Bigotry and Low Expectations

No, this isn’t about the “soft bigotry of low expectations,” I just did that to catch the eye. There is no heat in my office, my hands are cold, and the only way to keep myself typing is to start with something eye-grabbing. This is actually about the state of Maine (with which I have family connections) and the results of their referendum on same-sex marriage.

1) Why a referendum at all? Since when do we put constitutional rights to a popular vote? The fact that we have done it, in California and Maine, begs the question. Holding a referendum (regardless of its outcome) presumes that we don’t consider marriage a constitutional right, despite the Supreme Court’s ruling in the marvelously-named Loving vs. Virginia case 40 years ago. Foo.

2) Does that mean that those who voted to repeal same-sex marriage in those states were bigoted?

3) Or does it mean that the supporters of same-sex marriage in those states were bigoted when they called their opponents bigots? Or that they were interfering with their opponents’ First Amendment rights by advocating boycotts and other non-violent demonstrations of opposition to the repealers? Conservatives seem to consider being labeled as bigots to be a fate worse than, say, Matthew Shepard’s death. Whatever happened to “sticks and stones”?

The word “bigot,” BTW, is believed to come from some Germanic sort of root meaning “by God.” There is a literal equivalent in Spanish, referring to little old ladies in black crepe who spend most of their time in churches: pordiosera. For more etymological information, see the Wikipedia entry.

Now that we’ve explicated the word as well as one can these days, let’s scrap it. It’s not useful for this discussion. Let’s, instead, use “prejudice” and “discrimination.” Mr. Wired draws a very useful distinction between them. “Prejudice” is what everybody has a bunch of, just by virtue of having been born and raised in a particular context. Most of them we don’t even notice most of the time. They’re as close to original sin as I can allow myself to believe in. But as a practical matter they’re morally neutral. It is useful to be aware of one’s own prejudices, because that enables us to avoid discrimination.

Discrimination is not morally neutral. It involves acting on one’s prejudices, to the detriment of the well-being of others. It’s a real sin. Not serving people in restaurants. Not letting them hold certain jobs. Beating them up. Hate crimes.

Very often, the way we become aware of our prejudices is by somehow associating their object with our children. Desegregating schools unveiled a lot of parental bigotry after the promulgation of Brown vs. Board of Education. White people who were willing to work with, or even for, African-Americans, or to vote for them, or to recognize the legal authority of people who had been elected mainly by the Black vote, found themselves drawing the line at the schoolhouse door.

The campaign against same-sex marriage in Maine apparently owes its success to the claim that schoolchildren would have to be taught that same-sex marriage was no different from the usual kind. So far as anybody can tell, that claim was utter hogwash, but, as other bloggers have already pointed out, it served as a proxy for the Bigotry That Dares Not Speak Its Name, opposition to allowing our children to be aware of otherwise normal people being gay. How we want to raise our children (as opposed to how we live our own lives) is often an expression of both our highest values and our lowest prejudices.

Many otherwise very decent opponents of same-sex marriage are perfectly okay with civil unions. As a practical matter, that keeps them mostly on the right side of the prejudice-discrimination line. Most same-sex couples will not suffer unduly from having civil unions rather than marriages, given proper legal drafting. Until we think about why these decent anti-same-sex-marriage opponents want to take that position. It’s really the same reason that classical and medieval authorities required prostitutes, and Jews, to wear distinctive dress. Not because Those People were so utterly different from The Rest of Us, but precisely because they weren’t. Without the yellow hat or the blond wig or the six-pointed star, they could easily be mistaken for, and treated like, Real People. We wouldn’t know whom to discriminate against.

When one of my colleagues tells me he frequents gay bars because he is “husband-hunting” (and I respond, as gently as possible, by telling him that bars are not usually great places to meet spouses), the very normality of this exchange puts any eavesdropping adolescent at the risk of concluding that gay people are just like the rest of us. For that matter, what happens when your kid’s high school class does a field trip to the local court and hears the judge, in the course of jury selection, ask a member of the panel, “Are you married or do you have a domestic partner?” (Yes, here in Cook County, they do that.) We can’t have that, can we?

Many sincere and religious people believe that homosexual behavior is a sin. Most of them also believe that adultery is a sin (one which is usually condemned in the same biblical paragraphs as homosexuality, and sentenced to the same punishment, by the way.) Many of them even believe that remarriage after divorce is a sin. But they somehow survive their children interacting with, or at least becoming very aware of, the public adulterers and remarried divorcés around them. So apparently their religiously-based discomfort with those classes of sinners does not get translated into discrimination, maybe not even into prejudice. One has to conclude that homosexuality is different for reasons that have nothing to do with biblical morality. The yuck factor, as some religious bloggers have termed it.

So, okay, I’m willing not to call same-sex-marriage opponents bigots if they’re willing to allow civil unions (or, for that matter, religious marriages) with all of the privileges that go with civil marriage in this society—so long as they don’t treat people in civil unions, and gay people in general, any differently than they treat public adulterers and remarried divorcés. Which means allowing their kids to interact with and be aware of and be taught in school by all, or none, of these public sinners.

CynThesis

Mean(s) Testing and Compassionate Conservatism

Most self-proclaimed conservatives who believe government has any legitimate role in alleviating poverty, believe that role must begin with means testing, that is, checking to make sure that any would-be recipient of government aid to the poor really is poor. They underline their case with horrifying references to “welfare queens” using food stamps to buy steak and lobster, and travelling to and from the welfare office in Cadillacs. The goal these compassionate conservatives claim to be aiming at is a reasonable one–let’s give scarce public resources only to the people who really need them. Even when public resources are more plentiful, they are still most effective when targeted to those most in need.

But the c.c.’s–who normally presume that all the consequences of any governmental program not aimed at killing the enemies of the people at home (police) or abroad (army) are unintended–seem to have lost their grip on this fundamental law as it applies to means testing. Means testing really does have unintended consequences. At least, one hopes they are unintended. (Oliver Stone probably thinks they are intended.)

First, the eligibility line for any means-tested program is always set at least a couple of notches below the income which would enable a person to purchase all of the goods and services supplied by such programs in the private sector. There is always a group of people in the middle, too poor for private health insurance but too rich for Medicaid, too poor to be able to afford a balanced diet on their own funds but too rich for food stamps, too poor to be able to afford the rent on a decent private-sector apartment large enough for the whole family but too rich for public housing, too poor to be able to afford a lawyer but too rich for Legal Aid. Naturally that group in the middle will direct their envy and anger, not upward at the legislative and regulatory bodies that set the eligibility standards, nor at the agencies that administer them, but at the people below them who do qualify. This too, we must presume, is unintended.

Second, the procedure for qualifying for such programs requires the applicant to supply humiliating and exhausting detail about his or her personal life, beginning of course with the public (or at least on-the-record) acknowledgment of being poor. Most of us would rather confess to having sex with an underage dead chicken than to poverty, these days. But the mere admission of poverty is never enough. Verification must be supplied: paycheck stubs, rent receipts, utility bills and so on. The official purpose of the ritual is to weed out ineligible applicants. But the effect is to weed out any of the eligible applicants who still retain any pride or still value their personal privacy. This mostly gets rid of applicants without dependents, since most of us will endure a lot more humiliation and intrusion to provide for our children and disabled or elderly relatives than for ourselves. Anyway, we know for a fact, and repeated studies have verified it, that nearly half of those eligible for governmental assistance to the poor either never apply for it, or drop out of the process in the very early stages. We have known it for well over 50 years. I’m with Oliver Stone on this one–we want it this way.

Third, once we have designated a program as being for “the poor” and no one else, no one else but the poor will have any interest in maintaining it, or administering it properly and effectively. Once a program has been labeled “for poor people only”, its days are numbered. Why should “we” pay for a program that benefits only “them”?

Most of us have lived with this situation so long that we respond almost reflexively, “But of course the people who need the programs can’t afford to pay for them–otherwise, why would they need them? And of course the people who pay for the programs don’t need them. The best we can do is appeal to their sense of generosity and charity. ” (We do that, of course, only after a concerted campaign to discredit those virtues.) But we literally cannot imagine any other way to distribute public benefits, except by putting the people who pay on one side of the Great Divide and the people who receive on the other, and making sure than never the twain shall meet.

Well, no, it’s not quite accurate to say we cannot imagine any other way. We have in our midst a program open to most citizens and residents of this great country regardless of their current resources, and paid for by almost all of us. It is the most popular government program in the history of this country. And it is currently under constant assault in a relentless effort to discredit, privatize, and ultimately destroy it precisely because, to most of us, until very recently, it was proof positive that government could do something useful in alleviating poverty without humiliating the beneficiaries of the program.

I am referring, of course, to Social Security. Until a decade ago, the closest thing to a means test for Social Security (or its younger brother, Medicare) was an earnings limit. Now, even that is long gone. And the compassionate conservatives–including even some “centrist” liberals–cannot stop fulminating at the thought that Bill Gates will someday be able to collect his $1,100.00 per month from the public treasury. Under current law, most of that $1,100.00 would actually be taxed away (although the value of Gates’ Medicare would not.) Most American senior citizens can live with that arrangement, because it spares them the necessity of confessing poverty and pleading for charity. But conservatives and “centrists” simply cannot swallow the idea of giving a public benefit to anyone without collecting the recipient’s dignity in return. Indeed, now that we have finally given up on the idea of privatizing Social Security, our main suggestion for “saving” it is to means-test it.

Most honest conservatives will come out and say that, regardless of where it comes from or what we call it, any aid to the poor from the non-poor is charity, and the poor should acknowledge that fact. Means-testing is one of the more effective ways of rubbing it in. Which might be acceptable, if we were willing to allow dignity to the recipients of our charity. If “poor” were not a four-letter word. If we did not, at heart, believe that all of us get what we deserve and deserve what we get. Or don’t get.

I prefer the Jewish tradition in its view of charity. To the extent that we have any resources, they come ultimately from the Holy One, Who makes all of us conduits for those resources. I like the approach of Maimonides, Writing in the 1200s in highly-urbanized Spain and Northern Africa, he is realistic, and perfectly willing to admit that there are phony beggars out there, people who claim needs they do not in fact have. The Holy One has allowed these fakers to exist, he tells us, to create a benefit of the doubt for people who refuse to give to beggars (Maimonides was realistic about those people, too.) If all the beggars out there were really destitute, he says, anyone who failed to give to one of them when s/he could afford to would be committing a grave sin. Since some of them are fakes, those who refuse to give are guilty only in proportion to the ratio of real beggars to phonies. Ultimately, he says, means-testing is the job of the Holy One.

Cynthesis

Things the Bible Would Have Said if the Author Had a Better Quote Book

Warning: this is yet another rant from Jane Grey on people who cite the Bible without bothering to read it.  If you’re not in the mood, go buy some popcorn.

That Other Blog Over There just attributed “hate the sin but love the sinner” to Jesus.  The Other Blogger Over There is usually much more biblically literate than that.  A swift resort to Google tells us that nobody knows who really said it first, but everyone who bothered to check it out reports that it is not to be found anywhere in the Bible.  Which is consistent with my own research.

“God helps those who help themselves,” OTOH, is definitely Ben Franklin.  “To thine own self be true” is definitely Shakespeare.  “With malice toward none, with charity to all” is definitely Lincoln. All of them have, at one time or another, been attributed to the Bible.

The Bible, similarly, says absolutely nothing about abortion, and nothing directly about same-sex marriage.  And everything it says about homosexuality, it says in paragraphs adjacent to pronouncements about adultery, for which it recommends essentially the same punishments (except for the Sodom and Gomorrah story, which can be read several different ways, and which Jews and Christians in fact do read very differently.  The traditional Jewish reading of the story sees the Sin of Sodom as powerful people doing it to powerless people, rather than men doing it with men.)

The finer points of modern textual criticism enable us to determine that, even if all that stuff about wives submitting to their husbands is in the Bible, it wasn’t really Saint Paul who said it, but some cheap knockoff, which is kind of nice.  And, while ignoring Revelation may be easy for us Jews, we don’t get off that easily from looking at Daniel, which was in fact one of the sources of Revelation.  (Arguably, Revelation is a cheap knockoff of Daniel, in fact.)

But then, one of my dearest friends, of blessed memory, once talked a Jehovah’s Witness missionary off his doorstep by quoting scripture at him in English and Hebrew until the poor guy gave up.  Let’s hear it for a little learning (not, BTW, a little knowledge.  See Pope’s “Essay on Man.”  Not the Bible.)

Jane Grey

Where Does Superman Change?

In one of the more recent Superman films, there is a lovely scene in which Clark Kent becomes aware of a pressing emergency requiring the services of Superman. He looks around, sees a couple of the phones-on-a-stick, but nothing remotely resembling a booth, looks bewildered, and finally ducks into the far end of an alley, from which Superman almost immediately emerges.

For the last 20 years, phone companies have been trying to get rid of pay phones, on the premise that they are expensive to maintain and collect from. Often, the neighborhoods in which those phones are placed collude with them and actually demand that pay phones be removed, on the premise that pay phones are mostly used by, and therefore tend to attract, drug dealers and other criminals.

The first public phones, patented in 1891, were in actual walk-in closets, equipped with a desk, seat, paper, and pen. This was fairly quickly downgraded to a confessional-style bench and ledge, but still with a door and a flat surface suitable for taking notes on. More recently that was downgraded to a 3-sided, or 2-sided triangular, cubicle, with no door, in which privacy could be preserved only by facing into the corner. Flat horizontal surfaces were removed, leaving only the top of the telephone itself, which however was acutely slanted, apparently to discourage using it for taking notes. Now even the open-sided cubicle is gone, to be replaced, as noted above, by the phone-on-a-stick, or, more often, by absolutely nothing.

Well, not exactly nothing. First, there are still a few pay phones in public places, mostly for emergency use or calling a cab. They are mostly set up and maintained by small local companies, rather than any of the Baby Bells and their offspring, and they are virtually unregulated. As a result, a friend of mine, a couple of years back, had occasion to be stranded at her hair stylist’s in a bad storm, so she used the pay phone on the premises to call home to ask for a ride. Not having any quarters available, she charged the call to her home phone. Later that month, she got the bill: nine dollars for a two-minute phone call to her home, four blocks away. “It would have been cheaper to take a cab,” she wailed.

The public phone has now mostly been replaced by the mobile phone. We presume that everybody has one. Indeed, an increasing proportion of the population has only a cell phone. Some of the younger generation may never even have used a “land line,” as the regular home-and-office phone is now retronymically called. It has even been replaced, for the purposes of anonymous and untraceable criminal communications, by the disposable prepaid cell phone, often used once or twice and then discarded and replaced by yet another. Sooner or later, no doubt, someone will pass a law requiring photo identification for purchasers of all such phones, but it hasn’t happened yet. So closing down phone booths did not solve the crime problem, it only made it harder for impecunious citizens to call the police, and gave the police a different criminal communication problem.

Well, now I’m noticing yet another area in which a public sector benefit is being privatized, at the expense of poor people—water. It was inevitable. First the great fascist-capitalist conspiracy convinced people that tap water, since it is provided by government, can’t possibly be good for you. Then they started bottling water (often, BTW, tap water) and selling it. The bottles are mostly plastic, and non-biodegradable. The water often comes from places that really can’t afford to export it, and is often sold in places that have more than enough of their own. ( See Holy Hydration, Batman! Florida’s Exporting Water!)

We have moved on to step #4. Public water fountains, in most public places, are no longer being maintained, and are often being removed altogether. Many otherwise cheap eateries are no longer serving water with meals, except when purchased in the bottle. Often, the excuse is given that water fountains attract homeless people. That is, people who cannot afford to buy water often quench their thirst at a sanitary public fountain, rather than waiting until it rains and then drinking out of the gutter. The nerve of some people!

Once again, this is the sin of Sodom. (See Panhandlers and the Jewish Tradition.) It is also the sin of the unhygienic late 19^th century. Public water fountains were first installed around that time, to prevent the spread of disease from less sanitary water sources, such as mud puddles. We are likely to find out, fairly soon, why our ancestors made this decision, just as we are about to find out (due to the spread of antibiotic-resistant TB) why they made laws forbidding spitting on the sidewalk. Sometimes I think we should all just read a book about the Reformers of that period, since we are in the process of undoing most of their work.

What’s next? We have not yet figured out how to privatize air. And despite a great deal of work on the project, we have not yet made the Internet a completely pay-per-use resource. We haven’t figured out how to charge for the use of escalators and elevators, much less sidewalks. The Wired family welcomes any other bright ideas about public resources which can easily be privatized. Watch this space.

Red Emma

Panhandlers and the Jewish Tradition

These are hard days for street beggars.  More and more municipalities have tried to ban their activities by law (the courts have held that merely asking somebody for money is free speech, protected by the First Amendment, but that “coercive” panhandling can legitimately be barred. So far there has been no binding precedent on the constitutionality of laws prohibiting camping in public parks, sleeping in public spaces, and searching for food in dumpsters and garbage cans.) Police conduct regular “sweeps” of places ordinarily frequented by homeless people, seizing and destroying their property, and packing the residents off to shelters or jails, or just “away.”  Dumpsters behind restaurants and multi-residential buildings are locked, or noxious or even poisonous substances sprayed on their contents.  Citizens approached by panhandlers are becoming less and less likely to be generous or even polite.  Municipal governments tend to see panhandlers as, at best, a blight on the landscape, and at worst, potential or actual criminals.

The liberal response to panhandling isn’t much better.  Community organizations which have traditionally thought of themselves as “do-gooders” are almost universally taking the position that panhandlers are either people with mental disabilities, who belong in some proper care facility, or substance abusers, who will use cash contributions only to degrade themselves further by feeding their habit.  The best response they can come up with from this perspective is voucher systems–would-be contributors buy vouchers for fifty or twenty-five cents each, and then hand them out to panhandlers.  The latter can redeem the vouchers at local food pantries, soup kitchens, grocery stores, restaurants, and sundry shops, but only for “legitimate” purchases, such as food, non-alcoholic beverages, and personal hygiene articles.  Not surprisingly, in some cities, a thriving black market for vouchers has already developed; the panhandlers sell them to “fences” at a discount, for cash, which they then presumably use for whatever anti-social purpose the vouchers were supposed to defeat, and the fences then use them for purchases of food etc. for which they would have otherwise paid cash, often twice as much. To the extent that they see any ethical quandary in this situation, the “do-gooders” define it as “How can I keep this person from starvation without helping him/her feed an addiction?”  The voucher system in fact does this job more or less adequately.  But it ignores a much older system of ethical priorities.

We Americans of the 1990s did not invent street beggars, or programs to repress and eliminate them, or voucher systems for that matter.  Third World countries take for granted the presence of swarms of beggars in any place likely to generate any surplus food or other resources.  Police may try to keep them from being too much of a nuisance to tourists and honest working people, but they rarely define the mere presence of any beggars as a “problem.”  Nor do the tourists and working people in question; “this is a Third World country,” they presume.  “The poor we have always with us.”  People give to them, or not, based on purely individual decisions.  Those decisions may in turn be motivated by religious tradition, emotion, or political commitment.  This is pretty much the traditional approach to beggary in such countries, dating back to the beginning of money economies.  It was also the accepted attitude in pre-industrial Europe.  Several religious orders, in their early years, supported themselves by begging.  The implicit bargain was that those who donated were freeing the friars to devote their time to prayer and good works, and in return would receive some of the merit therefrom.  This arrangement also existed on an individual basis–”give me a penny, kind sir, and I will pray for you.”  In addition, the medieval Catholic Church defined “feeding the hungry, clothing the naked, and sheltering the homeless” as “corporal works of mercy”, meritorious in and of themselves, regardless of the deserts of the beneficiary. Many aristocrats and wealthy burghers retained “almoners” to take charge of giving out alms to people in need.

Islam and Judaism have similar traditions.  The giving of alms is one of the four pillars of Muslim practice.   “Tzedakah”–usually translated “charity”–is one of the obligations to which religious Jews are commanded.  In the Buddhist tradition, the monastic orders supported themselves by begging, and the laypeople who donated to them gained spiritual merit by doing so.

But the coming of industrialization to Europe, and especially the dissolution of the monasteries and religious orders in Britain and Northern (Protestant) Europe, changed this picture.  The presumption took hold that any able-bodied adult (and both terms were defined very loosely) could work, and anyone who could work should work, and deserved no support from anyone if s/he was not working.  “Sturdy [able-bodied] beggars” could be driven out of wherever they appeared, often with corporal punishment, or rounded up and imprisoned in “workhouses.” Substance abuse was not the issue–until quite late in the 19th century, almost everybody drank prodigious amounts of alcohol, and anyone who could afford it could legally obtain various kinds of opiates and cocaine derivatives over the counter for self-medication of various real and imagined ailments. Probably at least half of these people would today be classified as addicted to something.  That was not a major social concern, except among a few minority religious groups like the Methodists and their offshoot, the Salvation Army.

In industrialized Eastern Europe, especially in what is now called Poland, the Jewish community was called on to respond to several waves of increased indigency, often connected with the movement of refugees from the various wars which infested the area over the 17th through the early 20th century.  Community organizations, soup kitchens, food pantries, and other large-scale charitable organizations were set up, drawing on the financial support of wealthy Jewish entrepreneurs and the moral support of the rabbinic establishment.   And some of these organizations set up voucher programs, to discourage beggars from “bothering” working citizens and make sure that only “deserving” poor people received alms.  There is a story about one such campaign in Poland a hundred years or so ago; a meeting of the umbrella community organization was held, and one of the major items of “new business” on the agenda was a proposal for a voucher program, which would prohibit beggars from approaching individuals directly, and require them to apply to some authorized agency for help.  The Hafetz Hayyim, a very holy rabbi, who had been asked to attend the meeting to lend his moral support to its decisions, raised his hand. “Point of order,” he called out. “What is your point of order, rabbi?” asked the chair.  “You have called this proposal ‘new business.’  But in point of fact this is old business.  It is as old as Sodom and Gomorrah.”

This requires an explanation. In Genesis 18:20, the Holy One tells Abraham “The sins of Sodom and Gomorrah cry out to Me.  I am going to destroy them.”  After a charming interlude in which Abraham tries unsuccessfully to talk the Holy One out of His plan, the latter sends a couple of angels into Sodom to tell Abraham’s nephew Lot and his family to get out of town before the sulfur and brimstone hit.  The local citizens, on seeing these personable strangers enter Lot’s house, gather outside Lot’s door and demand “Send out these men, that we may know them.”  As we all learned in Sunday school, when the Bible says “know”, it means “have relations with.”  The angels and Lot’s family get out safely, and Sodom and Gomorrah get what’s coming to them.

Christians read this story as an indictment of the evils of deviant sexuality.   They presume that the sins that “cried out to heaven” and got the Holy One’s attention in the first place were also sexual sins.  But that is not how the Jewish tradition reads it.

To elaborate on this tradition, we need to understand the Jewish concept of midrash. Loosely translated, it means “story- telling.” In practice, it means that, unlike the Saturday Evening Post in its heyday, the rabbis have taken responsibility for what the characters in the biblical narrative do between installments. While the stories woven to account for how the dramatis personae got from here to there do not have the authority of scripture, and may often wildly contradict each other, they provide us with a world-view and a way of looking at scripture that is part and parcel of the Jewish mindset. Jews do not read the Bible raw and unaccompanied; it is always filtered through commentary and midrash.

So what does the midrash say about Sodom and Gomorrah? (My source, for the sake of convenience, is Louis Ginzberg’s  Legends of the Jews.) “If a stranger merchant passed through their territory, he was besieged by them all, big and little alike, and robbed of whatever he possessed. Each one appropriated a bagatelle, until the traveler was stripped bare. If the victim ventured to remonstrate with one or another, he would show him that he had taken a mere trifle, not worth talking about. [Anyone involved in consumer protection work knows that it is vastly easier to steal one dollar each from a million people than a million dollars from one person--and far less likely to be prosecuted and punished.] And the end was that they hounded him from the city….After a while travelers avoided these cities, but if some poor devil was betrayed occasionally into entering them, they would give him gold and silver, but never any bread, so that he was bound to die of starvation.  Once he was dead, the residents of the city came and took back the marked gold and silver which they had given him, and they would quarrel about the distribution of his clothes, for they would bury him naked….

“The cause of their cruelty was their exceeding great wealth.  Their soil was  gold, and in their miserliness and their greed for more and more gold, they wanted to prevent strangers from enjoying aught of their riches.  Accordingly, they flooded the highways with streams of water, so that the roads to their city were obliterated, and none could find the way thither.  They were as heartless towards beasts as towards men.  They begrudged the birds what they ate, and therefore extirpated them.  [Nowadays, in some place, people get arrested for feeding pigeons.]  They behaved impiously towards one another, too, not shrinking back from murder to gain possession of more gold….

“Their laws were calculated to do injury to the poor. The richer a man was, the more was he favored before the law. The owner of two oxen was obliged to render one day’s shepherd service, but if he had but one ox, he had to give two days’ service….For the use of the ferry, a traveler had to pay four zuz, but if he waded through the water, he had to pay eight zuz [one of the earliest examples of the now well-known fact that the poor pay more].” Ginzberg follows with a story of a outsider woman who had married a man of Sodom. “Once a beggar came to town, and the court issued a proclamation that none should give him anything to eat, in order that he might die of starvation. But [the woman] had pity upon the unfortunate wretch, and every day when she went to the well to draw water, she supplied him with a piece of bread, which she hid in her water pitcher.  The inhabitants of the two sinful cities, Sodom and Gomorrah, could not understand why the beggar did not perish, and they suspected that someone was giving him food in secret.  Three men concealed themselves near the beggar, and  caught [the woman] in the act of giving him something to eat. She had to pay for her humanity with death; she was burnt upon a pyre….

“The people of Admah [one of the other "cities of the plain" destroyed with Sodom and Gomorrah] were no better than those of Sodom.  Once a stranger came to Admah, intending to stay overnight and continue his journey the next morning.  The daughter of a rich man met the stranger, and gave him water to drink and bread to eat at his request.  When the people of Admah heard of this infraction of the law of the land, they seized the girl and arraigned her before the judges, who condemned her to death.  The people smeared her with honey from top to toe, and exposed her where bees would be attracted to her. The insects stung her to death, and the callous people paid no attention to her heart-rending cries.  Then it was that God resolved upon the destruction of these sinners.”

Which brings us to the visit of the angels to Sodom, and the locals’ demand to gang-rape them, that actually appears in the narrative in Genesis. Midrash explains it thus: “It was not the first time that the inhabitants of Sodom wanted to perpetrate a crime of this sort. They had made a law some time before that all strangers were to be treated in this horrible way.” In short, the midrashic tradition is that the cities of the plain were punished for their inhospitality to the poor and the stranger. Their proposed attack on the angels, like most rapes, was not a sexual act, but an act of violence. It was especially evil because it was directed against victims especially protected by Heaven–strangers and travelers, people with no other source of protection among the locals.

For the origin of this idea, we need to look at the book of Deuteronomy, for instance 24: 19, where “the widow, the orphan, the stranger, and the poor” are repeatedly described as being under the special protection of Heaven (one might even say that Heaven has placed them under an affirmative action program.)  This protection is necessary, in an agrarian society, because these people in particular have no link to the means of survival–ownership or share-cropping rights on agricultural land.  The Book of Ruth–in which the title character is a widow, an orphan, and a stranger, and is given what she needs to survive and feed her family–is the paradigm of the proper treatment of this protected class.  The Sodom and Gomorrah story, in the Jewish tradition, is the paradigm of the improper treatment of this same class.

So when a rabbi talks about Sodom and Gomorrah, chances are he is talking about mistreatment of  poor and helpless people.  Clearly, that was what the Hafetz Hayyim meant.  And that is the lens through which religious Jews have to decide what to do about panhandlers.  We have a divinely-imposed obligation to help those who cannot support themselves.  Anyone who has any resources whatever to spare (over and above the support of their own family) is subject to that obligation, even poor people–even, in fact, a beggar who has had a good day, vis-a-vis one who has not been so lucky.

Among the most important and best-known pronouncements on the obligation to give to the poor are those of Moses ben Maimon–Maimonides.  Most Jews and many non-Jews are familiar with his classification of the eight grades of charity, of which the highest is enabling a poor person to become self-supporting, and the next highest is the gift in total anonymity on both sides.  It should be noted that he did not intend the higher levels to replace the lower (the person-to-person face-to-face gift, with varying degrees of good grace on the part of the giver.) In his less well-known works, Maimonides, who is writing in the 1200s in highly-urbanized Spain and Northern Africa, is realistic, and perfectly willing to admit that there are phony beggars out there, people who claim needs they do not in fact have.  The Holy One has allowed these fakers to exist, he tells us, to create a benefit of the doubt for people who refuse to give to beggars (Maimonides was realistic about those people, too.)  If all the beggars out there were really destitute, he says, anyone who failed to give to one of them when s/he could afford to would be committing a grave sin.  Since some of them are fakes, those who refuse to give are guilty only in proportion to the ratio of real beggars to phonies.  Maimonides also says that anyone who cannot respond to a beggar’s request for alms by giving money or other physical goods has an obligation at least to give him/her a cheerful greeting.

“Tzedekah” is usually translated “charity.”  But in fact, its meaning is much closer to “justice” or “righteousness”–closely related to what Plato and Aristotle mean by “justice” as “giving to each person what s/he deserves.”  It is an individual obligation, and creates individual rights.  The passages in Exodus and Deuteronomy which impose it are mostly written in the second person singular (for example, Ex. 22: 20ff.; Deut. 15; 7ff.) The beggar who approaches a by-passer is not asking for a favor, s/he is invoking a right.  “Fiddler on the Roof” retells an old Jewish beggar joke–”Alms for the poor,” cries the beggar. “Not this week, business hasn’t been so good,” replies the by-passer.  “So because you had a bad week, I should suffer?” says the beggar.  Maimonides would utterly concur with him.

So we have three possible views of undeserving beggars: Maimonides in the 13th century says that Heaven allows them to exist to keep stingy people from incurring grave sin–and if we refuse to give to them, we are taking a calculated risk; the “Poor Law” administrators of newly-industrialized England say that these are people who are refusing to work despite being able to do so, and giving to them merely encourages their idleness; and today’s “liberal” organizations say they are crazy or addicted, and giving to them only encourages them in not getting the care they need to become sane, sober, self-supporting human beings.  The Poor Law administrators had no trouble distinguishing between deserving and undeserving beggars–any adult (loosely defined) with the usual number of limbs and organs who wasn’t working was undeserving. Period.  But both Maimonides and today’s do-gooders are willing to grant at least some ambiguity in this category–we can’t always tell by looking at or talking to a beggar whether s/he is for real.  Maimonides took the position that, morally, the safest way to deal with this ambiguity was to give; today’s liberals take precisely the opposite position, perhaps because they believe the proportion of really destitute people to fakes has shifted, and possibly even reversed, since the 13th century.  The various surveys and studies of homeless people, street people, and beggars have produced conflicting and admittedly inconclusive results.  We generally don’t know, and probably can’t know, which of the people who approaches us on the street is for real.

And that’s assuming that the currently respectable definitions of “deserving” and “undeserving” are valid.  Suppose every beggar, every homeless person, were to clean up, sober up, and apply for every job currently available.  Suppose–even less likely–that each of those jobs were actually filled with a homeless person or a beggar.  How many people would that leave?  Given the incomplete state of our statistics on homelessness and indigency, we can’t know–but it is hard to believe there really are jobs out there for every one of the people who “ought” to be seeking them.

Certainly it is morally, spiritually, emotionally, intellectually, and physically better to be unemployed and sober than to be unemployed and drunk–but who are we to begrudge the unemployed alcoholic his daily ration of rotgut if we are not willing to help him sober up?

At any rate, the point of voucher programs is to benefit people who, although probably addicted or crazy, are at least genuinely in need and should not be ignored altogether.  There are, I think, three possible ways to deal with such people:
(1) You can assume the panhandler is a person like yourself, capable of making rational decisions about allocating his/her resources and just in need of some help in acquiring resources.  In which case, the appropriate course of action is to give her/him some money. [In this society, the way to acquire full human dignity is to earn or inherit a lot of money.  But one can have at least some dignity simply by virtue of having some money, regardless of how it was obtained, and being free to decide how to spend it.  We grant that much dignity to children over the age of 5 or so, to whom most parents give cash allowances.  Arguably, even the panhandler deserves no less.]

(2) Or you can assume that the panhandler is for some reason not capable of spending money on what s/he needs without degrading him/herself even more.  In that case, if you are genuinely concerned about the panhandler as a person, you will do what I have known both my husband and my father to do on various occasions–take him/her to a restaurant–or what I have, more timidly, done–bring him/her a sandwich from the nearest fast food joint.

(3) But if all you really want is to get the panhandler out of your face so you can go on about your business, you can give him/her a voucher.  This is not a symbol or an instrument of personal concern; it is a substitute for it.  Unlike real charity, it is not a means of bringing giver and recipient closer together, but of setting a distance between them which the giver considers appropriate.

Don’t get me wrong; vouchers aren’t as bad as using the police to sweep the “riffraff” off the “nicer” streets.  And they’re a lot better than shooting street people, as is done in Rio these days. But the program should not be dignified with the name of charity, when it is really nothing but a relatively humane method of crowd control.

A final question:  should our decisions on what to do about street beggars be guided by a general policy–that is, should we always give, or never give, based on some general principle?  Or should we make our decisions one day at a time and one beggar at a time, based on our circumstances and theirs at that particular moment?  I lean toward the latter position.  Can I afford it today?  Maybe my finances fluctuate more than most people’s, but that is often a valid question for me.  Assuming I can, am I obligated to give to every beggar who approaches me, or may I pick and choose?  Assuming I may, on what basis do I make those choices?  As a practical matter, I don’t give to people who scare me, or try to intimidate me, and I have no scruples about that.  And I don’t give to people who really do strike me as phonies.  (But I do try to remember the cheerful greeting when I’m not in a position to give.)

Ultimately I have to use my own judgment, bearing in mind what Maimonides says on the subject.  I believe that part of the obligation to give to those in need is an obligation to look at each person who asks as an individual, rather than merely a vehicle for my virtue.  The Hafetz Hayyim and many orthodox Jews today would probably disagree with that position, and might say instead that if your path today intersects a beggar’s, Heaven has made that happen, for the beggar’s benefit or yours, or both.  Some people find that a really appealing spiritual path. It is the source of many legends–not only in the Jewish tradition, by the way–about beggars turning out to be Elijah the prophet, or some other spiritual VIP, who rewards those who treat him kindly, with either spiritual blessings or, sometimes, material ones.  This may be another way of saying that a beggar who seems phony may turn out to be the real thing, for all we know–an important reminder even to those of us trained in the social sciences, about where we should be applying the benefit of the doubt.

In the abstract, of course, Maimonides is right–the best thing we could do for street beggars is put them in a position to support themselves.  But when clean, sober middle managers with MBAs are being “downsized,” that solution is obviously a long way off.  An economy in which even an unskilled person with episodic mental problems can get a job that pays enough to put a roof over his or her head is what we should be working for, in the long run* .  The long run ought not to be coterminous with the messianic age.  “In the long run,” as Winston Churchill says, “we are all dead.”  Street people, if not cared for decently, are likely to be dead in the short run–some statistics indicate that the average street person will last, at most, ten years or until age sixty, whichever comes sooner.  We now know that changing the political party in power, or its philosophy, does nothing whatever to reduce the number of beggars on the street.  Until we can figure out what will, we have an obligation to tend to the short-run welfare of the poor we have with us.

Jane Grey

Nightline and the Devil

Last night, Nightline proclaimed that they would be airing a “great debate” over the existence of Satan. I really hope Ted Koppel was otherwise occupied, because what his successors broadcast bore no resemblance to Koppel’s various great debates and town meetings. If Koppel had done last night’s show, it would have featured Satan and God, or at the very least the Pope and Anton LaVey. Koppel would have advised the networks that the broadcast would be running over its usual time by at least an hour, and it would have actually included the entire debate.

Instead, we got slightly more than half an hour of mostly voice-over from the moderator summarizing whatever the participants said. And the participants were a bunch of second-stringers with not a serious theological brain among them.

Well, if you want to look up Rabbi Hirshfeld on Beliefnet, you can get a somewhat more literate treatment of the subject (though Hirshfeld attributes the bit about G-d fashioning good and forming evil to the Jewish liturgy of the good old days, rather than to the original source, Isaiah 45.)

Anyway, does Satan exist? For the earliest picture of his M.O., see the Book of Job, in which Satan is clearly one of G-d’s operatives. From the point of view of an occasional practicioner of criminal law, I find it easy to see the Satan of Job as an overzealous and sleazy prosecutor who is not above engaging in entrapment to keep up his win-lose stats. But I’m not sure I believe in this overblown Ken Starr wannabe. It was hard enough believing in the real one.

OTOH….yes there is evil in the world, and some of it really seems to have no rational explanation. Genocide, for instance, or child abuse. Or torture. It is easier to believe that such things are caused by diabolical possession than by elements that can be found in the nature of all human beings, from Mother Teresa to Adolf Eichman. If there is no devil, then all of us are capable of serious evil. Nightline not only missed that point, it trivialized the entire issue.

Jane Grey

A Night Among My Neighbors

Last night, our condo association held a meeting. Normally I don’t go to those meetings, even though they occur in a meeting room directly under my kitchen. I am the only condo-dwelling attorney I know who has never served on the condo board. Mostly I am satisfied with the job the board is doing, though I have minor objections to the latest set of doorbell-intercoms, middling objections to the newly-installed windows which seem to be causing trouble to several of our neighbors (though ours are okay so far), and serious objections to the cost of installing new porches, even though the alternative would have been paying a whopping fine to the city.

But the current board president, an upstairs neighbor of ours, specifically asked me to come last night, to observe problems with a fellow owner who appears to be both a jailhouse lawyer and an empire-builder, who poses the possibility of serious legal problems down the road if not dealt with sooner. The Board has recently retained legal counsel, thank heaven. I couldn’t provide that if I wanted to—it would be a conflict of interest if I did, and furthermore, condo law is an esoteric specialty about which I know only the rudiments. But seeing The Empire-Builder in action was useful. It gave me something to tell the President to ask our Board Counsel to look into. Hopefully that will head off more serious trouble.

Long ago, I read somewhere [this may be the most important piece of parliamentary procedure you will ever see. It should be written on your heart in letters of fire] that Robert’s Rules of Order provides that a point of order, a point of information, and a point of personal privilege all take precedence over any other business currently before the membership. Joe McCarthy got a lot of mileage out of the point of order stuff. And Abraham Ribicoff got a fair amount accomplished with a point of information at the 1968 Democratic Convention before Daley the Elder shut off his mike. I started last night’s meeting with a point of personal privilege, to wit, why don’t we have space heaters on in this basement meeting room? The Board promised to see to it for our next meeting, in January, but in the meantime, we all froze. The President later pointed out that it kept the meeting short. I have heard of CEOs who removed all chairs from their meeting rooms, on the same principle.

Anyway, forgive the moderately boring preamble here. What Prexy wanted me to see The Empire-Builder doing was writing him long letters accusing him of violating the applicable laws, by-laws, and regulations, and urging him to resign before things got really bad. After my earnest plea for space heaters, The Empire Builder raised such issues in reading the latest nastygram aloud for the membership and asking Prexy to comment. Prexy said, “what laws or by-laws are being violated here?” and The Empire Builder said, “I can’t tell you exactly but I know they are.”

Back when I was an English teacher, I advised my students that anybody whose papers include the phrase “the Bible says” without citation to chapter and verse gets an automatic F for the assignment. I was, of course, displacing onto my hapless students my hostility to self-designated biblical literalists who do the same thing, like the guy with whom I had a longish debate on some Quaker (of all places) e-list, who said, “the Bible forbids” abortion. Naively, thinking perhaps I had missed something, and on this kind of list I could reasonably expect somebody to lighten my darkness, I asked him for chapter and verse. “Oh, there isn’t any particular place,” he said, blithely. “I just don’t believe that a God who would give us the Scriptures to guide us would fail to place a human soul in the unborn fetus.”

The anonymous Quaker would probably have been horrified to find himself in the same drawer in my mental filing cabinet with the Kentuckian school parents, back in the ‘80s, who objected when their children were required to read textbooks that depicted men cooking, because that was “unbiblical.” If you have a concordance ready to hand, check out “cooking,” and you will find that something like 8 of the first 10 references either attribute the cooking to men, or do not attribute it at all. Even if you remove all of the Levitical barbecues, that will change the stats very little.

What I advised Prexy was to make sure our Board counsel became extremely familiar with chapter and verse of our Condo Declaration, By-laws, and rules and regulations. In the unlikely event that any of them substantiated the Empire Builder’s complaints, those complaints need to be addressed immediately. Otherwise, a long letter dealing item-by-item with those complaints, and quoting the applicable legal texts, should get rid of the Empire Builder with a minimum of hassle. Yes, it will take our counsel some time and cost us some money. It will be money well-spent. Would that the biblical literalists could be dealt with as easily and cheaply.

CynThesis

The Bible and Same-Sex Marriage

What does it say about this week’s news from my home state that I would rather write about same-sex marriage than Illinois politics? Okay, here we go, on this week’s favorite topic other than the soon-to-be-former Governor of Illinois: the Newsweek article on biblical endorsement of gay marriage. As a divorce lawyer, I figure there is little enough love and commitment in this world that we should enthusiastically welcome it wherever it turns up. And I say this even though same-sex marriage would probably be bad for my practice, which currently includes all kinds of devices for making nonstandard same-sex families look like standard-issue straight families, including cohabitation agreements, custody agreements, and separation agreements.

The first thing any serious student of the Bible should notice, upon reading what it says about homosexuality, is that, in almost any paragraph where homosexuality is mentioned, adultery is also mentioned, and subjected to precisely the same penalties. So any biblical literalist who is not willing to see adulterers stoned to death should probably rethink the whole thing.

`The next, admittedly more subtle, thing for a Bible-reader to notice, is that almost everything the Jewish Scriptures (that’s the Old Testament, to you gentiles) says in the abstract about sex has to do with proper relationships of power and property. All of the “forbidden relationships” enumerated in Leviticus 18 and 20, for instance. Almost all of these strictures are addressed only to men (grammatically this is unmistakable in the Hebrew), except for intercourse with animals. No, that’s not the result of any sexist presumption. It’s the result of the political reality of biblical times, that only men could take the sexual initiative.

Sex with women “belonging” to other men was an infringement of property rights. Sex with women “belonging” to one’s father were an infringement of his dominance in the family. Sex with women “belonging” to one’s sons or brothers—that is, lower-ranking males–was an abuse of dominance. In this context, “You shall not lie with a male as one lies with a female; it is an abomination” suggests strongly that power is an issue here, too, and that what the Author is really talking about is male-on-male rape, of the sort that happens in prisons. Which I think is an abomination, too. (Although I do like the interpretation of a rabbinical friend of mine, that lying with a man as one lies with a woman means grabbing all the covers and snoring.)

The fact is, most of the abstract things the Jewish scriptures says about sex have absolutely nothing to do with love and companionship (as opposed to several narratives about particular people falling in love and getting married.) The only exception is directed at polygynists—if a man has two wives, and loves one and hates the other, he is not allowed to let that disparity influence his treatment of their children. Which, as a divorce lawyer, I still think is a good rule, but these days, of course, we apply it only to serial polygamy.

What about the New Testament and sex? Well, Jesus had absolutely nothing to say about homosexuality, not a single word. On the other hand, he objected pretty strongly to divorce, either forbidding it altogether or permitting it only where adultery was involved. This was consistent with one of the major schools of rabbinical thought of that era, the School of Shammai. Which is interesting, given that Jesus mostly followed the teachings of the other school, the School of Hillel. But I digress.

Paul wasn’t keen on sex of any kind, gay, straight, married or unmarried. But, as with his Jewish predecessors, where he talks about homosexuality at all, it is almost always in the same paragraph and under the same strictures as adultery.

I’m not willing to go as far as Lisa Miller in her Newsweek analysis; I don’t believe the Bible necessarily endorses same-sex marriage. But I do believe that it provides for regulating it, as it regulates heterosexual marriage, along with eating, drinking, earning and spending money, and all of the other activities of daily life. Thus, another rabbinical friend of mine who will bless same-sex marriages the same as straight marriages, but will not do interfaith marriages of either kind, is, I think, being perfectly consistent by her own lights and the Jewish Tradition. Similarly, I believe that the Illinois Domestic Violence Act, which forbids assault and battery between husband and wife, cohabitating man and woman, and domestic partners (along with a whole bunch of other people in current and former relationships), is on the right track.

I also strongly endorse the distinction, utterly unknown to the Bible, between civil and religious marriage. Some of my clients have entered into religious marriages and never registered them with the state, either because state recognition violated their anarchist principles, or because it penalizes them in receiving Social Security or other benefits. A lot of my clients have married civilly but not religiously, because they just didn’t want to do the church thing, or felt they couldn’t afford it. When the religiously-but-not-civilly-married bunch shuffle off this mortal coil, they will undoubtedly make work for some lawyer, possibly me, regardless of their gender mix. The civilly-but-not-religiously-married bunch may make work for some Roman Catholic canon lawyer, or some rabbi, but thank heaven, that’s not my problem. I figure Jefferson’s sublime insight that the state and religion should stay out of each other business is especially sensible where marriage is concerned, and there is no reason not to apply it to same-sex unions too.

The Proposition 8 gang should read up on what happened (early in Gandhi’s career) when the British colonial government decided to stop recognizing all non-Christian marriages in South Africa. The results were a major setback for the colonial administration by people who, as Gandhi eloquently expressed, saw their wives branded as whores and their children as bastards. This hits people, quite literally, where they live.

Okay, enough for now. The heat has gone off in my office and I’m going home. Peace, light, and warmth to you all.

CynThesis

Strangers in Egypt, Prop. 8, and Reynolds vs. U.S.

Okay, this is going to be esoteric. Reynolds vs. US was a Supreme Court case, decided in 1878, in which the justices (including John Marshall Harlan, whom I generally admire because later on, he dissented from the majority in Plessy vs. Ferguson) held that the religiously promulgated duty of male members of the Church of Latter-Day Saints to marry multiple wives did not exempt them from compliance with anti-bigamy laws, despite the First Amendment’s guarantee of free exercise of religion. I personally believe this decision was wrongly decided, and ought to be revisited. It probably won’t be, because the beneficiaries of any such review would be some fringy cult with very few votes behind it.

The official hierarchy of the Latter-Day Saints accepted this decision and were divinely inspired to scrap plural marriage, and most Mormons followed this ruling. As a result, Utah was declared a state in 1890, and we all sort of lived happily ever after. Well, sort of. Mitt Romney’s grandfather was one of a group of schismatic polygamist Mormons who moved to Mexico to avoid the law. (As a result, Mitt’s father George was born in Mexico, but the constitutionality of his candidacy for president was never ruled on.) There are still a fair number of polygamist Mormon groups out there, in varying degrees of closetedness.

The reason the Mormons ended up in Utah in the first place was that they had already been forcibly dislocated from Ohio, Missouri, and Illinois. They decided to try their luck in a territory where the locals might be less intolerant. This strategy worked well enough to establish them as the predominant social institution of Utah, but it delayed the admission of Utah as a state until the polygamy issue was resolved to the satisfaction of the federal government.

So it strikes me as ironic that, having endured so much harassment and persecution for the oddities of their family life, they now feel entitled, or even obliged, to subject other people to similar strictures.

I should, I suppose, not be surprised by this. After all, the ancestors of the white settlers in the Carolinas who encouraged Andrew Jackson to evict the Cherokees onto the Trail of Tears in the early 1800s had themselves been exiled from Scotland for participating in the Jacobite rebellions of 1715 and 1745. There are undoubtedly lots of other equally esoteric and equally ironic instances lurking in human history, of the victims of persecution becoming persecutors in their turn.

Amazingly, this is something the Bible actually does say something about. Yes, gentle reader, Biblical morality actually forbids the victims of persecution to victimize others. Exodus 22:21 says “you shall not wrong a stranger, nor oppress him, for you were strangers in Egypt.”

But we are all accustomed to hearing the Bible thumped more often than it is read. I just thought it was time for a history refresher.

Jane Grey

Buy It While You Can: Rapture Memorabilia in Advance

Once the Rapture happens, nobody will be in any position to sell or buy any memorabilia. So now is the time to buy. Order now: your “My Buddies All Went to Heaven and All I Got Was This Lousy T-Shirt” T-shirt; your “If You Didn’t Get Raptured, You Need More Coffee” mug; your “God is My Travel Agent” bumper sticker; all $9.95 apiece.

Red Emma