Governor Brewer, Justice, and Coercion

Back when my kids were tiny little spuds, getting them to clean their rooms on a Saturday could take For. Ever.  Little creatures that they were, they'd drift about, picking up one thing and putting it away.  And then, ooh!  Look!  Lego!  And they'd start playing with the thing they were cleaning, right up until the point when Daddy would return to goad them back into semi-purposeful motion.

This pattern would repeat, over and over again.  Even though they had skin in the game, in the form of their allowance, it could take hours.  Hours.  It was crazy-making.

And so I instituted a new Daddy Room Cleaning Policy.  It was called Twenty Minute Panic, and represented a modification of the Terms and Conditions of their allowance.  In order to get allowance for the week, they had to clean their rooms in twenty minutes.  In a panic.  Failure to comply meant no allowance.  Period.  A timer would be set, and I would stay on them the entire time, shouting out times, pointing out uncleaned objects, shouting out more times, preferably in a dramatic voice.  Every once in a while, I'd throw in a line from the end of Alien.  "Auto-destruct sequence initiated.  Your allowance will detonate in Tee-Minus ten minutes. The option to override is no longer valid."

Parenting really can be entertaining, if you let yourself get creative with it.

Tiny people would scamper about, frantically doing what they needed to have been doing in the first place.  After the rooms got cleaned, I'd strut about like Mussolini, carefully inspecting and critiquing. It was a show, of course, to reinforce next week's Twenty Minute Panic.

Sure, it got things done.  The trains ran on time.  And it was a little fun.  But it also wasn't really cause for celebration.

What's cause for celebration is when they clean their rooms without you making them do it.   And with two teen boys, I don't know that I'm there yet.

I think, in part, that's why I'm not quite overjoyed at yesterday's decision in Arizona.  Oh, sure, it's great that this utterly pointless and destructive law was stillborn.

But the "why" of the decision strikes me.

Analyzing the rhetorical structure of Governor Brewer's carefully written full statement, and tracking the evolution of the arguments over the last few days, what was evident was that this was not a decision made willingly.  It was an economically coerced decision.

In setting the stage for her veto of the bill, she took five paragraphs to tiptoe up to the issue.  And tiptoeing rhetorically makes sense here, just as it does whenever you're negotiating a minefield.  She...or her speechwriter... only got around to establishing the rationale for her decision in the sixth paragraph.  "My priority is the business agenda," she says, clearly.

It was at that moment, if you knew the context of the influences and pressures on her, that you knew the veto was coming.

Because bias against same-sex relationships is increasingly anathema in the broader business community.   The loudest voices in Governor Brewer's ears, the ones she was hearing?  They were not the voices of advocates for the LGBT community.  Those voices came from large corporations and from within the Arizona business community, who were realizing that if...for example...the NFL were to pull the SuperBowl from Arizona...they'd lose a whole bunch of money.  If major corporations refused to locate in Arizona because of the potential embarrassment and/or legal exposure that might come if one of your employees used this law to justify bigoted actions, that wouldn't help either.

So the decision was clear, as was her basis for making it.

What is less clear, for me, is how much a coerced decision like this one is cause for celebration.  It is, unquestionably, better than the alternative.  Without a doubt.  But when someone does the right thing for the wrong reason, it's a relief, but it is not time to break out the champagne.

Grudgingly acquiescing to the rights of a long-oppressed minority out of economic self-interest is not a deep victory for equality.  Just a shallow one.

Because coerced justice is not yet true justice.  It does not represent...not yet...the heart-change that is the ground of real transformation.

And that, or so an old friend tells me, is what really matters.

Arizona, Faith, and the Definition of a Person

The faith-o-sphere is all alight these days with shimmering debate and umbrage about a-soon-to-be-enacted law in the state of Arizona, one which allows individuals to refuse to perform services that violate the integrity of their faith.  It's cleared the Arizona House and Senate, and now sits with Governor Jan Brewer for signature.

This puppy will be a law, at least in that state.

Amidst all the furor, I thought to myself, gosh, perhaps it might be a good idea to actually read the bill as it stands right now.

Hard to talk about it meaningfully unless I've actually read the danged thing, now, eh?  And so I did.

You can too.  Just follow this link.

There are many things that are challenging about this law, and many reasons folks are up in arms about it.  There are legitimate concerns that it...like another law passed in Kentucky...might permit waiters to refuse to serve customers who offend their faith.

"Hi!  I'm Ida Mae!  Welcome to PQ McQuackenbushes!  Hey, wait.  Are y'all friends, or are y'all gay?  'Cause if you're friends, let me tell you about our specials.  If not, I'm afraid I'm going to have to ask you to move to that two-top over there so that slut Jolene can be your sinner-server today."   It feels just a teensy bit too much like segregation.  Just a tich.  Just a tad.

But I have another problem with it.

My concern, as a pastor and a person of faith, goes somewhere else.  It lies with how the bill describes what it means to be a person.  Because personhood matters in America, and our rights as individuals are central to the integrity of our republic.

But a person, according to this law, is defined as follows:

41-1493.5 "Person" includes any individual, association, partnership, corporation, church, religious assembly or institution or other business organization.

And there, I have beef, as should anyone who takes faith seriously.

I have written on this before, but the assumption of corporate personhood bugs the bejabbers out of me when it comes to asserting faith and religious conviction.  Because as deeply as personhood matters in our republic, it matters more to our relationship with our Maker.  An individual can have faith.  We worship, we pray, we sing.  We are, ourselves, loved and culpable and redeemable and faithful.  We stand accountable before our God.

A corporation does not have faith.  It cannot.  It is a thing.

No, scratch that.  It's less than a thing.  An object is real.  But a corporation is not real.  It is a legal construct, an illusion, a phantasm that has no reality.  It cannot feel, or weep, or laugh, or be saved.  It is not sentient, or self-aware.  It cannot be held to account.  In fact, corporate structure exists solely for the purposes of escaping accountability, a mask that hides individual liability.  It has no soul, and with no soul, can have no faith.

A corporation is no more a person than a statue of Ba'al is a god.

And yet the Arizona bill as written asks us to understand that this soulless nothing can have a belief.  It can "sincerely hold" this belief.  It can "exercise" faith.

No, it cannot.

And yes, I understand the legal conceit of corporate personhood.  I do.

But that understanding doesn't make me less bothered by it.  Because if in the defense of "religious freedom", we are watering down what it means to be both faithful and a person, we're treading in some dangerous places spiritually.

Chuck Norris Doesn't Scare Me One Little Bit

One of the many viral threads in our society is the "Chuck Norris" thing. You know, that particular thread of humor that makes a statement in which Chuck Norris is revealed as the world's most fearsome individual. Stuff like:

There is no theory of evolution, only animals Chuck Norris allowed to live.
and
When Chuck Norris does a pushup, he's not pushing himself up. He's pushing the earth down.
and
Chuck Norris doesn't read books. He stares at them until he gets the information he wants.

I was reminded of the truth of this last one when I read Chuck's regular column in TownHall.com yesterday. In addition to being a karate champ thirty years ago, the star of some of the crappiest movies of all time and some epically camp broadcast television, and being considered the world's most kick-butt humanoid, Chuck also happens to be an ultra-right-wing commentator. In that way, he's a bit like David Hasselhoff, if David Hasselhoff was a fascist.

Norris is, perhaps unsurprisingly, eager to see the laws of the land enforced with extreme prejudice. This is particularly true when it comes to the Arizona immigration laws that have caused so much commotion among everyone who isn't as lily-white as my bad self.
In his column supporting the efforts behind that law, what was most striking was his argument that we should settle this matter by going back to what the founding fathers did about immigration and naturalization. There is no reference here to huddled masses yearning to breathe free.

Instead, Chuck goes back to 1795, and to the Naturalization Act of 1795 in particular. Here in the Wisdom of Our Founding Fathers (tm), says The Chuck, is the model for how America should deal with immigrants. Two things make this Act of Congress a rather interesting choice.
First, the Naturalization Act of 1795, which you can read right here, permits citizenship for people dwelling in the United States who have been here at least five years and are willing to renounce the sovereignty of their place of birth. Nothing about "being here legally," because, well, there weren't any laws governing entry into the United States before the United States existed. If you stuck around and honestly wanted to be American, you were basically good to go. Period. I'm down with that, although I'm not quite sure Chuck's audience is quite so amenable to that option.

Second, there's a wee little nuance to the Naturalization Act of 1795, one that Chuck might have overlooked when he was staring at it with that fearsome stare of his. The Act begins:

"BE it enacted by the Senate and House of Representatives of the United States of America, in Congress assembled, that any alien, being a free white person, may be admitted to become a citizen of the United States, or any of them, on the following conditions..."

I'm not quite sure that the requirement that you be a "free white person" to be a citizen of this nation represents the kind of Wisdom of Our Founding Fathers(tm) that The Chuck really wants to be referencing.

Ah, Chuck, Chuck, Chuck. When you're citing something, it always helps to have read the text itself, rather than the talking points that have been culled out by some inside-the-beltway think tank. A man's got to know his limitations.