000?

Can we and should we go against the “popular vote” when it comes to a civil rights issue?  It was a four-to-three decision by Supreme Court Judges in May of this year that overturned Proposition 22, stating that all laws directed specifically against gays and lesbians were “subject to strict judicial scrutiny” and that marriage was a fundamental right under the California Constitution (see re Marriage Cases, http://www.courtinfo.ca.gov/opinions/archive/S147999.PDF). Proponents of 8 say, “see? The people spoke, but then a very biased set of judges decided it was okay for them to change things.” As it happens, that’s exactly what I hope our Supreme Court judges do. When they see a civil rights violation, they move to correct it.

Why do you keep talking about this as though it is a civil rights issue?

Take the following example: In 1958, a White man and a Black Woman were married; shortly afterwards, a grand jury issued an indictment charging them with violating Virginia’s ban on interracial marriages. They plead guilty and were sentenced to one year in prison, but the trial judge offered that they might forgo this punishment if they simply left Virginia and not return. He said,

“Almighty God created the races white, black, yellow, malay and red, and he placed them on separate continents. And but for the interference with His arrangement there would be no cause for such marriages. The fact that He separated the races shows that He did not intend for the races to mix.”

This sounds suspiciously familiar: simply replace the races with the genders, and voila!  We have the familiar argument that God meant for men to marry women, and but for the interference with His arrangement, there would be no cause for such marriages.

Furthermore, had someone taken a popular vote at the time, they would have had no difficulty passing a Proposition in Virginia stating that the only recognizable form of marriage ought to be between Whites. This, however, did not sit well with a couple of Supreme Court judges, who in 1967, ruled that this decision – and indeed, Virginia’s policy of preventing marraiges between persons “solely on the basis of racial classifications” was “held to violate the Equal Protection and Due Process Clauses of the Fourteenth Amendment.” I’m sure this upset a number of people at the time, and went against the popular sentiment, but it was clearly the right thing to do (see Loving v. Virginia, http://caselaw.lp.findlaw.com/scripts/getcase.pl?court=US&vol=388&invol=1).

This decision was – amazingly – only 50 years ago now, but the people then were wrongheaded, uptight, and biased, and it required the unwanted interference of the law to contravene the people’s desires and set things right.

Massachusetts, of course, has already legalized gay marriage. In 2003, their Supreme Judicial court ruled that their state Constitution “affirms the dignity and equality of all individuals” and “forbids the creation of second-class citizens.” They felt that the state had no “constitutionally adequate reason” for denying marriage to same-sex couples on the ground of due process and equal protection (see Goodridge v. Department of Public Health, http://fl1.findlaw.com/news.findlaw.com/cnn/docs/conlaw/goodridge111803opn.pdf). This month, Connecticut will follow suit, having ruled in October that denying gays the right to marry was against the equality and liberty rules in the Connecticut state constitution, as well. I want no “second-class citizens” in California, either.

How do you know that allowing same-sex marriage won’t have destructive, far-reaching repercussions that we can’t possibly understand or predict? 

It would certainly be interesting to look at the statistics regarding heterosexual marriage rates in Massachusetts since 2003 for a clue to our future; at this writing, the census information is available by written request (but not online). However, it is ethnocentric of us to forget that there are other countries than the U.S. in which same-sex marriage or partnership rights have existed for up to fifteen years. Studies regarding the impact of gay marriage in Scandinavian countries and the Netherlands, for example, have been conducted; one University of Massachusetts economics professor reports that previously existing trends in marriage, divorce, cohabitation, and out-of-wedlock childbearing did not change as a result. In fact, heterosexual marriage rates in Denmark increased after the adoption of same-sex marriage and are now the highest they have been since the early 1970s. Divorce rates remained the same in the countries studied. Further, the majority of families with children were headed by married couples (see  http://www.aclu.org/getequal/ffm/section1/1c13slate.pdf and http://www.nytimes.com/2005/06/19/magazine/19ANTIGAY.html?pagewanted=all). Belgium, Canada, Norway, South Africa, and Spain have all legalized gay marriage; I suppose the eventual long-range impact of this decision remains to be seen, but we have no evidence thus far that these countries are suffering as a direct (or even indirect) result of it.

In my eyes, the bottom line is that it doesn’t matter what the repercussions might be. At one point in our history, the marriage of one black slave to another was not recognized – because they were lesser than us, we felt, and we had a right to decide whether or not their love for one another was sufficiently acceptable in the eyes of God (and Us). And I’m pretty sure that that’s wrong. We will not, I promise you, find ourselves in a world where everyone wants to be homosexual so desperately that human beings will cease getting married to members of the opposite sex and having children, thus threatening our very existence as a species. And short of that… I can think of no outcome that isn’t an acceptable consequence for providing equal treatment under the law.

God says homosexuality is wrong.

It seems clear to me that what this eventually amounts to, when distilled to its most basic level, is an attempt to force one’s religious beliefs on the rest of society. I know that it is naïve to imagine that we live in a country where Church and State are actually separate, but such a separation is nevertheless a stated goal of our Constitution. Yet if we surveyed proponents of Prop 8, it seems clear that the main reasons for its support would be based in conceptions of God’s will. Indeed, the LA Times recently reported that some 43% of the funding for Prop 8 came from Mormon donators, at the strong urging of the Mormon Church (see http://latimesblogs.latimes.com/lanow/2008/10/now-the-mormon.html). So we have people making civil rights decisions and impeding upon the freedoms of others based upon their religious convictions.  I understand that to some degree, it becomes impossible to separate one’s belief system from one’s decision-making process, but this instance is neither subtle nor unconscious in nature.

The interesting thing to me about all of this is that people don’t have as firm a stance, as detailed a plan, or as vested an interest in how society ought to deal with the poor, the sick, or the hungry… yet there are hundreds of verses in the New Testament alone that explicitly talk about this. In contrast, there are only a handful of Bible verses that might conceivably be interpreted as relating in any way to homosexuality. So why is this issue at the forefront? And while people have ever pointed to the Bible as support for their discrimination against all sorts of groups of people, this is always the wrong decision. 

I am not particularly religious, but I believe an appropriate verse might be Matthew 7:4, “how wilt though say to thy brother, ‘let me pull the splinter out of thine eye’ when a plank is in thine own?”

In The Trouble with Diversity, Walter Benn Michaels makes a provocative case against the elevation of cultural diversity, or respect and appreciation for different groups, over class concerns. This argument draws upon the classic American Exceptionalism argument that American society differs from Europe in that it lacks a class consciousness. Benn-Michaels adds an interesting twist: he argues that diversity, as we practice it on college campuses, is complicit in masking class inequality by encouraging us to focus on important, but less controversial aspects of cultural difference (food and holidays for instance) while ignoring the growing income inequality in the United States:

We love race — we love identity — because we don’t love class…..for 30 years, while the gap between the rich and the poor has grown larger, we’ve been urged to respect people’s identities — as if the problem of poverty would be solved if we just appreciated the poor.

I’ve written a bit about how our current understanding of diversity emphasizes tolerance at the expense of broader civic obligations to work across group boundaries to solve vexing civic problems like poverty and inequality. The result is we develop a keen appreciation that difference exists in society, but have no incentive to address what Cathy Cohen calls “cross-cutting” issues — those that affect groups across identity categories and are thus require cross-group mobilization.

What do you think? Where does race stand vis-a-vis class in terms of an identity that affects life chances for individuals in American society? Do we emphasize group acceptance at the expense of class-based concerns? Can we do both? Why don’t we? Should we?