Think twice before retaining "The Liberty Counsel"

The Liberty Counsel, the nonprofit outfit representing jailed Rowan County (Kentucky) clerk Kim Davis, filed an amendment to its appeal of her incarceration for contempt of court. I don't know what precisely the appeal said, but here's how the AP described the organization's news release of Sunday (6 September):

"Mrs. Davis is entitled to proper notice and due process when she is threatened with the loss of her freedom," Mat Staver, founder and chairman of Liberty Counsel, said in the news release. "There was no indication that she would be incarcerated. We will be presenting our arguments on appeal and asking for an expedited ruling."

If you're not rolling on the floor laughing, you should be. The whole world knew she could be jailed. Everybody. Really. Even her supporters. The idea that her lawyers didn't know is laughable. And not believable.

Staver, et al., made their claim in a press release, but have they made it in court papers? If The Liberty Counsel hasn't made this claim in a court filing, I call "bullshit" on it. The net result would be that they're not unbelievably incompetent lawyers, but they're trying, in an unbelievably stupid way, to cover their asses in the court of public opinion.

Now on the other hand, if TLC has or will put forth this argument in a court filing, they are either genuinely unqualified to practice law, or they're lying to the court. I haven't read any of their briefs but I find it hard to imagine they're such complete jackasses that they aren't qualified to practice law. Presumably they passed the bar somewhere. Yet would they really risk jail and disbarment for perjury? I find that hard to imagine, too.

Whether this is genuinely clueless lawyering or a flat-out lie, every current and potential client of The Liberty Counsel should be wondering: do I want these guys' help?

Get some perspective on Trump

Being in favor of Trump because he's not a professional politician is like being in favor of a Twinkie because it's not a pesticide-laden fruit.

Shouldn't you insist on a genuinely better choice?

Is it piety or hatred?

Now that Kim Davis is in jail for defying a federal court's order to do her job (or, in the alternative, to let her deputies do the job for her), the Rowan County (Kentucky) clerk's office is issuing marriage licenses again. Hey, great! The system managed to bypass an obstruction.

Well, maybe not.

Davis, through her Liberty Counsel lawyer, says the licenses issued in her absence are invalid.

"They are not being issued under the authority of the Rowan County clerk's office. They are not worth the paper that they are written on," said attorney Mat Staver after meeting with Davis in the Carter County jail in Grayson.

He claims that only Davis has the authority to issue a marriage license. The Rowan County Attorney, Cecil Watkins, has said that deputy clerks don't need their boss' approval to issue a marriage license.

I suspect we won't know who's right until somebody files suit and the Kentucky Supreme Court eventually rules one way or the other.

This prompts a bigger question, though: exactly how does Davis suggest that Kentucky resolve the tension between her beliefs and settled law?

Frankly, I don't see how we can accommodate the unbelievably stringent notion of what I call "transitive sin" with human law, period.

Davis objects to standard legislative accommodations of objecting religious believers. She won't allow her deputies to do the physical work of issuing documents because they still require her signature, and even if the signature were imprinted by a machine it would, in her eyes, still reflect her endorsement of a sinful act. This level of belief can't be satisfied by legalistic fig leaves that exempt the believer from physically participating in the act: it considers standing aside and letting the action take place to be tantamount to complicity. (Last year I mentioned a piece about the Little Sisters of the Poor, who have a similarly strict view of what constitutes "participation" in a sinful act.) Since the sinfulness can't be avoided by permitting an intermediary to do the dirty work, I call this view of sin and action as "transitive".

This is a pretty expansive idea of moral responsibility. Moreover, the lengths to which she has gone to satisfy her beliefs call into question her sincerity on a different matter.

Davis claims she has no problem if same-sex couples seek their license in another county. Yet how does this absolve Davis in her own eyes?

The obvious answer is, Davis' legal authority doesn't extend to a different county. But how much does Davis respect legal authority? Not much, as far as a federal judge's order is concerned. Why does she respect the legality of county boundaries but not a judge's order aimed specifically at her? Why should one carry weight with her but not the other?

Then there's the spiritual aspect of the matter. If she is so concerned with not enabling sin, how can she be okay telling same-sex couples they can get a marriage license in the next county? How are her hands clean in that case? She enabled them to commit the sin of same-sex marriage!

If you sincerely believe that the least little contact makes you complicit in a sin, I don't see how you can be virtuous in the modern world. I also don't see how you can believe in freedom of belief for anyone else if you're inclined to constrain what other people can do if their actions impinge on your "web" of possible complicity.

The legal rule of thumb for how far any given "freedom" can extend is, it has to be reined in when it impinges on someone else. In other words, "Your freedom to stretch ends at my nose". How can Davis' expansive version of "religious freedom" fit that legal rule of thumb?

I don't think it can.

The claimed injury to Davis' freedom of worship is so vaguely expansive, the "penumbra" of what might impinge on her religious belief can't be defined in the law. Common-sense, reasonable accommodations for religious belief have not sufficed for her. I doubt any accommodation is possible.

When your "personal" belief extends so far that you won't let others do your work, you've crossed a line. We can't and shouldn't accommodate you, because you are imposing your belief on others.

By the way, the strength of her belief in this particular sin strongly suggests that what really motivates her is a deep animus toward homosexuals. That, too, can be "protected" under the rubric of religious belief, but it's a much less trendy sentiment.

Oh, and those like the tiresome Mike Huckabee who are crying "Religious intolerance!" and "Christian persecution!" to the rafters are simply trying to raise money. Davis was jailed because she refused to do her job. You jokers are amplifying hostility toward yourselves and your coreligionists by being too goddamned greedy to secure power for yourselves. Worried about a more secular world? If that happens, you will bear much responsibility because you will have discredited genuine spiritualism with your whining and bigotry. So I'm actually doing you a favor by telling you to fuck off.

Killing for attention

Arthur Chu links narcissism and privilege in his Salon piece "Celebrity killer culture: When grandiosity, privilege and entitlement turn attention-seeking into violence".

It makes a disturbing amount of sense to me. I've long accepted the cliched observation that sensationally destructive acts are "a cry for attention", but Chu makes a compelling case that a lot of our most notorious murderers are linked by a much more specific characteristic.

[There is a psychological] trait that’s part of some mental illness diagnoses (like bipolar disorder) and some personality disorder diagnoses (like narcissistic personality disorder) but that I’d argue goes beyond either one. It’s called grandiosity — the idea that you, personally, are the center of the universe, that people ought to be paying attention to you, that you’re entitled to take up space in other people’s lives and their denying you that space is an injustice.

Grandiosity is joined at the hip with privilege. It festers among the subset of our culture that’s taught to take up space, to assert themselves, to make themselves important.

[link in the original text]

I'm skeptical of quickie psychosocial analyses in mass-culture publications like Salon, but this one rings true. It makes sense not just of Dylann Roof and the Columbine killers, but of a host of other white and Asian "public-spectacle" killers as well as Vester Lee Flanagan, the ex-TV reporter who murdered his former colleagues live on TV.

Chu also implicitly suggests that as long as we keep mindlessly showering attention on such killings, we're going to see more of them. Maybe we can minimize the destruction if we instead suggest that a spectacular suicide (that doesn't involve homicide) is even more attention-getting. At the least, such a development would complete our society's transformation into the uncomfortable dystopia portrayed in Paddy Chayefsky's Network.

Or maybe we can change our culture so that a subset of men is no longer taught that the rest of the world must make way for them.

Hmm. Why do I think it would be easier to convince them to commit suicide?

No, really: fire Kim Davis

It strains credulity that someone can baldly and unapologetically refuse to do a job while insisting that she deserves to keep it, but such is the sorry spectacle that Rowan County (Kentucky) clerk Kim Davis presents.

Even after being ordered by both a federal judge and the Sixth Circuit Court of Appeals to issue marriage licenses to everyone, including same-sex couples, Davis continues her work stoppage.

Rowan County Clerk Kim Davis has refused to issue any marriage licenses, citing her Christian faith and constitutional right to religious freedom, since the landmark [U.S. Supreme Court's Obergefell] decision in June.

Davis' attorney Mat Staver says she should be accommodated.

“The court of appeals did not provide any religious accommodation rights to individuals, which makes little sense because at the end of the day it’s individuals that are carrying out the acts of the office,” Staver said. “They don’t lose their individual constitutional rights just because they are employed in a public office.”

An "accommodation" lets somebody do the job in spite of difficulties. Davis is asking not to do her job. Staver's argument is a bad joke.

Worse, her refusal to do her job is keeping her office from doing its job of issuing marriage licenses. Because no licenses are being issued, the county government effectively has adopted her religion's strictures. And the First Amendment does not permit that.

Assuming Davis loses in the courts, Kentucky needs to oust her from her job. Apparently, that won't be easy.

Davis has said she will not resign. She can only be removed from office if the state legislature impeaches her, which is unlikely. If she continues to defy a federal court order, a judge could hold her in contempt and order hefty fines or jail time.

Fines and jail time would be appropriate for her intransigence, but what Rowan County needs is not a jailed county clerk, but a county clerk who will do the job. Somebody else has to be installed. If the state legislature won't impeach her, her county's citizens should sue her (and perhaps the state legislature, too) for nonperformance.

Kim Davis refuses either to do her job or to let her job be done. How does she dare claim she deserves to keep it?

She is a shameful example of arrogance fueled by religious zeal. I said it before, and I'll say it again.

Fire her!

Matt Taibbi nails our Trumpian sickness

Back in the immediate aftermath of a couple of violent jackasses beating down a homeless Latino man in Boston and invoking the Donald's name as they were arrested, Matt Taibbi penned a piece entitled, "Donald Trump Just Stopped Being Funny".

Trump is probably too dumb to realize it, or maybe he isn't, but he doesn't need to win anything to become the most dangerous person in America. He can do plenty of damage just by encouraging people to be as uninhibited in their stupidity as he is.

And he summed up with about as chilling, yet insightful, an observation as any I've seen lately:

America has been trending stupid for a long time. Now the stupid wants out of its cage, and Trump is urging it on. There are a lot of ways this can go wrong, no matter who wins in 2016.

Indeed, "the stupid wants out of its cage".

The same insistent simplemindedness that animates fundamentalism, the same overriding desire to reduce the world to white and black, good and evil, friend and foe, informs not just the support for Trump, but Trump's own buffoonish attitude toward just about everything. The world isn't complex, he insists, it's just that we don't have smart people (like him) running things.

I grew out of believing in political saviors a long time ago. It astonishes me that such a brazenly obvious snake-oil salesman as Trump found an audience, but his followers do not strike me as the clearest or deepest of thinkers. If a cruel fate makes The Donald our forty-fifth president, they're going to be very, very angry when he can't deliver.

Jeb middle-fingers Asian Americans

Jeb Bush tried to clarify what he meant by his criticism of what he called "anchor babies" a few days ago. Per Time:

Jeb Bush struggled Monday to explain his position on birthright citizenship, suggesting that his use of the term “anchor babies” was directed not at Hispanics but rather at Asians.

“What I was talking about was the specific case of fraud being committed,” Bush told reporters during an immigration-focused press conference in McAllen, Tex. “Frankly it’s more related to Asian people [who are] coming into our country, having children, and… taking advantage of a noble concept, which is birthright citizenship.”

Now, if you parse only the words, Jeb's words themselves aren't (unduly) offensive. Who's going to defend the idea of scurrilous foreigners entering the U.S. just long enough literally to drop a baby and to file the paperwork proving the circumstances of the birth?

But of course, you cannot parse only the words. You have to parse the circumstances in which those words are uttered. In this case, the circumstance of interest is the racially-charged atmosphere the GOP has created with its rhetoric. GOP candidates and far-right conservatives have criticized the #BlackLivesMatter movement as another cry of "victimization" from blacks; they've pandered to their base with racist fearmongering against Hispanics in the guise of "immigration reform". It's not a great surprise that Bush, increasingly desperate to garner some attention for his candidacy and some traction with the far-right base that dominates the GOP's primaries, has now gone after the other major subgroup That Doesn't Look Like Us.

There are more charitable ways of interpreting his remarks. For one thing, he may well be right that there is a substantial number of foreign-born Asians who travel to the U.S. expressly for the purpose of gaining a literal toehold on American citizenship for their children. For another, Bush may genuinely feel Hispanics are being railroaded by his conservative brethren, and he may have tried to redirect some of the nativist fury at "others" away from Hispanics.

But in the current, charged atmosphere in which the likes of Trump are demonizing non-whites, simply saying that he meant Asians rather than Hispanics invites the nativist, borderline racist GOP base to target Asians and Asian Americans rather than (or in addition to) Hispanics.

Did he mean to stoke anti-Asian sentiment? Well, look at it this way: he used to govern Florida, a state with a sizable non-white population. If he habitually blundered into minefields of ethnicity with catastrophic results, I doubt he would have secured two terms as governor. He didn't blunder into this remark. He didn't accidentally drag Asians and Asian Americans into the nativist GOP base's lashing-out against non-whites.

From a purely numerical standpoint, Asian Americans don't matter in national politics: there just aren't enough of them. But as a matter of optics, to use the currently popular term, substituting "Asians" for "Hispanics" simply gives the sizable pool of covert and overt racists in the GOP's fold an additional set of targets. Or rather, since these racists already loathed non-whites, Bush gave them rhetorical cover.

Bush could dig himself out of his hole, but it would take a lot of further clarifications and explanations, none of which will make him a more viable candidate in the eyes of GOP primary voters. So, like many who have insulted Asian Americans in the past (hello, Rush), he won't bother — and he likely won't pay a political price, either.