To the casual observer the American people appear incapable of moving past the abortion divide. But the reality is that many political parties, lobbying organizations, and zealots don’t want to give up the issue. Their strategy is all about a desire to keep the conversation locked in failure.
Abortion is a premium “wedge” issue for producing money and votes. The base of the discussion is presented as a matter of differing religious values. And clashes come fast and with sharp edges when religion is introduced into America’s public sphere. There should be a big fight because, again, one of the country’s founding principles is the separation of church and state. And don’t be fooled by people who claim the words in the Constitution say that it is “freedom of religion,” not “freedom from religion.” The attempt to make such a distinction is a common refrain from religious advocates who complain about the country losing its basic religious values and becoming too secular. That thinking leads to a hard-line split between “heathens” and “fundamentalists,” as each side is harshly depicted by its opponents. It is no surprise that this antagonism takes center stage come major national elections. Political strategists use these debates to excite their base voters, pro or con, but also as a form of negative advertising to attack the character of opposing candidates. American presidential campaigns have increasingly become contests in which voters pick a candidate based on which one most closely shares their values. And like clockwork the political debates come down to competing religious perspectives. And as a result, a great deal of debate on any issue with a values or religious angle immediately is reduced to fearmongering and demonization. That is the regrettable situation with high-profile debates on the leading wedge issues of our time—abortion, gay rights, gay marriage, and teaching evolution in school, as well as government-funded celebrations of Christmas. They all fit into the same fixed pattern of debate with the same prescribed divisions being held in place by the gravity of big money and the power to excite voters. And they all orbit around the same attempts to force religious beliefs into public-policy debates.
The gay rights debate has taken center stage for much of the first decade of the twenty-first century, from state and federal policy on gay marriage, civil unions, and gays serving in the military to a major Supreme Court ruling on antigay speech. The issue emerged as a wedge in the presidential politics of 2000, 2004, and 2008. In the 2000 election George W. Bush opposed gay marriages and so did his Democrat opponent, Vice President Al Gore. Unlike Bush and the Republicans, the Democrats and Gore did favor gay civil unions.
The political dynamic continued to change in favor of increased gay rights, and by 2004, the year of his reelection campaign, President Bush proposed a constitutional amendment to prevent same-sex marriage. In the president’s words, after centuries of social standards, “a few judges and local authorities are presuming to change the most fundamental institution [marriage] of civilization.” Senator John Kerry, the Democrats’ presidential candidate in 2004, feared a backlash if he went beyond a middling acceptance of gay unions, shutting down debate on the national level and crushing any chance of compromise.
That pushed the debate to the state level, with politicians ranging from California governor Schwarzenegger to San Francisco mayor Gavin Newsom taking the lead. (The governor twice vetoed bills to legalize same-sex marriage, before becoming a supporter of gay marriage, while the mayor was aggressive in granting gay marriage licenses in San Francisco.)
By the 2008 campaign, even with six states having passed laws to allow gays to marry, the Republicans continued to oppose gay marriage—but so did the Democrats. The courts and the opinion polls might have moved, but the politics of the issue, especially on the liberal side, had become paralyzed with fright.
The repeated references to the Bible in the divisive gay rights debate led Newsweek’s religion editor, Lisa Miller, to write: “First, while the Bible and Jesus say many important things about love and family … neither explicitly defines marriage as between one man and one woman. And second, no sensible modern person wants marriage—his or her own or anyone else’s—to look in its particulars anything like what the Bible describes.”
Fox News Channel’s news analyst Kirsten Powers also addressed the Bible’s role as the final word being cited by opponents of same-sex marriage: “Many complained that they weren’t anti-gay, that they just opposed same-sex marriage because the Bible, they said, defines marriage as between a man and a woman. Yet, we don’t live in a theocracy. The Bible is not the governing legal document of the United States. The Constitution is. But if people really want to use the Bible as our governing legal document, then we need many constitutional amendments, including one that bans divorce except in the very narrow circumstances the Bible permits it. This would be a tough one for Evangelicals since their divorce rate is almost identical to that of atheists and agnostics. This might explain why we don’t see evangelical leaders pumping hundreds of thousands of dollars into campaigns to keep the government from providing divorce.”
In the military, gay rights made more progress over the decades. In 1950 President Truman signed the Uniform Code of Military Justice, which outlawed homosexuals from any branch of the military. President Reagan, in 1982, said explicitly that “homosexuality is incompatible with military service.” President Clinton campaigned in the gay community by promising to lift the ban, but once in office he ran into a political uproar over the issue. He tried to find some middle ground by agreeing not to ask service members if they were gay. Over the next fifteen years, however, his “don’t ask, don’t tell” policy resulted in twelve thousand people being dismissed from the military. In 2010 a U.S. district judge ruled “don’t ask, don’t tell” unconstitutional. And after the 2010 midterm elections a lame-duck Congress, with bipartisan support, repealed “don’t ask, don’t tell.” The rapid end to the controversy leads to the question of whether there was ever a real issue here, or if politicians spent several years simply playing for political advantage by appealing to traditional bias against gays. And if the opposition was a matter of religious teaching and tradition, how did bedrock values change so radically and so quickly? The answer seems to be that religion and tradition had long ago taken a backseat to the business of money and political power. Money and power pushed “don’t ask, don’t tell” as a successful wedge issue and found it useful to point to religion and tradition as the reason for keeping that wedge issue alive in national politics.
The same dynamic is at the heart of political fights over prayer in public schools and at graduation ceremonies. The Supreme Court has banned prayer in public schools since the early sixties, and President Kennedy supported the Court. His response to the controversy was to say that children and adults who wanted to pray in school had a clear, constitutional alternative: to pray in churches and at home. And the same dynamic is at the heart of arguments over another school controversy, the teaching of evolution. Some fundamentalist families have complained that it is wrong to teach their children anything other than the biblical assertion that God created man. This wedge issue goes back in U.S. history to 1925, when Tennessee legislators made it the law that state-funded public schools teach nothing that contradicts the creation of man by divinity. The famous lawyer Clarence Darrow argued that the origin of man as told in the Bible does not belong in any school’s government-approved curriculum. Nevertheless, the fight has persisted. But as in the wedge-issue debates over abortion and gay rights, the overarching question is why any science class or academic text should be written to conform to religious teachings. Science is not religion and religion is not science. And why would any divinely inspired religion need to debase itself by wading into the muddy depths of human efforts to postulate scientific theories, devise test regimens, and then gauge and measure them in the name of scientific findings? It is the nature of religion to delight in faith as opposed to concrete evidence. Faith is a matter of belief in supreme powers beyond human understanding. And there are several different versions of
the creation as told by various religions. Unless a child is going to a parochial school affiliated with one denomination, any complete textbook would have to list all the competing versions of the creation. At that point the schools would be teaching comparative religion, not science.
But these fights over religion and public policy stir passion, garner donations, and provoke voter turnout. They pit the faithful against nonbelievers and even against faithful people with other beliefs. The political power here is significant. The question is who gets to decide on everything from abortion to gay marriage to school prayer to the teaching of evolution. The contest for power in American life is eternal and essential to the work of democracy. When those power plays slip into orthodoxy, they cross constitutional lines and the law. Religion is not the law in America. The Constitution is the law. And we Americans live in a nation founded on freedom from any one religion’s imposed rules. That seems to include abortion, gay rights, and school prayer.
CHAPTER 8
THE PROVOCATEURS
IN THE MOVIE The American President, actor Michael Douglas plays a president who walks into the White House briefing room and delivers a powerful response to a political opponent’s personal attacks on his character. “We have serious problems to solve, and we need serious people to solve them,” he begins. “And whatever your particular problem is, I promise you Bob [his opponent] is not the least bit interested in solving it. He is interested in two things and two things only: making you afraid of it, and telling you who’s to blame for it … [so he can] win elections.” In the final line of the speech, he calls out Bob: “This is a time for serious people, Bob, and your fifteen minutes are up. My name is Andrew Shepherd and I am the president!”
Like all good works of fiction, that scene is so memorable because it touches on something so real.
Today’s provocateurs in politics and the media seed conflict everywhere. But nowhere do they show a genuine interest in bringing Americans together to achieve positive results. If they did, they might be out of a job, after all. We are no longer living in the 24-7 news cycle. This new era is being called the “1,440-7” news cycle, where media are competing for the audience’s attention every minute of every day. And one surefire way to get attention in the 1,440-7 news world is to say something outrageous. As a result, we have an entire graduate class of professional provocateurs. We all know them. They are my friends, my colleagues, and occasionally my adversaries in the media. Rush Limbaugh. Rachel Maddow. Sean Hannity. Lawrence O’Donnell. Glenn Beck. Even my colleague and antispin meister Bill O’Reilly has been accused of the role, although I find his show balanced in a way few talk shows on the Left or Right can match.
As is true of the medium, talk-show hosts are entertainers as much as they are commentators, and being bland as toast wins neither reviews nor ratings. Whether on the Left or the Right, whether on MSNBC or Fox News, each is aware of their target audience. Each offers provocative commentary that grabs our attention and fires up debate. The problem is that talk-show hosts aren’t on the air to compromise or bring opposing sides together; they have a strong point of view, which they fiercely express. By their very nature they are designed to spark debate, not search for answers; focus our concerns, not reach a bipartisan compromise. But in sparking debate that plays off of our fears and concerns, they also act to drive out rational discussion and reasoned debate. Their very function as hosts and provocateurs can serve to drive us apart.
The influence of talk-show hosts on today’s political culture is pervasive and worth exploring in more detail. Some have called such pundits and provocateurs perpetual conflict machines. Others have called their shows echo chambers, where the hosts simply preach to the choir. Whatever you call this phenomenon, the point is that the current state of media and public affairs is stifling the genuine give-and-take of honest debate. Every day a stream of snarky, loud, and sometimes angry voices from the Left and Right are giving reinforcement, reassurance, and endless coverage to one or the other political extreme. This is what lies behind our common perception that “the crazies are the ones doing all the talking.” To a large extent, they are.
But when these provocateurs—in politics and the media—are challenged on their crass appeals to fear, anger, and hate, they counter by charging their critics with “political correctness” and claim objectors are attempting to censor them. It is a strategy that has stymied many critics. Casual observers see the deterioration of important debates on the issues into a carnival sideshow, with the clowns running an entertaining, distracting, emotionally charged, but not very informative spectacle. I believe most Americans would passionately embrace reasoned, honest debate on the issues, but they don’t know how to stop the drivel and personal attacks. And critics in government certainly don’t want to risk speaking out too loudly for fear of being targeted for attack by provocateurs on the other side. It has made it harder for the American people to see when politically correct thinking is really being used not to open a debate but to shut one down, such as the NPR response to my debate with Bill O’Reilly about Muslims and terrorism.
The reality of much of American media today makes a movie fantasy such as The American President ever more appealing—someone in authority finally stands up to politics and media run amok. The nation would love for a political Superman to take to task the growing horde that has no interest in solving the serious problems facing America.
Let’s face it, these professional rude boys (and girls) thrive on arousing people’s passions. They make money by making our problems even worse. The more bitter the divide over an issue, the more intractable the problem, the brighter they shine. So they make us afraid of problems; they belittle and demonize those with a different point of view as enemies—even political allies who are not willing to be as extreme or radical in their views. We are given superb political theater but little in the way of education. It is like watching a docudrama at times. Yes, it is based on the facts, but they have been embellished, made more entertaining, with none of the painful searching and uncertainty of real life.
The provocateurs delight in coming up with demeaning, cutting sound bites that quickly go viral on the Internet and cable news. My colleague Glenn Beck has been guilty of this repeatedly. Such attacks and personal put-downs attract attention, as well as condemnation from critics. Nonetheless, the spotlight, good or bad, brings the provocateurs to the attention of even more people, putting more people in the seats for their carnival act. And that puts more money in their pockets. It is entertaining among their constituents, to be sure. But their vitriolic displays scare good people away from getting involved in politics, and they have led smart, well-informed people in the political middle to stay away from important debates. The perpetual conflict machine these agitators have created favors entrenched constituencies that are looking not so much for real debate with new ideas and hope for compromise as much as for confirmation of the beliefs they already hold. Their audiences are captivated by the explosive anger they see on the air, arousing their own anger and frustration.
This phenomenon has reached the point where our provocateur culture inhibits the functions of government. Our public servants increasingly respond first to the loudest voices behind the biggest microphones, who can make them or break them in the opinion polls and at the ballot box. The result is a chronic hardening of political views that is destroying the flexibility needed for effective democracy. But today’s politicians feel they have little choice but to play along. After all, the prophets of doom and destruction get people to attend rallies, to give money to politicians, and to get out and vote. Candidates running for office, and even those politicians in elected office now, find it to their advantage to mimic the screaming, hectoring, and finger-pointing instead of looking for compromise and solutions. Anyone who varies from their party’s hard line is condemned and ultimately muzzled.
The First Amendment to the Constitution gives everyone the right to speak without fear of government censorship or repr
isal. It allows me to earn a living doing what I love to do—talking and writing about politics. Of course, it does not guarantee there will be an audience when I exercise that right. Sometimes bells and whistles, fireworks and sparkles are needed to attract an audience. Sometimes we need political theater to get us into our seats. But this need also creates programs with attitude and opinion. Most of the programming day at Fox News Channel is taken up with news presented by working journalists collecting the facts and presenting compelling stories. The channel strives to maintain and grow an audience by providing a mixture of honest, original, and engaging analysis and news. But it also offers a variety of potent talk shows on the issues of the day with hosts and guests who have big personalities. Fox CEO Roger Ailes recognizes that the media is a demanding, competitive business and the audience cannot be taken for granted. Attractive, engaging, provocative people and compelling arguments are always in demand.
Whenever I appear on Fox News or write a column for The Hill, I try to meet the economic demands of those outlets by advancing the conversation, avoiding the predictable, and making a constructive contribution to the discussion. I make a conscious effort to avoid ad hominem attacks or name-calling. I attack ideas and point out their consequences, rather than attack the people who hold them. I don’t say things just for the sake of being provocative. I criticize both liberals and conservatives when I think they are wrong and agree with them when I think they are right, trying to keep my arguments grounded in honesty, civility, and rational thought. As a result, the larger-than-life media personalities—who never entertain any doubt of their fixed position—occasionally shout me down and upstage me. But I give them full credit for having me on in the first place to present what is sometimes a contradicting point of view. I want both left-wing and right-wing audiences to pay attention to what I have to say because they know me as someone who is straight with them, who doesn’t come at the issues from a fixed ideological position. I put a premium on telling them what I really think, and they seem to value that. My bet is that the audience wants to hear what I will say, too, even if they can’t count on me as reliably conservative or liberal.
Juan Williams Page 19