Et in terra pax

In the Gospel According to Luke the story of the birth of Jesus is told in chapter two.  There is a particular passage there that I have always found to be meaningful.  Near the birthplace of Jesus, on the night, there were shepherds tending their flocks, when an angel appeared to them. Picking up at verse 9:

⁹ And, lo, the angel of the Lord came upon them, and the glory of the Lord shone round about them: and they were sore afraid.
¹⁰ And the angel said unto them, Fear not: for, behold, I bring you good tidings of great joy, which shall be to all people.
¹¹ For unto you is born this day in the city of David a Saviour, which is Christ the Lord.
¹² And this shall be a sign unto you; Ye shall find the babe wrapped in swaddling clothes, lying in a manger.
¹³ And suddenly there was with the angel a multitude of the heavenly host praising God, and saying,
¹⁴ Glory to God in the highest, and on earth peace, good will toward men.

(The above is from the King James Version, which I prefer for this passage.)

If someone were to ask me to sum up Christianity in a single sentence, the last line would be a strong candidate.  Gloria in excelsis Deo, it reads in Latin. Et in terra pax hominibus bonae voluntatis.  Peace on Earth, good will toward men.

You don't need to be a Christian, or even to have any religion at all, to see the value of that sentiment.

For me, the Christmas story is—unexpectedly—a wonderful metaphor, full of hope for humankind.  I see many, many people who are waiting on God to solve the problems of the world, but the solutions are in us, in our work, in our will, in our strength.  In the story even God could not, or did not, will the world's problems away, but had to (or chose to) act through a man.

That means that the capacity is within us all to effect the result promised by the angel of the Christmas story.  It begins with small acts of peace, forgetting old hatreds, atoning for our transgressions, and committing ourselves anew to the cause of peace and good will.  But it continues with self-examination. What have you done for peace in your neighborhood, in your community?  What good will have you shown to others?  As a nation, have we been for peace, or for our own interests?  Has our will toward others been good or ill?  Have we been the author of our own problems?

We can choose peace.  We can choose good will to our fellow man, even to those who would wish us harm.  The responsibility to do so lies within us.

For all those who are celebrating today, Merry Christmas.  Et in terra pax, for all of us.

Maybe there is a free lunch after all, or could have been

A few months ago I wrote about the saying "there's no free lunch" in the context of so-called "free" services that require users to surrender their privacy as a condition of use.  Today I'm writing about a different kind of free lunch, but I wanted to make clear that I'm not talking about the same thing just because I use similar language.

Today's Good Counsel is about economics, and more particularly about the role of the government in the economy.  I should preface this by saying that I have next to zero formal education in economics, so I'm approaching this as a layperson. I have read a great deal about the subject.  I also don't think that you need to hold a Ph.D. in Economics to grasp policy issues even as you leave the maths and hard-core theory to others.  In fact, one of the more important things I've read is that economics education tends to be extremely orthodox and conservative in its orientation, and if you know anything about me you should know that I am an enemy of orthodoxy in almost everything (I remain opposed to the use of the designated hitter, but that is a topic for another day).

I should also say that this is an enormously complicated subject, and one that can't be distilled into a single blog post of reasonable length.  But we can try.

Finally, I should further say that while this entry is long, I think the payoff is worth it, in that this is something that not many people really understand, and we are pretty much being victimized by a huge screw job.

That diversion aside, let's get down to business.

We have a rather weird set of current conditions. 

By some measures, the American economy is roaring.  The stock market is at record levels.  Gross national income is up.  The unemployment rate is down.   

By other measures, the American economy is stagnant.  Job-creation is limping along at moderate levels, at about 200,000 new jobs a month.  (A basic fact of the American economy is that we need about 150,000 new jobs each month to keep up with population growth, because that many workers enter the workforce, net of those who leave it due to retirement, death, or other reasons.)

By still other measures, the American economy is in recession.  There are millions of long-term unemployed people--otherwise healthy and available for work--whose unemployment insurance benefits have run out or soon will.  These are people who have been out of work and actively seeking work for at least 99 weeks--that's almost two years.  Years of stimulus of various types have failed to move the needle on inflation, which is historically low.  And interest rates are at the rock-bottom.

And I think if you asked the average person on the street what they thought of the economy, that person would say, "Hey, times are tough."  That may be the most important indicator of all.

One of the weirder consequences of all of this is that despite that fact basic fact--that a lot of people think we're mired in a long-term down period--the political will in Washington is to do things that are really counter to what needs to be done here.  Now, I'm the first to acknowledge that what Washington thinks and what the people think are often out-of-sync.  But official Washington, and especially people who ought to know better, seem to think that it's government spending that is the cause of our ills.

Thus we get genuinely stupid economic policy, like the sequester, and artificial fiscal constructs, like the debt limit, that serve literally no prudent purpose.

We are attempting to fight with both hands tied behind our back, so to speak.  Here's why:

Principle 1:  The government fisc is not like your family's budget.

If you want to spend money, whether it's to buy a box of noodles for your supper or to buy a house, you first have to get the money.  You can get that money by working, or by receiving it as a gift, or by receiving a return on an investment, or by borrowing it.  Your spending is limited by your capacity in each of those areas.  You can get more money by increasing your work or by increasing your borrowing, but if you spend freely you will eventually reach a point at which you will be maxed out.

For that reason, you MUST constrain yourself, foregoing things that you might like to have to ensure that you have enough resources for things you need.

But, as I have said previously, the federal government doesn't have any such restriction, because the federal government can create money at will.  You can't do that; you have to convince other people to give you money (usually in exchange for services) in order to have money.

Principle 2:  What most people think of as "money" is just symbolic of value.

I mentioned before that there are some artificial restrictions on the government with regard to monetary policy.  One of them is the control that Congress exerts over fiscal policy, through the budgeting and appropriations processes.  That's actually a good artificial restriction, because we are a representative democracy, and we like to make sure that our decision-making process is democratic in nature.  We also have the federal debt limit.  We have the Federal Reserve, which controls monetary policy in a less democratic way, using authority delegated to it by Congress.

It's important to recognize that just because the government can create money at will, in the sense of having the ability, does not mean that it does or should, in the sense of having the desire, or may, in the sense of having the authority.  But I am not really talking about those things as real restrictions on the ability to act.

Suppose I cut a piece of paper into the size of a dollar bill, drew a portrait of myself on it, and wrote that it had a value equal to "One Hundred Harringtons" on it.  If I went to Kroger, filled up my grocery basket, and went to the register, what are the chances that the cashier would accept my paper as payment for my groceries?  The answer obviously is zero.  That paper has no value.
Of course, if I handed them a $100 Federal Reserve Note with a picture of Benjamin Franklin on it, the cashier would (after ascertaining that it was real) likely give me my groceries, and, if I'm lucky, hand me a few Federal Reserve Notes and maybe some coins back as change.

Obviously there is a difference between my 100-Harringtons bill and American currency, but it's not exactly the difference you think.  To show you why, consider what would happen if I cut a small slip of paper out of the Sunday newspaper that offers me a free candy bar, and presented that to the cashier in exchange for a Twix.  That transaction would probably go through without difficulty.

The reason why Kroger accepts my $100 dollar bill and free-Twix coupon is that Kroger has a great deal of confidence that it will be able to give that bill (or that coupon) to someone else and get $100 (or the cost of a Twix) in value for it.

But there really isn't any substantive difference between my 100-Harringtons bill and my writing Kroger a personal check for the amount due, either.  A check is an instruction to my bank to pay Kroger the amount of the check, but Kroger has no way of knowing whether my bank will actually honor the check--they are willing to take it because, if the check is dishonored, they can activate a robust structural response that is likely to result in them being paid--everything from private collections efforts, to reporting to check bureaus, to bringing criminal charges, if necessary.

If you took away or significantly modified that structural response--which is a creation and function of government (although, in this case, for convenience's sake it's mostly state government)--then check acceptance would become a thing of the past.  But that doesn't mean that checks and dollar bills are substantively different from each other.

In a way, the government's establishment of the concept of "recourse" in check-writing--the ability of a financially wronged party to force the other party to make good on a transaction--is effectively the same as creating a private currency system.  Just as dollar bills symbolize holdings, so do checks, just with more flexibility.

On the other hand, the value associated with dollar bills is transferred with the bills themselves.  You could think of dollar bills as checks payable to the person who holds them--the "bearer"--for specified amounts.

Principle 3:  There are only two meaningful restrictions on a government's ability to create money.

The government creates money.  It does so in complicated ways that are beyond the scope of this entry, and we impose a lot of restrictions on the way money gets created, ostensibly in order to prevent abuse of the process.  Suffice it to say that the government creates dollars as symbols of value and injects them into the economy for use as a medium of exchange--a go-between that allows all goods and services to be priced using a consistent unit so that market participants can engage in greater specialization without harming their ability to trade.

The dollar has value by reference to what it will buy at a given point in time.  A dollar might buy six minutes of unskilled labor or a quarter-pound of ground beef or one day of wireless telephone service.  The precise numbers don't matter and are in fact in constant flux, but the point is that tradesmen accept dollars for their labor or ground beef or telephone service because they know that they can use those dollars to buy other things they need.

For that reason, the effectiveness of money depends on (a) whether it is accepted and (b) at what rate for a given trade.  The government's interest is in ensuring that trades can happen as easily as possible (as a general rule; the government uses other tools, such as taxation, to regulate trading), which means that it must put enough money into circulation to account for the transactions that are likely to occur, but not so much that tradesmen won't accept it or demand too much of it for given trades.  Finding that balance can be difficult.

The two meaningful restrictions on the government's ability to create money, therefore, are acceptance, sometimes known as confidence, and inflation.

On the broader scale, the dollar enjoys broad acceptance, not just in the United States, but worldwide. For large purchases, like a tanker of oil, the dollar is used as the medium of exchange even when the U.S. isn't involved in the transaction.  Moreover, when foreign governments need to park money for a while--a process known as currency reserve--they generally park it in dollar-denominated bank accounts. 

The reason for all this confidence is because the dollar is viewed as the most stable currency; it is viewed as such because the American economy is the strongest in the world and because, despite all of our gridlock in Washington, we still have the most stable and responsible process for managing our monetary policy.

If we do things that undermine confidence in the dollar--especially among foreign nations--then acceptance of the dollar will go down and it will cost more dollars to obtain the same goods and services.  That is therefore a real restriction on the government's ability to create money.

The other real restriction on money creation is inflation.  Most people have a grasp of inflation in the sense that they understand that the cost of things gets higher over time.  Many people also understand, in the abstract, that to the extent that the government prints money that is not backed by anything--in other words, handing out money for nothing in return--then inflation will result.

They don't really understand why that is.  But they understand that inflation is bad because it makes things cost more dollars.  Too much inflation can also be bad because it undermines acceptance; if people believe their dollars will be worth a lot less in the future, they are less likely to accept dollars (which is another way of saying that they will demand more dollars for their goods or services).

Principle 4:  The government has been enormously unfair in the way it has been increasing the money supply.

So, what does this mean for monetary policy?

With the way our monetary system, the Federal Reserve System, is set up, the government has the ability to create money simply by increasing the value of private banks' accounts at the Federal Reserve.  As a practical matter, the Federal Reserve accounts for these transactions as loans to banks that carry interest and will eventually require repayment.  But there is no inherent, structural reason why repayment has to be required.

There is a political reason why repayment has to be required--namely, that providing free money to banks that are already enormously wealthy is, one would hope, a terrible political loser.  Yet there is very little difference between the "bailout" of 2008-09 (which continues to this day) and the giving of free money to banks, because the money was lent at virtually no interest and with no collateral. Banks, not individuals, benefited from the increase in the money supply--but it's all Americans who bear the burden of inflation and reduced acceptance of dollars.  After all, we rely on the value of the dollars we have and earn to pay for things we need to live.

In fact, it's even worse than that.  One of the other things the Fed has been doing over the last few years is a project known as "quantitative easing."  Essentially, the Fed uses its money-creation ability to buy financial assets on the open market--things like government bonds, mortgage-backed securities, etc.--as a method of propping up asset prices.  The "easing" refers to the cushioning of the "blow" of falling asset prices.

The Fed has spent an astonishing $3.3 trillion through three rounds of quantitative easing. That's just over $10,000 for every man, woman, and child in the U.S.

Now, I think the Federal Reserve System is, by and large, a good system that has a lot of benefits.  You will not find me aligning myself with the dilettantes who oppose the Fed and seek a financial system based on the gold standard.  I have news for those people:  Gold no more has intrinsic value than anything else.

However, I find quantitative easing, as the Fed has practiced it, to be enormously unfair for a couple of reasons.  One, it bails banks out of bad assets by paying them at par--full nominal value!--for assets that are likely bad, which eliminates the incentives that banks have to avoid making those kinds of loans in the first place.  (Witness what happened when the Fed announced earlier this year that it would scale back QE in 2014--the stock market fell over 4% in a few days.  That tells me that the upper end of the financial system knows it is getting a great deal.)  Two, that program favors the kinds of people who hold those kinds of assets in the first place--people who have lots of money to begin with--to the exclusion of people of modest means.

It didn't have to be that way.  In fact, it could have been done in a way that would give the same net result to the banks while allowing all Americans to benefit.  Rather than handing $3.3 trillion, mostly to banks, the Fed could have handed $10,000 to each of us.  Most of us would have spent it by buying goods or paying off debts, which would have stimulated the economy, helped banks out of bad assets (loans), and had a multiplying effect throughout the economy, creating millions of jobs and ending the federal budget deficit.

Instead, we got nothing for it.  Except precisely what we have, as noted at the outset:  Some parts of the economy--the high end of the financial system--are roaring, while the broad swath of people are suffering.

Time will tell whether this activity will have a real cost to the economy in terms of monetary policy.  The bankers' lunch may or may not have been free.  (Signs point to continued low inflation.)  But this long explanation will have been worth it if you, the reader, recognize that relative to where we are now, we could have had a "free lunch."  We had an opportunity to use monetary policy to improve the financial lives of all Americans on a more-or-less equal basis, while still getting all of the benefits we got anyway (in terms of economic stability), and that opportunity has been wasted.

It should make you angry.  If more people understood the basic facts, they'd be angry, too.  I know I am.

Farewell, Madiba

There is not a lot I can say about Nelson Mandela that hasn't already been said since his death a few days ago, so this is more of a memoir entry than anything.

I was in elementary school when I first heard about the system of racial segregation practiced in South Africa and known by the name apartheid.  When you are seven or eight years old, and adults are presenting uncomfortable and incomprehensible subject matter to you, they tend to stick to bare facts, divorced from context or consequence.  That meant that while we were told that apartheid means "apartness" and that whites were about 20% of the population but controlled the whole government and that blacks were unhappy with (and protesting) the system, there was very little of the why discussed.  Moreover, the only conclusion presented to us about the consequences of this system was that whites and blacks could not interact socially, which was of course false.

I was a weird child, far more interested in "adult" matters than my peers, and there were lots of aspects of these explanations that simply made no sense.  How, I wondered, could a minority of a population exercise oppress the majority?  Why, I wondered, would anyone care whether blacks and whites could interact socially?  I grew up in racially mixed schools, without any evident racial strife, so it was strange to me that anyone would think it important to keep blacks and whites separated.

My understanding of the issue was further confounded by a very real disconnect between the values that were being inculcated in my civics classes at the time--freedom, equality, voting, public participation in political affairs--and an American government, the Reagan administration, that seemed to be supporting the very opposite of these things in South Africa.  Weren't we supposed to be in favor of democracy and equality? 

As I grew older and learned more facts, it became less confusing.  The white minority that ran South Africa was able to do so through force--a white military, white bureaucracy, white courts and police, and a government elected exclusively by whites all acting in concert to preserve white privilege.  It was not until I studied the subject in college that I made the connection with our own American apartheid, a system enforced through all of the same mechanisms.  All of a sudden, the Reagan administration's support of apartheid made sense.  Reagan was elected while subtly, or maybe not so subtly, nodding toward racism in the South; he kicked off his 1980 campaign in Mississippi and railed against Cadillac-driving welfare queens and steak-eating "young bucks" who preyed upon vulnerable white women.  Like Richard Nixon before him, he used the "Southern Strategy" to win election by appealing to the kinds of people who had thought that having "whites only" and "colored" water fountains wasn't a bad idea.

At some point, I became aware of Nelson Mandela as a symbol of the anti-apartheid movement.  I'm not sure when that occurred; it was probably in the context of statements from black American cultural leaders who gained new prominence in the 1980s--people like Bill Cosby and Quincy Jones, to name a couple, but there were many of them:  black people who became powerful in our culture through the entertainment field, and who used that power to shine a light on Africa and African issues.  Not just apartheid, either, but famine in Ethiopia and new American colonial-style interference in African affairs.  "Free Mandela" was a liberal watchword of the 1980s; just who this "Mandela" was, was somewhat undiscovered.  And those who supported apartheid sought to fill in the blanks with the usual suspects.

Mandela, they said, was a communist*, a Marxist.  He was a black crusader.  He was a murderer, having resorted to planning and carrying out violence in an attempt to overthrow the rightful government of South Africa.  He wanted to bring about rule by the black majority so that blacks could oppress the white minority.  He wanted to steal white industry and white land.  He wanted to drive whites out of Africa entirely.  He was insane and wanted to be a dictator in the mold of Robert Mugabe in Zimbabwe or Mobutu Sese Seko in Zaire (although Mobutu was "our man," a distinction lost on the racists who were driving the meme).

* - Mandela was not a communist, and he laughed at the suggestion: "Perhaps the most striking is the cooperation between Great Britain, the United States and the Soviet Union in the fight against Hitler. Nobody but Hitler would have dared to suggest that such cooperation turned Churchill or Roosevelt into communists. Theoretical differences amongst those fighting against oppression is a luxury we cannot afford at this stage."  I've always found it funny, not humorously, but fishy, that everyone we perceive as being against us is, miraculously, an insane communist dictator, even if they show no signs of any of those things and may in fact have been popularly elected or enjoy majority support.

I will leave to others to identify which of those hoarsely whispered criticisms were accurate and which were not.  But the last few days have shown that Mandela was able to transcend, if not overcome, the calculated campaign against him, to become a man of nearly universal acclaim in his own country.  Sadly, I have seen too much commentary from Americans that we might charitably call uninformed, but is in reality more likely unmitigated racism, that seeks to be iconoclastic toward Mandela based upon those same whispered criticisms.  But it was heart-warming to see racially mixed crowds in South Africa celebrating the life of Madiba, the clan name by which Mandela is known there.  In some ways they have come much further in the twenty years since Mandela became president than we have in the nearly fifty years since the Civil Rights Act of 1964 became law.  One need only look at the histrionics exhibited by some people to the election of Barack Obama to see that.

Nelson Mandela was not a perfect man.  Like everyone, he was human.  He was certainly guilty of the crimes of which he was convicted.  He seems superhuman largely because of the restraint he showed when the change he sought was finally brought about. But if you had been in the courtroom on the day Mandela spoke from the dock, and paying attention, you would have seen that what he achieved was simply what he set out to do:

Above all, we want equal political rights, because without them our disabilities will be permanent. I know this sounds revolutionary to the whites in this country, because the majority of voters will be Africans. This makes the white man fear democracy. But this fear cannot be allowed to stand in the way of the only solution which will guarantee racial harmony and freedom for all. It is not true that the enfranchisement of all will result in racial domination. Political division, based on colour, is entirely artificial and, when it disappears, so will the domination of one colour group by another. The ANC has spent half a century fighting against racialism. When it triumphs it will not change that policy.

This then is what the ANC is fighting. Their struggle is a truly national one. It is a struggle of the African people, inspired by their own suffering and their own experience. It is a struggle for the right to live. During my lifetime I have dedicated myself to this struggle of the African people. I have fought against white domination, and I have fought against black domination. I have cherished the ideal of a democratic and free society in which all persons live together in harmony and with equal opportunities. It is an ideal which I hope to live for and to achieve. But if needs be, it is an ideal for which I am prepared to die.

There is much we could learn from those words even today.  The whole thing is worth a read, by the way, and I encourage you to give it a look.

A victory for intellectual property rights

Christmas cinema is a genre that's been done ad nauseam (did we really need The Santa Clause 3?), but for my money, there's no better than the classic It's a Wonderful Life.  James Stewart, of course, plays George Bailey, the everyman, the dreamer, who's thrust into a life he didn't want, running the family Building & Loan, by his father's untimely demise.  The film covers an amazing swath of a lifetime of giving to others--the saving of George's brother from drowning, catching the pharmacist's mistake, fending off a bank run by pledging his honeymoon cash, and running his business for the good of the community instead of for big profits.

George is living a blessed life until a mistake brings him to the brink of losing everything.  At the end of his rope on Christmas Eve, George treads out onto a bridge, intent on throwing himself into the icy water below.  But Clarence, an angel seeking to earn his wings, is looking out for him.  When George confesses that he wishes he'd never been born, Clarence arranges for him to see what his little town would be like without him.  When he sees the impact of his life on others through the prism of his absence, George realizes that he does indeed have a wonderful life, too precious to throw away because of some financial trouble.  In the end, the friendships he's made save him.

It's a great film--funny, romantic, dramatic, emotive--and although it's the product of a different, less cynical, more credulous time in American history, it's still among my favorites.  You don't have to believe in angels to get the message.

Earlier this week, it was announced in Variety that a sequel is in the works, this time featuring George Bailey's grandson (also George Bailey, and as-yet uncast) as the near-suicidal man on the brink, and Karolyn Grimes, who played Zuzu in the original, as his guardian angel.  In a twist, the younger George is unloved and unlikable, in contrast to his universally acclaimed grandfather, and the alternate reality he sees will show him how much better the world would be if he'd never been born.

Presumably the goal would be to reform him, although the AV Club--a project of the satirical newspaper The Onion--suggested that the message might be, "Go ahead and kill yourself, the world will be better off."  Not exactly a fine Christmas message.

I happen to think that this is potentially the biggest sequel-related Hollywood atrocity since The Lion King 2½, and maybe since Another Stakeout..

It may well be that It's a Wonderful Life story needs refreshing.  I wasn't happy when they re-booted Star Trek, but I have to admit that the franchise has been re-energized by the process.  The recent Batman films have far exceeded the Michael Keaton original as filmcraft.  And remakes are hardly a new concept.

But I'm concerned that producing a sequel to It's a Wonderful Life will almost certainly lead to a cotton-candy sentimental story that lacks the emotional depth of the original.  Bringing back Zuzu--which means she's dead, by the way--strikes me as a gimmick staged to make a buck rather than to craft an enduring film.  It cannot help but cheapen the original.

To put it another way, this is a stunt you could easily see on the Hallmark Channel.

Fortunately, Paramount Pictures, which controls the rights to the original, has stepped up to indicate, if somewhat obliquely, that this project will not go forward.  Paramount made it clear that any sequel would need official licensing and that it would vigorously defend its rights in the original.  That's code language for "over our dead bodies."

So, intellectual property rights to the rescue.  The world is saved from this hideous barbarity.

In defense of the Methodists

When I was 12, my family moved from Pine Bluff, Arkansas, then a city of about 60,000, to Sheridan, a town of about 3,000 some 30 miles away, where my dad's parents lived, where my dad grew up, and where my parents had met.

We had been Presbyterians in Pine Bluff, but there was no Presbyterian church in Sheridan.  As we were a churchgoing family, it would not do to stay home on Sunday, so we tried the Baptist church where my grandparents were members.  It was nice enough, and large enough to have plenty of kids my and my brother's ages, but there were some problems.  In Pine Bluff, our church was what passed for liberal in a small Southern city. It had even begun to desegregate and had hired a female associate pastor, but even more than that, it was doctrinally liberal, consistent with the national denomination's ideological bent toward social justice.  The Baptists, however, were the opposite of that, as befits most Baptists--though it was less so in the 1980s than today.  In a meeting with the Baptist pastor, my parents were encouraged to try out the Methodist church down the street--not out of any rancor, but out of the recognition that we would find the Methodists more in line spiritually with what my family was used to.

So that's where we landed.

I have written on this page about where I stand today, but in those days, it was as good a fit as might be expected.  I am lucky to have grown up in a tradition in which careful examination and scholarship are to be valued even when they challenge the old ways of thinking, and I tend to think of myself as Presbyterian in my approach to policy if not in my conclusions, especially about spiritual matters.  I have always found the Methodists similarly to be thoughtful and intentional when it was important to be so, but in my experience, most Methodists are content to be easygoing, open to all, and nonjudgmental.  They dislike strife even as Baptists seem to thrive on it. 

There is a great struggle within the old-line main-line denominations--the Presbyterians, the Methodists, the Lutherans, the Episcopalians, and so forth--about how to deal with the rapid changes our society is experiencing.  These denominations, for various reasons but largely because of their focus upon scholarship over evangelism as means for developing faith, have tended to be more accepting of social change than their more conservative brethren, even if some have come more slowly to that status.  (There is a great line in Norman Maclean's A River Runs Through It and Other Stories in which Maclean's father, a Presbyterian minister, is said to regard Methodists, contemptuously, as "Baptists who can read.")  It is to their credit that it's a struggle, because in the more evangelical branches of Christianity, it's not a struggle in the slightest.  It's hardly even a question.

That struggle has brought the Methodists into the news lately.  Rev. Frank Schaefer is the pastor of the Zion United Methodist Church of Iona in Lebanon, Pa.  In 2007, he officiated at the wedding of his son in Massachusetts.  The controversy is that his son is gay and married a man, an act that was legal in Massachusetts but not recognized in Pennsylvania.

After a complaint brought by a parishoner, Rev. Schaefer was charged under the rules specified in the Book of Discipline, a Methodist doctrinal document that carries the force of law as far as the church is concerned, with officiating at a same-sex wedding and with being disobedient to the order and discipline of the church.  On Tuesday, a panel of 13 ordained Methodists voted unanimously to find him guilty of the charges and to impose upon him a 30-day suspension.  The judgment also carries the proviso that if Rev. Schaefer officiates at a future same-sex wedding, he will be defrocked.

Anyone who reads my blog or who interacts with me regularly in any other way will know that I have been a long-time supporter of the legal recognition of same-sex marriage, dating even to before Vermont passed the first-ever "civil unions" statute.  Rev. Schaefer's decision to officiate at his son's wedding was undertaken with the knowledge that doing so violated the rules of his church.  It was a brave act and a loving act for which he is to be commended.  The church's decision to discipline him for doing so is merely the latest in a long parade of horribles through which Christian churches have sought to stem the tide of social change.  In the abstract, I oppose their decision.  I wish they would be better people than they are.

Nevertheless, I am writing today to defend them, and I write also today to defend everyone who chooses to say "no" in their private lives to gay marriage on the basis of a principled objection to it.  I believe that the law should recognize same-sex marriage on the same terms as different-sex marriage, and I am convinced that in a short time, the law will do so.  The freedom of all Americans--not just people who want to enter into same-sex marriages, but all of us--depends upon the extension of the freedoms that recognition of same-sex marriage provides.

But our freedom also depends upon the rights of conscience and the free exercise of religion.  We cannot advance ourselves by forcing one group to step aside from their rights in favor of another.  Religious people must remain free to decline to participate--not to have their beliefs codified in the law, but to determine for themselves how they themselves act.  As such, the Methodists must remain free to discipline their clergy for violating church doctrine, as long as that discipline carries no legal consequences.

For the record, I don't think this concept is necessarily limited to churches.  I am not comfortable with private service providers being forced, through the law, to accommodate customers whose business violates the service providers' conscience.  It should not be illegal for a baker to refuse to furnish a cake to a same-sex wedding party, for example.  On the other hand, should a reception hall that is in the business of renting out space for weddings as a public accommodation (like a restaurant or hotel is a public accommodation) be permitted, under the law, to discriminate against same-sex couples, when they would not be permitted to discriminate against mixed-race couples or (more broadly) minority couples?  Should a pharmacist be permitted to refuse to dispense birth control on the basis of a religious objection?  My gut reaction is no to both.  In the latter case, the problem I have with it is that the law reposes special trust and licensing in the pharmacist and restricts access to drugs on that basis, but overall, I have trouble figuring out where the line should be drawn and on what basis.

That does not mean that these folks are immune from criticism.  I believe their doctrinal decision is foolish, short-sighted, and wrong, and I don't mind saying so.  But that's hardly the only thing, or even the most important thing, over which we disagree.

And it doesn't leave Rev. Schaefer without recourse.  He can use this opportunity to show how his church is wrong, and perhaps his efforts will lead to change.  If not, it is certainly no blot on his record to have been defrocked as the result of an unjust policy.

Are you on drugs?

If you don't watch the news, or the Daily Show, or read the newspaper, or watch late-night talk shows, or if you otherwise live in a cave, then you might not have heard about Toronto (yes, the one in Canada) mayor Rob Ford.

To call Mayor Ford "embattled" is putting it mildly.  Already derided as a notorious binge drinker enveloped in a cloud of continual controversy, Mayor Ford came under new scrutiny back in May when the Gawker website announced that it had been offered video that purported to show Ford  smoking crack cocaine and sought to raise money to buy the video. 

I am not sure precisely where "crack" falls in the ranked order of drugs that are bad for you to do, especially if you are a politician, but let's say that it, heroin, powder cocaine, and crystal methamphetamine are 1, 1A, 1B, and 1C.

In fact, crack is such a notoriously bad drug that at some point it became a perfectly normal response to ask, following someone's obviously wrong observation, whether the speaker was on crack:

A:  "George W. Bush is the greatest president of my lifetime."
B:  "Are you on crack?"

Anyway, this would have been a pretty easy thing to deny.  First of all, do they even have crack in Canada?  And besides, Rob Ford is, like most Canadians, a middle-aged white guy, and if there is anything we know about middle-aged white guys, it is that they prefer powder cocaine if they are rich and meth if they are not.  So what if he pounds a fifth of Seagram's VO every evening?  That's just a poor life choice.  Crack is for people who are referred to as "Canadians" (warning: NSFW; see definition 2) by the waitstaff in American restaurants, not actual Canadians.

And Ford did deny it, and said that there wasn't a video because it never happened.

Except.  Turns out, a few months later, that a video did surface, showing a guy who looked an awful lot like Rob Ford smoking something that looked an awful lot like crack cocaine from something that looked an awful lot like a crack pipe.

Now, at that point, once he knew there was a video, His Honor probably would have been well advised to throw in the towel.  In fact, he was advised to do just that.  Unfortunately, as the video establishes, Ford is actually a crack smoker, and that might have impaired his judgment just a wee bit.

So he denied it.  I belong to the school of public relations that says that one should admit that which cannot be denied, and deny that which cannot be admitted.  I have to admit that if, at that point, Rob Ford believed he had any chance at all at keeping his job, he needed to apply the second part of that rule.

But it was on video.  On video.

So the first part of the rule got applied yesterday, when the Mayor finally admitted that yes, it was entirely possible, just a chance, mind you, but in the fog of one of his drunken stupors, yes, in fact, that crack pipe just might have touched his lips once or twice, but he just didn't remember it ever happening, probably because of the alcohol.

Now, this is just me, but if you are drinking so much that you can't seem to remember whether you smoked crack or not, you might want to back off a bit.

And if Rob Ford had had the good sense to resign, like any decent person would have done, that probably would have been the end of it.  Soon he would recede into the fog of our distant collective memory, eventually showing up only as part of a Daily Double on Jeopardy! ("I'll take Whacked-Out Canadian Mayors for $800, Alex").

Of course, as we've already established, Rob Ford is a crack smoker.  Resign?  Pshaw.  Never.  He's sticking it out for Team Ford!  In fact, he used his latest press conference as an opportunity to announce his bid for re-election.

Hey, you've got to respect the guy's persistence.  When your behavior is so bad that "I was in a drunken stupor at the time" seems like the relatively better thing to admit, managing to get out of bed each day really ought to be considered a personal triumph.

But Rob Ford has some powerful enemies.  I'm sure those enemies thought that the drug allegation (with video!) would be enough to do him in, kind of like when you find that creepy centipede you found in the corner of your shower and hope that a spray of water will be enough to flush him down the drain.  But today, after seeing Ford clinging to the drain for dear life, they brought out the Raid.

During the drug saga, Ford was filmed coming out of his residence in front of a gaggle of reporters.  He politely asked them to get off his property, and when they didn't immediately comply, he went totally bat-s--- insane on them, screaming like they were stabbing out his eyeballs to GET THE *&^#$ OFF MY @#(*$()* )(*$*(^$_)# @#$)$)(!#$*#*(!  The blue streak could be seen and heard* from the International Space Station.  To show it on American TV, CBS had to borrow the censor button usually reserved for making Eminem's raps suitable for radio play.

* - As Gravity reminds us, there is no sound in space. This is dramatic license.

That was bad enough.  But let's go back to the videotape.  Today, a new video surfaced in which His Honor is waxing poetic on what he is planning to do to someone, presumably one of his political opponents, or maybe a reporter, or an aide.  Or, who knows, maybe just some random person on the street because--I've mentioned this before--he's a crack smoker:

I'm going to kill that f---ing guy. I'm telling you it's first-degree murder ... He dies or I die, brother. ... When he's down, I'll rip his f---ing throat out. ... I'll poke his eyes out. ... I'll make sure that motherf-----'s dead. ... No one is [going to] f--- around with me. ... Don't tell me we're liars.

Now, who among us hasn't wanted to kill a motherf-----?  We just usually have the good sense not to admit to it on video. 

But Rob Ford has an excuse.  He was "extremely, extremely inebriated."  I'll bet.

I suppose it could have been worse.  He could have been the mayor of San Diego.

A Lesson Learned

I have not yet seen "12 Years a Slave," a new film from Steve McQueen (not the long-dead action-movie star, but a British writer-director whose work I'm not familiar with), so my commentary today isn't about that.  I am told, however, that the film is stunning, even "concussively powerful"--see below--in its depiction of slavery.

For those who aren't familiar with the story, a brief synopsis:  In the 1840s, a free black musician from New York, Solomon Northup, is lured to Washington, D.C., where he is kidnapped and sold into slavery.  The loss of freedom and property is total; he is held in bondage for 12 years before being released when his status as a freeman is verified.

It is hard to express in words the visceral disgust I feel regarding this American's treatment.  And yet, at the same time, his treatment was no worse than that doled out to millions before, during, and after his enslavement.  Perhaps it hurt him more to have been free and to have it taken away from him, but those who were born into slavery were no less robbed than he was.  For them there was no happy ending except through the barrel of a gun.


I am prompted to write about this subject by a column in today's Washington Post by Richard Cohen.  I'm not a fan to begin with, but his words today left me shaking my head.

Apparently, Richard Cohen has been laboring his whole life under the belief that slavery, while philosophically horrible and against our highest values, was mostly a benign institution under which mostly benevolent white people merely exploited the labor of mostly content black people.

I find this to be a bizarre view.

I suppose congratulations are due Mr. Cohen in some small measure for righting a wrongness in his thinking, and he can't, of course, help what he was taught.  We might even expect such a sanitized view of slavery to be taught in the more rural reaches of the Deep South--still inexcusable, but not unexpected--but Richard Cohen grew up on Long Island.

Lest there be any confusion, let's be clear:  Slavery was a crime against humanity on par with the Holocaust.  That it was tolerated for so long, and defended by so many, is a stain on our forebears. 

I have lived my entire life in states where slavery was legal 150 years ago--Arkansas, Maryland, North Carolina.  Growing up, I heard the lesser lights trotting out the familiar tropes of Southern martyrdom:  If we'd-a won the war, we'd-a been a lot better off.  Hank Williams, Jr. turned that into a hit song, even.

That kind of attitude has always sickened me.  "We" did win the Civil War.  In no way do I identify with a group of people who engaged in armed insurrection against the Union, who turned their backs on the Constitution, and who did it in defense of the stomach-turning idea that one man may properly own another as property.  I stand with the Constitution, now and forever.  I am an American, first, last, and only.

I have heard my whole life about how the Southern rebels were "honorable people," "fighting for principle and their way of life."  Their way of life was a betrayal of our most sacred concept:  that the rights to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness are inalienable and inviolate.  (Yes, I recognize the huge irony that the man most responsible for putting that concept onto paper at our founding was himself a slaveowner. He had a blind spot, and it stains him, too.)

It is hard to conceive of a situation under which any thinking person could think of slavery as something less awful than that.

So I am, to some extent, shocked to hear that Richard Cohen is only now coming around to the reality of what slavery was.

At the same time, perhaps it explains why certain people have spent the last 150 years working as hard as they could to keep their boots on the necks of those who would have been their slaves.  Perhaps they simply don't realize how degrading to them their support of slavery and its progeny really is.