Protecting Women From Sharia Law, Here and Abroad

The news today about the protests in Saudi Arabia over the ban on female driving remind me of a response I wrote a few months ago to an e-mail, attributed to Nonie Darwish, about the threat Islam poses to the West. The e-mail read, in part:

In 20 years there will be enough Muslim voters in Canada, the U.S. and Britain To elect the president by themselves! Rest assured they will do so. You can look at how they have taken over several towns in the USA -- Dearborne Mich., is one, and there are others. Britain has several cities now totally controlled by Muslims. Everyone in Canada. the U.S. and Great Britain should be required to read this, but with the ACLU, there is no way this will be widely publicized, unless each of us sends it on! 

My response, in full:

I've seen many things in the media in recent months that attempt to use concerns for women's rights as a cover for far-right positions and propaganda. If you strip away the stories of terrible treatment of women by strict adherents of Sharia law—none of which have been, or will ever be, tolerated in this country—you are left with this: Growing numbers of Muslims in the U.S.—"boogie men"—are part of a secret conspiracy to take over the government, abolish Democracy and establish their own religious law. They have already taken over whole towns and, unchecked, will run roughshod over Christianity if we do not do something now. (What exactly should be done is left unsaid.) They are a moral and physical threat to women and especially young children, who are exposed to the risk of pedophilia as a result of their presence in our land.

Come on, folks, this is Nazi stuff, pure and simple. Substitute Jews for Muslims and you've got Bavaria 1936. Perhaps it would be helpful if "real Americans" made the business owners of Dearborn aware of our displeasure by forming a mob and smashing the windows of all their stores in the downtown business district. This would send a strong message: we aren't going to take it anymore!

Nasty, vituperative nonsense.

I would like to pose some solutions and positive actions that we can all take to safeguard democracy and human rights for all in this great country of ours.

1. Join the ACLU. The ACLU works on the front lines to protect the civil liberties of all Americans, including historic efforts to ensure that Jews are not forced to read portions of the New Testament in school, that black people are not subject to discrimination and political disenfranchisement, that religion is not used to discriminate against women, and that people are not forced to "show their papers" to law enforcement.

2. Join Americans United For the Separation of Church and State. This organization protects the free practice of religion and the authority of the U.S. Constitution, the greatest secular document ever conceived, from the threat of efforts to establish any officially sanctioned state religion. Whether Sharia or the tribal law of the ancient Hebrews (which, incidentally, compares women to Oxen and servants among the possessions of a neighbor a man must not covet), we must be sure to protect our nation's system of justice from outmoded theocratic legal decrees.

3. Lobby for a carbon tax and other measures to wean us off Middle Eastern oil. Oil fuels Islamic extremism the world over and enriches the wahhabist regime in Saudi Arabia, where women cannot vote or drive. The human rights records of other petro-dictatorships around the world are hardly better, and often much worse.

The Ghettoization of the Right

I was disappointed to hear that George Will jumped over to Fox News, following his former colleague at ABC, John Stossel, who left for Fox in 2009. While it may seem tidy to group all the conservative and libertarian-leaning voices under the Fox banner, I think this is a bad situation. We need a diversity of viewpoints across media channels if we are to avoid furthering the "echo chamber" effect on the left and the right.

Sadly, it seems people see this sort of ghettoization as the expected norm. In an interview with Will, the Deseret News states, "Some questioned why he hadn't made the move to Fox News in the past, and he had said it was because Roger Ailes hadn't asked." Or as New York magazine put it, "George Will Is Finally Joining Fox News," where he gets to work with "a team more his speed."

Maybe I'm overstating the problem, since other conservatives (e.g. Ann Coulter, Peggy Noonan) do appear regularly on ABC's "This Week," where Will was a mainstay. But losing Will's contribution marks a big change. I doubt we are going to see a liberal with his stature joining the ranks at Fox News anytime soon—and just this week, Sally Kohn, whom the New York Times calls "one of Fox News Channel's most visible liberal pundits," left the network for MSNBC.

Barack Obama, the Moderate Conservative

In a sane political environment, Barack Obama would be considered center-right.

This was first made clear to me by Andrew Sullivan, on the Colbert Report and in his blog, and it's undeniably true. Obama shepherded through Congress a health-care law modeled on Mitt Romney's, which incorporates many elements originally recommended by the conservative Heritage Foundation. Obamacare works with private insurers and other existing health care delivery systems and relies on free-market incentives to reduce health care costs—an element of the law that is already working.

Obama is pro business, and pro tax cuts. He lectures African-Americans on personal responsibility. He has allowed Bush-era surveillance and anti-terrorism methods to stand (earning the ire of libertarians and many on the left), and ramped up the pursuit of Osama bin Laden, leading to his killing. He has agreed to unprecedented cuts to the federal budget in an effort to appease hard-liners in the Republican party. The number of public employees under his administration has shrunk, largely due to cuts in federal money for the states. Federal spending is flat since 2009, and has decreased as a percentage of GDP.

Obama is in every rational sense a centrist, and is best understood as taking a center-right stand on most matters of public policy. He is, as Sullivan states, "America's Tory President." Yet the right hates, fears and distrusts him, seeing him as some kind of closet socialist dictator. How can this be?

I think it's useful to make a comparison with Richard Nixon. Nixon was elected a Republican president in an era when liberalism was at its apex, and calls for radical social and political change came most vehemently from the left. In response, Nixon acted in a way that was essentially center-left, supporting the Clean Air Act and the EPA and pushing myriad big-government policies during his tenure. Had he been president today, he would be seen as more liberal than Obama or Bill Clinton. Yet the left of the late '60s and early '70s did not see it this way. To them, he was a right-wing warmonger, a fraud and a disaster for the nation (all this years before Watergate).

Nixon tacked left in reaction to the winds of his time. Obama has tacked right in reaction to the winds of his. Today's right, like yesterday's left, just doesn't see it. In years to come, when Tea Party hysteria dies down, I am certain this will be accepted fact, and I pledge to point it out to my Republican friends ad nauseum.

What Today's Headlines on Obamacare Should Be

It's a shame. This should be a day of excitement and hope. Today we implement a health care law that will cut the number of uninsured Americans by 25 to 30 million. A law that prevents denial of coverage for preexisting conditions. A law that, according to the Congressional Budget Office, will reduce the federal deficit over time. A law tested in Mitt Romney's Massachusetts and full of provisions recommended by the conservative Heritage Foundation as recently as the early '90s. A law most of us should be able to get behind.

Sure, it's not perfect. So we implement it and work out the kinks as they are revealed in practice. We make it better. We don't shut down the government because a minority of lawmakers dislike it in principle. That's not how our democracy works.

Obamacare is about helping poor and middle class people get insurance. That's what it's for. That's what it does. The ideologues of the Right, who compare their childish escapades on Capitol Hill to the heroism of Flight 93 (I'm looking at you, John Culberson) need to stand down. You failed to convince Americans last year that Obamacare should be repealed, and lost the presidential election. It's time to move on. Fund the government, fix the postal service, pass a farm bill. Do some work.