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Beyond Red and Blue
How Twelve Political Philosophies Shape American Debates
By Peter S. Wenz
The MIT Press
Copyright © 2009 Massachusetts Institute of Technology
All right reserved.
ISBN: 978-0-262-01295-9
Introduction
Political Conflicts
Political conflicts exist when people disagree about what the state should do or permit. This book is about those conflicts and the twelve, not merely two, political orientations that guide our deliberations on such matters as these:
Darlene Miller was making decent money dancing in pasties and a G-string at the Kitty Kat Lounge in South Bend, Indiana, but she thought she could do better. Chief Justice William Rehnquist, not a known patron, explained: "Dancers are not paid an hourly wage, but work on commission. They receive a 100 percent commission on the first $60 in drink sales during their performances.... Miller wishes to dance nude because she believes she would make more money doing so." But Indiana's public indecency statute required dancers to wear pasties and a G-string when they danced.
The court of appeals ruled against the state, arguing "that nonobscene nude dancing performed for entertainment is expression protected by the First Amendment, and that the public indecency statute was an improper infringement of that expressive activity because its purpose was to prevent the message of eroticism and sexuality conveyed by the dancers."
The Supreme Court reversed the appeals court and held that Indiana was within its rights to outlaw nude dancing. The statute was not aimed specifically at nude dancing, an expressive activity, but at public nudity of all kinds, which has long been considered something bad in itself. Rehnquist concluded: "The statutory prohibition is not a means to some greater end, but an end in itself." Justice Souter, agreeing to uphold the statute, noted Indiana's contention that nude dancing leads to other evils. It "encourag[es] prostitution, increas[es] sexual assaults, and attract[s] other criminal activity." Justice Souter didn't think the state should have to prove any of these claims.
Justice White, writing for the minority of four in a 5-4 decision, thought Indiana's statute unconstitutional.
The purpose of forbidding people to appear nude in parks, beaches, hot dog stands, and like public places is to protect others from offense. But that could not possibly be the purpose of preventing nude dancing in theaters and barrooms since the viewers are exclusively consenting adults who pay money to see these dances.
Then why does the state require pasties and a G-string? White concludes:
It is only because nude dancing performances may generate emotions and feelings of eroticism and sensuality among the spectators that the State seeks to regulate such expressive activity, apparently on the assumption that creating or emphasizing such thoughts and ideas in the minds of the spectators may lead to increased prostitution and the degradation of women. But generating thoughts, ideas, and emotions is the essence of communication.
Preventing such communication violates the First Amendment, according to White and the other dissenters. The Court majority, by contrast, believed that the First Amendment does not cover Ms. Miller's dancing, so pasties and a G-string must.
Should animal sacrifice in religious rituals be outlawed as cruelty to animals or protected as freedom of religion? United States Supreme Court Justice Kennedy explained, "Animals sacrificed in Santeria rituals include chickens, pigeons, doves, ducks, guinea pigs, goats, sheep, and turtles. The animals are killed by the cutting of the carotid arteries in the neck. The sacrificed animal is cooked and eaten, except after healing and death rituals." The religion couldn't continue without animal sacrifice, because the initiation of new priests requires it.
Santeria expert Migene Gonzalez-Wippler emphasizes the difference between animal sacrifice and ordinary slaughter:
The first time I saw an animal sacrifice ..., my knees and my teeth knocked together all through the ceremony. In an animal sacrifice there is something primeval, something deeply connected with the collective unconscious of the race. It is all so simple. A quick twist of the hand and the chicken's head is gone, and a thick stream of dark-red, hot blood is streaming from the severed neck. But it is not the beheading of the animals that is so earth-shaking. It is the giving of the blood, the acceptance that blood is the life, the spirit; and that it is being returned to the divine source from where it came.
The phrase "washed in the blood of the chicken" may lack religious resonance for most Americans, but the Santeria seem to find it meaningful.
Opponents of animal sacrifice claim that the killings are more painful to animals than ordinary slaughter, and that animals sacrificed for healing and death rituals die for no good reason because they're not eaten. This is cruelty to animals, they say.
Kerrigan and Mock had been living together for twelve years and believed it was about time they got married. The thirteen-year-old babysitter of their adopted Guatemalan twin boys, Fernando and Carlos, assumed they were married, but Connecticut law forbids Beth Kerrigan to marry Jody Mock because both are women. Connecticut's civil union law for gay couples defines marriage as solely between a man and a woman. Kerrigan and Mock sued Connecticut for the right to marry. Most of Connecticut's registered voters, however, thought that civil union is enough. Just over 50 percent opposed gay marriage in polls taken in 2005 and 2006.
Many conservative Christians oppose both civil union and gay marriage because they believe homosexuality conflicts with the laws of God and nature. Brian Racer, pastor of the Open Door Bible Church at the Arundel Mills Mall in Maryland, explained to Russell Shorto of the New York Times Magazine:
It's unfortunate that homosexuals have taken the moniker "gay," because their lifestyle and its consequences are anything but. Look what has happened in the decades since the sexual revolution and acceptance of the gay lifestyle as normal. Viruses have mutated, S.T.D.'s have spread. It shows that when we try to change the natural course of things, what comes out of that is not joy or gayness.
Bryan Simonaire, another anti-gay-marriage activist added: "Once you start this, you could have a 45-year-old man wanting to marry a 9-year-old boy. That could be O.K. in 20 years. That's what you get with relative moral truth. Whereas with absolute moral truth, what was O.K. 50 years ago will still be O.K. 20 years from now." From this perspective, we can't be certain that slavery was wrong two hundred years ago without absolute values.
But the inability to marry can jeopardize family life, as Jeffrey Busch and Stephen Davis, partners for sixteen years, found while returning home from Canada. They were traveling with their three-year-old son Elijah when Canadian officials noticed that Elijah's birth certificate listed his mother as "unknown." The official said, "Here you are, two men with a child, how do we know it's not a kidnapping." It shook the couple up. Busch said, "If we were a married couple, I could say, 'I'm Eli's dad and this is my spouse.' But I couldn't, so six weeks after that happened, we decided to enter into the lawsuit to secure our rights." The lawsuit, which claimed that Connecticut's constitution implies a right to same-sex marriage, included Kerrigan and Mock among its plaintiffs.
James Canter is a cancer survivor who used marijuana for medical reasons, a practice later approved by California voters in 1996. Canter writes:
Doctors and patients should decide what medicines are best. Ten years ago, I nearly died from testicular cancer that spread into my lungs. Chemotherapy made me sick and nauseous. The standard drugs, like Marinol, didn't help. Marijuana blocked the nausea. As a result, I was able to continue the chemotherapy treatments. Today I've beaten the cancer, and no longer smoke marijuana. I credit marijuana as part of the treatment that saved my life.
But federal law, which pre-empts state law, lists marijuana as too dangerous for medical use. Accordingly, "the federal government stopped supplying marijuana to patients in 1991. Now it tells patients to take Marinol, a synthetic substitute ... that can cost $30,000 a year and is often less reliable and less effective." Ed Rosenthal, who grew marijuana in Oakland for medical purposes under state license, was convicted in January 2003 of a federal drug violation. Jurors at his trial were not told that he was licensed by the state.
The federal government worries that if marijuana can be grown legally for medical purposes, much will be diverted for recreation, which can lead to increased drug abuse. Others favor legalizing marijuana for recreation.
State responses to sexual harassment (or is it free speech?) can be controversial. Freelance writer Sarah Glazer describes one such case:
Peggy Kimzey, a Wal-Mart shipping clerk in Warsaw, Mo., was bending over a package when she heard the store manager and another employee snickering be hind her. Kimzey stood up and asked what they were doing. "Well," the manager smirked, "I just found someplace to put my screwdriver." When Kimzey asked him to stop crude remarks, he replied, "You don't know, you might like it."
In another case, Lois Robinson sued her bosses at a shipyard because they displayed a picture calendar featuring female models who were fully or partly nude. In nine of the pictures the models' breasts were bare and in two the pubic areas were visible. Robinson was told by a fellow employee, "You rate about an 8 or 9 on a scale of 10." Should the state stop such behavior and require compensation to women who were subjected to it? Most female employees at the shipyard said they didn't mind, but they may have been trying to keep their jobs or avoid worse harassment. Most men didn't find the pictures or comments offensive; just free speech of the jocular variety.
In a third case, a graduate student at the University of Nebraska kept on his office desk a small photo of his wife at the beach in a bikini. Two psychology graduate students who shared the office claimed the photo display constituted sexual harassment by creating a hostile work environment for them. The department head agreed.
Political Pluralism and Ideological Coalitions
How do Americans address such issues as these? One way is through political campaigns and elections, which determine who will legislate on such matters and, often indirectly, who will judge cases brought to court. The United States has what is basically a two-party political system, because most people think that casting a ballot for a third-party candidate, who seldom has a real chance of winning, wastes their vote.
The predominance of two parties leads many people to believe that Americans are divided ideologically into just two camps-Republican and Democratic, right and left, conservative and liberal, red and blue. There's a culture war between the two camps. Republicans are from Mars; Democrats are from Canada. When Republicans and Democrats or conservatives and liberals join together, it is said that politics makes strange bedfellows. Political interests have overcome ideological opposition. These are misperceptions that this book aims to correct.
In the United States today, I claim, arguments about hot-button political issues appeal to at least twelve different political philosophies, not just two. (There may be more than twelve, but I have distilled only twelve from analyses of current debates.) By "political philosophies," I mean organized views about why states are needed and what their goals and functions should be. Regarding hot-button political issues, the most important differences among political philosophies concern divergent views about the state's proper goals and functions. These are matters of values.
Most individuals use at least a half-dozen philosophies in their own political thinking, because they believe the state should promote several goals and perform various functions, whereas each philosophy emphasizes only one or a few major values.
The use of twelve different philosophies in our political discourse clears the way for principled coalitions that reflect convergences of ideologies, not of interests. People with different philosophical commitments come together on an issue when all have reasons within their own, but often different, schemes of values to support the same law or public policy. Political success often follows developing and marketing a position that takes advantage of such ideological convergence.
Ideological diversity is apparent in the major political parties, making each an ideological coalition. Consider the Republicans in 2008. They were divided on several issues, reflecting a diversity of political philosophies in their ranks. Concerning amnesty (or its equivalent) for illegal immigrants, for example, free-market conservatives favored expanding the workforce (and so the economy) with industrious immigrants, while some social conservatives balked at rewarding people for illegal behavior. Regarding evolution, some theocrats among Republicans wanted to require teaching Intelligent Design along with evolutionary theory in biology classes, whereas other Republicans-such as free-market conservatives who want the most educated workforce possible-favored science without religion. On civil liberties, some libertarian Republicans, who champion low taxes and a small government, were concerned that the Patriot Act deprived Americans of too much freedom, while other Republicans supported a get-tough attitude toward potential, suspected, and potentially suspected terrorists and were willing to sacrifice some traditional civil liberties in that cause.
Democrats were internally divided as well. On immigration, for example, cosmopolitan and multicultural Democrats favored policies that fostered increased immigration, with cosmopolitans questioning the ultimate importance of national borders and multiculturalists savoring the cultural diversity that immigrants bring. But contractarians (whose views are explained in chapter 1 and later) worried that immigrants depress the wages of poor Americans. They were wary of policies that encouraged immigration. They were joined by some environmentalists who noted that the American lifestyle is more environmentally damaging than lifestyles in the immigrants' countries of origin. The Earth would be healthier with fewer people achieving the American dream. There was disagreement in the Sierra Club over this issue in the 1990s.
Such ideological diversity within each party allows for ideology-based coalitions both within and between the parties. Suppose, for example, that you favor school vouchers-government vouchers given to parents who can use them either to support public schools or to send their children to private (including religion-based parochial) schools. Such vouchers make private education more affordable to a larger range of families. To build a political movement or candidacy on this issue, it's helpful to know that current support for school vouchers comes primarily from three different political philosophies. Theocrats, who want laws and public policies to reflect the views of their particular religion, favor vouchers because vouchers help families within their religious communities send their children to schools that teach their religion. Free-market conservatives, by contrast, favor vouchers because they believe that efficiency requires competition and vouchers will enable private education to be more competitive with public education. Public schools, private schools, and taxpayers will all benefit from such competition, they think. Social conservatives favor vouchers because they allow religion to be taught in government-funded schools, and they think religion is the firmest foundation for the moral development that students need to become productive, law-abiding citizens. Social conservatives differ from theocrats, however, because theocrats want schools that promote their particular religion (or ones they consider very similar), whereas social conservatives are happy with any world religion that teaches sound morals. Some theocrats in the United States would oppose vouchers being used for Hindu or Islamic schools, whereas social conservatives would not, so long as standard morality is being taught in that religious context.
Voucher supporters are largely Republican. Many Democrats are wary of vouchers, because contractarians among them-who think that the government should help the poorest citizens-worry that current voucher proposals will harm the poor. Such systems give parents a voucher worth less than half the cost of education and therefore benefit most the children in families that can afford to supplement the voucher with additional money. As children from these middle-and lower-middle-class families leave public schools for private ones, the quality of public schools is likely to decline because a smaller percentage of the politically active population will have a personal stake in public education, leading to underfunding. Children of the poorest families will be stuck in these inferior schools.
(Continues...)
Excerpted from Beyond Red and Blue by Peter S. Wenz Copyright © 2009 by Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Excerpted by permission.
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