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Don Narey

Monthly Archives: May 2015

Who’s Watching When the Legitimate Press Legitimizes Hate

19 Tuesday May 2015

Posted by djnarey in The Road to Equality

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Lydia Wheeler, Lydia Wheeler The Hill, Scott Lively Lydia Wheeler, Scott Lively The Hill

supremecourtScott Lively is nothing if not newsworthy. A public figure whose work has had punishing–often devastating–impact on thousands of people around the world, he likes to be described as “a lawyer, author and activist.” Although you really can’t argue with any of those, nearly all of the reporters who have covered him would consider it intellectually dishonest to ignore the rest of his story.

He is a defendant charged Crimes Against Humanity. Lively made a name for himself in Uganda as an “expert” homosexuality.  He helped draft and promote an infamous law imposing long prison sentences and, in some cases, the death penalty for homosexuality.  Uganda’s highest court eventually abolished the law, but Lively’s supporters continue his work.  He was recently handed a defeat when the First Circuit Court, denied his petition to dismiss and will stand trial for mass persecution of a minority.

He is also an author and master of exploiting the desperate and violent. His work,  The Pink Swastika, which argues that gays engineered the holocaust and warns of a homo-fascist agenda, has led to a 50-city speaking tour in Russia. He has thanked President Putin for sharing his vision and he personally takes credit for his role in increasing anti-gay intolerance and violence.  Mr. Lively also practices what he preaches; he was ordered to pay $30,000 in damages to a lesbian photographer he attacked and dragged around by the hair.

So, “lawyer, author, activist,” in any context, may be perfectly true, but indisputably inadequate. In the context of LGBT issues, though, concealing his background is concealing the truth.  It is lying by omission. What Lydia Wheeler has done in The Hill goes even further.  She doesn’t ignore his history, she rewrites it in order to give his position credibility. Her article, Faith Leaders Demand That Liberal Judges Sit Out Gay Marriage, is unequivocal, intentional lying.

It’s also the kind of thing I wouldn’t normally notice. I mean, everyone’s got a dog the fight. The point isn’t really reporting the news, it demonstrating how it proves you’re were right.  Fox might as well just end every broadcast with “we told you so!” But that’s what makes the Lydia Wheeler piece extraordinary: it’s not what she did it’s where she did it. The Hill, as Lively himself recently bragged, “is one of the most read and respected news sources inside the beltway.” In this case, he’s actually got a point.

When Lively showed up in D.C. last month to hold a “press conference” hardly anyone noticed. He was taking time from his other important work, raising public awareness of President Obama’s role as the antichrist leading a satanic-gay army into Armageddon.  He brought along a small cadre, a who’s-who of the Southern Poverty Law Center’s Hate Groups.

Lydia Wheeler, covering the event for the The Hill, reported a coalition of “religious leaders” had gathered to demand two Supreme Court justices recuse themselves from the marriage equality case.  The “religious leaders” is Scott Lively (the tense switch is hers, intentional and entirely transparent).  His lack of any affiliation to a religion, ordination, theology, ecclesiastical association, accountability, representation or anything typically associated with the term seems beside the point.

To be clear, it wouldn’t be Wheeler’s job to judge the quality of the title.  But, something remotely resembling vetting might in order when you’re using the same description you use for Archbishop of Canterbury.

A pile of empty boxes Lively posed with are described as “300,000 symbolic injunctions.”  But why nothing equals 300,000 as opposed to 3 or 3,000,000 or what “symbolic injunction” actually means, are apparently not worth asking.

I’m not going to go through the line by line absurdity. The fact is, not a single word in this story was meant to reflect reality.  It was as much an act of kindness as act of deceit. It was a gift Lydia Wheeler handed to Scott Lively courtesy of The Hill and God only knows the occasion.  

For Wheeler it’s no big deal, she has so little to lose in terms of integrity or respect anyway. For Lively it’s the best opportunity he’s ever had to look legitimate. For The  Hill, it is a stain that won’t, and certainly shouldn’t, be forgotten for a very long time.

 

[I provided links to the stories about Lively’s bizarre activities and, in most case, had several options: they are well publicized. I did not, however, provide links for any information that came from his own website.  I’m no more comfortable doing that, than linking readers to neo-Nazi or White Supremacist groups.  If you want to see his vile work, he’s easy enough to find.]

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

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Sam Alito: No Girls Allowed

10 Sunday May 2015

Posted by djnarey in The Road to Equality

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CAP Princeton, Concerned Alumni Princeton, Sam Alito Princeton, Sonia Sotomayor Princeton

 

It is a magnificently American irony. A man who fought so hard to keep women out of Princeton University, ends up along side one of those Princeton women on The United States Supreme Court deliberating, no less, the biggest civil rights case in a generation. With only eight other in people world doing this job, what were the chances? But this is precisely the kind of thing Sam Alito was worried about.

PicMonkey Collage

Princeton graduates Sam Alito ’72 and Sonia Sotomayor ’76

To be clear, no one should hold Justice Alito to views he held decades ago. If this were a case of youthful exuberance, a collegiate ideology long since  tempered by maturity and pragmatism, I’d join the endless parade of white guys who defend him. But, the problem with Sam Alito isn’t just bygones.

The problem is not that he joined a group whose primary purpose was limiting the number of women admitted to Princeton (not just limiting the impact of Affirmative Action: they also opposed gender-blind admissions). It’s not that he claims to have been active in the group well into the 1980’s or bragged about it to prove his reactionary credentials when seeking a promotion in Reagan administration.  It’s not even that Justice Alito argues from a myopic world view centered on race and gender. The problem is that he demonstrates no ability nor interest in entertaining any other perspective. And he doesn’t see a damn the wrong with that.

During last week’s opening arguments on marriage equality (Obergefell v Hodges), Alito offered a stunning display of pretense and irritability. He was hardly the only one failing to see beyond the prism of his own experience, but he never appears to struggle with alternate viewpoints.  He dismisses them out of hand.

His dependence on ad populum fallacy belies his training. It also illustrates that narrowness of his thinking. He asked Mary Baunato (plantiff) if we can “infer that all those nations and cultures thought there was some rational practical purpose for defining marriage that way or is it your argument that they were all operating independently based solely on irrational stereotypes and prejudice?”  Playing off Justice Kennedy’s notion that millennia of tradition can’t be wrong, he seems legitimately perplexed. Irritated that Baunano doesn’t immediately grasp his assault on logic, he quickly loses patience with her reasonability : “You’re not answering my question.”

Just as Chief Justice Roberts can’t see how marriage has changed in any substantive way–because it hasn’t for him–Alito can’t see the error in subjugating a class of people that isn’t his class of people. For both, the defense is that it has always been that way and has served them just fine, exquisitely in fact.

Apparently having heard enough, Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg leisurely interjects: “[The plaintiffs] wouldn’t be asking for this relief is the law of marriage was what it was a millennium ago…Same-sex unions wouldn’t have opted into a pattern of marriage which is a dominant and subordinate relationship.”

Alas, Justice Alito and Justice Ginsburg seem on equal footing. They make equally compelling cases for why we need women and minorities at Princeton, at Columbia and, God knows, on the Court.

Ali was not the greatest boxer; that’s too small for him.

06 Wednesday May 2015

Posted by djnarey in What I'm Seeing

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Muhammad Ali, Muhammad Ali and Floyd Mayweather, Muhmmad Ali and George Foreman

No one appreciates the power of Ali like George Foreman.  As a kid, listening the gold-medalist on the radio, he viewed Ali with equal measures of fear and fascination. He recalls first hearing the phrase “black Muslim,” growing in a small Texas town. Nobody really had a problem with “Muslim,” he says, but the word “black” inspired fear and suspicion. What was this guy talking about; what kind of problems could a man like Ali cause, what trouble was he going to stir up?

Ali arrives in Kinshasa, Zaire to meet Foreman for the Rumble in Jungle

Ali arrives in Kinshasa, Zaire to meet Foreman for the Rumble in Jungle

His confusion with Ali gave way to competition which gave way to contempt and, eventually,  to a hard-earned and heart felt respect.  George Foreman didn’t just experience the force that was Ali, he came to terms with it.

Before turning pro in 1969, George Foreman was already on the wrong side of Muhammad Ali. While he trained for the ’68 Olympics, some of the most elite black athletes in the country considered boycotting the Games altogether. The Olympic Project for Human Rights,  which promoted a boycott, counted Lew Alcindor (later Kareem Abdul Jabbar), Bob Beaumont and Tommie Smith among its members. They presented a series of grievances to the Olympic Committee concerning South Africa, Rhodesia and Muhammad Ali.

In South Africa, the Botha government had recently banned political opposition to apartheid. In Rhodesia, white-supremacists under Ian Smith declared national independence, violently imposing their will in defiance of world condemnation. Both countries planned to send whites-only teams to the Games.

By 1968 Muhammad Ali was a revolutionary force unto himself.  He cast a figure just a large as any African republic.  A convert to the Nation of Islam (and later Sunni Islam), he applied for conscientious objector status during the Vietnam war.  When his status was denied he stood his ground, was stripped of the heavyweight title, denied license to fight in all 50 states, had his passport revoked and was pilloried by the national press.

OPHR  demanded that the Olympic Committee ban both apartheid states from the games and that U.S. boxing officials restore Ali’s title.  They were also calling for the removal of Avery Brundage, the avowed white-supremacist and anti-Semite who chaired the Olympic Committee.

Peter Norman, Tommie Smith & John Carlos (all three wearing OCHR buttons)

Peter Norman (Aus), Tommie Smith & John Carlos, all wearing OPHR symbols.

In the end, however, OPHR concluded that boycotting the Olympics  was too much to ask of athletes who had sacrificed so much to get there. Abdul Jabbar, the best known collegiate athlete in the country, however, made a dramatic stand. He refused to join the U.S. Olympic basketball team, and he paid for it.

When Today show host, Joe Garagiola, asked Abdul Jabbar why he refused to play for his country, he famously answered: “I live here, but it’s really not my country.” Never known to be much of a thinking man, Garagiola replied,”then there’s only one solution…move.”

Tommie Smith went to Mexico City and set a world record, broke the 20 second barrier in 200 meters, and won gold.  Then, he sacrificed it all moments later. In one of the most iconic moments in sports, he and John Carlos raised their fists high during the National Anthem.  It was an act of immense courage, as well as the end of two careers.

The questions Abdul Jabbar, Smith and Carlos were grappling with are still relevant, but no closer to being resolved, today. The raging debates of athletes wearing I-Can’t-Breath jerseys, or running onto the field with their hands raised,  is no different than it was nearly 50 years ago.  How do our most celebrated athletes acknowledge the reality of being black in America?  Is it necessary, or even possible, to compartmentalize one’s existence enough to leave your identity in the locker room, like another item of street clothing?

For Muhammad Ali that wasn’t an option.  He had rejected the name, the history, the religion, the station, and the very consciousness that had been imposed upon him. He was his politics.  There was no gesture he could refrain from or button he could remove, no catch phrase he could avoid.  The problem people had with Muhammad Ali was his being Muhammad Ali.

Early in his career, after beating Sonny Liston, a reporter asked Ali about his association with the Nation of Islam.  He saw right through the question and got to the heart of the matter, saying “I don’t have to be what you want me to be.” He controlled the dialogue, he would not be controlled by it.  It was one more thing, like black, beautiful and Muslim, that we just couldn’t get used to: a black man who would define himself on his own terms.

On the other side of the moon, George Foreman understood none of this.  He was far removed from the historic Cleveland Summit.  Boycotting the Olympics never crossed his mind and he dismissed Smith and Carlos for their “college boy protests” (later he’d say it was more about elitism: he felt rejected by OPHR who, he says, never once reached out to a non-collegiate athlete).

But in 1974, the man who had feared the term “black” confronted the man who owned it  in Kinshasa, Zaire (now the Dem. Rep. of the Congo).  The likes of Norman Mailer, Hunter S. Thompson and George Plimpton were on hand, propelling this far beyond a mere title fight.  This was a story vindication and validity, righteousness and respect, courage against compromise.

It would be hard to overstate the significance of Ali’s victory.

I suppose it would be equally hard to overstate what it meant for Foreman to lose.  Ali had always reached something in him that no one else could touch. Only Ali could trigger that level of rage, that depth of shame. When he read in an interview that Ali said “Foreman is no boxer, he just wants to kill somebody,” he says he felt so ashamed. He also said every word was true.

Foreman turned the Rumble in the Jungle into an obsession, an internal burning rage that  that ate at him relentlessly.  He said he was robbed, the water was drugged, the ropes were loose and the fight was rigged. For six years he couldn’t admit to being beaten. Then, in 1980 when a reporter asked what had happened in Kinsasha, he said the words aloud. “He beat me.” The air coming out of his lungs took with it a crushing weight, but exposed a another level of shame. Recalling that moment, Foreman, says he realized what he’d done in denying Ali’s victory. He had had put a “blemish on this great man’s career.”  So, in the early 1980’s he  reached out to Ali.

He discovered the animosity was one-sided. Without hesitation, Ali welcomed the friendship, the unique bond and unabashed love he love he had to offer.  In 2003, Foreman would remember  the Rumble in The Jungle like this: “He wanted them to love him…Ali made them love him. That’s why I couldn’t beat him. He heard them chanting his name;  that’s where the stamina came from. They loved him. I love him too.”

“He’s the greatest man I’ve ever known,” Foreman added, “Not greatest boxer, that’s too small for him.”

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