The Baltimore Sun really shouldn’t have sent H. L. Mencken to cover that Scopes trial in Dayton, Tennessee, back in 1925 – the one where Clarence Darrow faced off against William Jennings Bryan on the matter of evolution, specifically on the issue of whether settled science can be taught in public schools, on the taxpayer’s dime, when that settled science seems, to some, to contradict the literal revealed “truth” in Bible. It was America’s first major trial where the religious folks claimed the right to restrict what others did because of their own personal religious beliefs – but it was their tax money that was funding the schools, after all. Still, it came down to arguing YOU can’t do THAT because WE believe THIS – an argument still being made today over the new government rules on what constitutes a minimally acceptable health plan, and that would be, among other things, a health plan that includes contraceptive coverage. The government sets standards for food safety and a host of other things, which folks think are fine, but that one standard offended the religious, and they want it gone – otherwise they lose their religious freedom, their freedom to make sure other aren’t doing what God says they shouldn’t be doing. Similarly the seek exemptions from that laws that provide that those who provide public goods and services and accommodations not discriminate against any class of people, That’s fine, and sure, they’ll serve blacks now, because they have to, but they draw the line at gay people. Being forced to participate even tangentially in the gay “life style” would make them sinners in the eyes of God, as they have been told, or have be told they’ve been told. When you look at it that way, the government is actually forcing them to abandon their religion, to turn their backs on God – and the government shouldn’t do that. We do have religious freedom here, or we should, damn it.
The Scope trial was simpler. Darrow hammered away at Bryan over Bryan and those he represented harping all the time on the quite literal “truth” in passages of the Bible. If the earth and everything on it was created in six days, and on the seventh day God rested, were those days really twenty-four hour days? The earth might be older than you think, and did Jonah really get swallowed by that whale and come out just fine, or was that a metaphor? And when Joshua made the sun stand still in the heavens, so he would have the time to win that big battle, did the earth really stop rotating? That would cause no end of trouble. It went on and on like that, with Darrow suggesting that, while he had no problem with faith and all the good things that derived from it, faith could be tempered by a bit of science and rational thought, without being damaged much at all. Bryan was having none of it and they fought to a draw – Scopes was found guilty and fined a hundred bucks, but the verdict was overturned on a technicality – and the only winner was Mencken. He wrote endless dispatches about the rubes. It was like shooting fish in a barrel, and almost cruel. Yeah, he was a cynical elitist – but he had a way with words and knew a fool when he saw one. His worldview could be summed up in one famous dictum – “For every complex problem there is an answer that is clear, simple, and wrong.”
Mencken lived by those words, even if no one else ever does. We seek a simple explanation. After 9/11 everyone seemed to agree with what George Bush had said, or decided his explanation was good enough – “they” hate us for our freedoms. That explained nothing – they didn’t give a shit that we had the freedom to choose Burger King over McDonalds, or that our women were free to work and even drive cars – that was our business. But when the unthinkable happens, and you know it can’t be your fault, you do look for that simple answer that has nothing to do with you, and that simple explanation, that they hate us for being loose and happy, would do just fine. Those who pointed to our actions in the Middle East, and the thugs we had propped up over all the years, were told to pipe down – it wasn’t us, it was them. We had nothing to apologize for.
We never do – and Mitt Romney ran on that “no apologies” premise, not that it did him much good. People were beginning to wonder about miscalculations we had made, like arranging the overthrow of the democratically elected government in Iran in 1953 and bringing the Shah back. That didn’t work out well. And we had no idea what to do when the Egyptian people threw Mubarak out on his ear, a true thug and also our key alley and friend in the region for decades, and the guy who kept Israel relatively safe from his crazy friends. And what were we to do when they elected that guy from the Muslim Brotherhood to replace Mubarak, and then their military tossed him out on his ear, with the approval of the people, as far as anyone could tell? The guy from the Muslim Brotherhood was gone, and that was fine, but do we support a military coup?
The Obama administration wrestled with that, but Romney kept it clear and simple, and wrong. We support… someone. It depended on the day of the week. John McCain had the same problem with the brief Russian invasion of Georgia back in 2008, and with support he Syrian rebels two years ago, and with the Russian occupation of the Crimea at the moment. We should support the Georgians, even if it meant nuclear war with Russia, except that crew was pretty shady, and two-thirds of the rebels in Syria are associated with al-Qaeda, and the current government in the Ukraine, which doesn’t want to lose Crimea, has its share of neo-Nazis – but not with swastikas just yet. These things are complicated. They require careful thinking, and here you can’t even turn to the Bible and say we should do this or that or the other thing because the Bible tells us so. Jesus had nothing to say about the Crimea, or about birth-control pills for that matter, or what to do when you’re asked to serve sodas to gay people in Arizona. We’re on our own in these matters. That’s sort of what Darrow was trying to say to Bryant.
William Jennings Bryan hated that, and today’s social conservatives hate that, but matters are now further complicated by the fact that the social conservatives lost the culture wars. The majority of Americans now support gay marriage, and marijuana is legal in two states now, and no one much cares, and Colorado is pulling in big bucks in tax revenues on those sales. Sin and sinners are everywhere, evolution is being taught in most public schools outside the Deep South, and the number of those who claim “no religious affiliation” keeps growing. That’s just how things are, and while not particularly secular, Americans seem fine keeping their religion, or lack of religion, to themselves. Fox News’ War on Christmas has become a running joke. Christmas is just fine, and Hollywood keeps making movies full of explicit sex or disgustingly crude jokes, or both, and those movies do quite well, so they keep making more of them. It’s been many years since that Scopes trial, where nothing much was decided, but in those years, science and secularism won whatever that battle was about. Even the new Pope has abandoned them, saying it might be time to quit harping on dogma and get back to that Jesus thing – you know, where everyone tries to treat everyone else, even gays and atheists, and even scientists, with common decency, or even love and respect. To social conservatives, this must seem like the end of the world.
If you’re a social conservative, and know that none of this could possibly be your fault, there’s only one explanation. There must be a plot. Just like the jihadists, gays and secularists surely have been secretly plotting the end of all that is good and right in America, the good stuff that God indented when He invented America, sending Jesus to write the Constitution, through his obedient and unquestioning disciples, the Founding Fathers. Yeah, that’s a minority view of how American was invented, but the plot is real, and there’s proof. That flamboyantly gay writer Truman Capote did set up that literary trust that funnels all the royalties from Breakfast at Tiffany’s and In Cold Blood and whatnot into positions like the Truman Capote Fellow for Creative Writing and Law, and Lecturer in Law at Yale Law School, currently held by Emily Bazelon – the granddaughter of David L. Bazelon, formerly a judge on the United States Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit, and second cousin twice removed of Betty Friedan, of all people. That must prove something, and Bazelon, also a senior editor at Slate, is at it again, with her take on what the right really thinks about birth control:
In challenging the Obamacare rule that employers must provide contraception coverage as part of their health care plans, Hobby Lobby and Conestoga Wood, the companies whose suits the Supreme Court will hear later this month, have been careful to frame their objections narrowly. They’re not refusing to pay for all birth control. They just don’t want to fund “items” like the morning-after pill and the IUD, which they say effectively cause abortion by preventing a fertilized embryo from implanting in the uterus. Many scientists say that’s not true. But the companies are trying to take a limited, reasonable-minds-may-differ position.
The government has medical heavyweights on its side, including the American Congress of Obstetricians and Gynecologists. But Hobby Lobby has more briefs – the majority of a total of more than 80 briefs, by my count, were filed by conservative groups – and their allies have written the sentences that jump off the page. Despite how the companies themselves have carefully crafted their case, the briefs from their supporters provide a refresher course in how fundamentalists get from here to there. They are full of revelations.
She means that in the biblical sense too, and offers a simple review of how we got here:
The Department of Health and Human Services decided to include contraception as part of comprehensive preventive health care for women – and thus a service that employers must cover under the Affordable Care Act – based on recommendations by the Institute of Medicine. The IOM looked at the outcomes associated with getting pregnant unintentionally and found connections to delayed prenatal care, premature delivery, low birth weight, maternal depression, and family violence. Getting pregnant without intending to also can prevent women from getting a degree or a job they aspire to. Birth control, in other words, helps women in wide-ranging ways. It’s pretty simple, really: Women are better off when they get to choose if and when to have babies. When birth control is part of the health insurance package, as opposed to an expense women foot on their own, their health literally benefits.
That seems to be the science of the matter, or the carefully verified facts of the matter, not that it matters, as the American Freedom Law Center, which says it “defends America’s Judeo-Christian heritage and moral values,” sees contraception, just as Pope Paul VI did in 1968, so the quote him:
It has come to pass that the widespread use of contraceptives has indeed harmed women physically, emotionally, morally, and spiritually – and has, in many respects, reduced her to the “mere instrument for the satisfaction of [man's] own desires.” Consequently, the promotion of contraceptive services – the very goal of the challenged mandate – harms not only women, but it harms society in general by “open[ing] wide the way for marital infidelity and a general lowering of moral standards.”
Bazelon also cites the Beverly LaHaye Institute, the research arm of Concerned Women for America, with this:
The documented negative effects the widespread availability of contraceptives has on women’s ability to enter into and maintain desired marital relationships. This in turn leads to decreased emotional wellbeing and economic stability (out-of-wedlock childbearing being a chief predictor of female poverty), as well as deleterious physical health consequences arising from, inter alia, sexually transmitted infections and domestic violence.
Bazelon adds this:
And so, as the AFLC argues, contraceptives of all kinds aren’t medical or related to health care at all. They are “procedures involving gravely immoral practices.” Protected sex demeans women by making men disrespect them. (Just as Pope Paul VI did decades ago, the AFLC presents this as true inside marriage as well as out.) By separating sex from childbearing, birth control is to blame for the erosion of marriage, for the economic difficulties of single motherhood, and even for the rotten behavior of men who beat their girlfriends and wives. Birth control is the original sin of modernity. Its widespread availability changed everything, for the worse.
Somehow we’re back on a rural town in Tennessee back in 1925:
The Hobby Lobby case has given the groups that want to go back to pre-pill days a chance to air their nostalgia. And they want the Supreme Court to know that all women don’t share the view that controlling one’s body, with regard to the deep, life-altering question of when to be pregnant, is helpful and freeing. There are plenty of women who don’t “value free abortion drugs above public goods such as religious freedom and limited government,” as the brief from conservative women’s groups, including Concerned Women for America and the Susan B. Anthony List, puts it. And they are on the straight-and-narrow conservative path to sanctified motherhood.
Bazelon just doesn’t see it that way:
Most women who have abortions bear and rear children, too, actually. And it goes without saying that women who have used birth control have kids, too, since “women who use contraceptives” means practically every woman in the country. And yet there are still people willing to say that “well-woman preventive care visits” are about minimizing “the risk and consequence of a sexually licentious lifestyle,” as yet another brief insists.
Make no mistake: If Hobby Lobby wins, the fundamentalist views I’ve been detailing (and despairing) win, too. Here’s the cherished ideal that will have its moment of ascendance: Women should welcome pregnancy at any time. Because if that blessing comes, it was divinely intended and any other goal, at any moment, must yield.
William Jennings Bryan would understand that, but Bazelon sees something else going on here:
These Supreme Court cases are ostensibly about a few lines in the many pages of Obamacare regulations, but really, they’re about sex and power. As New York Times columnist Gail Collins pointed out last week, “The war on abortion is often grounded in a simple aversion to sex that does not lead to procreation.” The same is true of the war on birth control. It’s supposed to be over, but it’s not. Because according to the segment of the religious right that signed on to these briefs, there is only one way for true women to wield power: by giving it up to become God’s (and their husband’s) handmaidens.
Well, that’s a clear and simple answer. God will take care of these things if you’re a hussy who can’t keep yourself doing-the-dirty, and you’ll have that child, ready or not, or things will be fine if you submit to you husband’s random lust when God (and a Viagra tab) blesses him with that god-like lust, and you’ll have that child, ready or not – so shut up and submit. God says so. It’s His gift to you, a gift of dignity.
Who is buying that? Yep, for every complex problem there is an answer that is clear, simple, and wrong – but maybe there is a plot, to ruin everyone with carefully verified facts. Ian O’Neill reports on the second part of the plot:
When I first heard that Carl Sagan’s classic “Cosmos” television series from 1980 was going to be remade for a modern audience, I was skeptical. How could Neil deGrasse Tyson hope to carry on where Sagan left off? Would an over-reliance on CGI dumb down the science to such an extent that it would just be a shiny yet soulless reboot? I’ve always been a huge fan of Tyson’s work, but could a Cosmos 2.0 be too much for the famous science communicator to handle?
But all my reservations about the Cosmos reboot, that premiered Sunday on FOX, were completely unfounded. It was a triumph for science and once again proved that Neil deGrasse Tyson is one of the heavyweight science educators of our time. For this brilliant effort, Tyson teamed up with executive producer and “Family Guy” creator Seth MacFarlane, and Ann Druyan, who co-writer of the original “Cosmos” with her late husband, Sagan.
In the one-hour first episode, “Cosmos: A Spacetime Odyssey” takes us on a dizzying journey from the Big Bang to the very edge of our observable universe; from the tiniest particles to the galactic superclusters. Tyson gives us a history lesson of the genesis of our modern understanding of the universe, starting with the oppressed 16th-Century astronomer Giordano Bruno who thought beyond the Copernican Principal, describing an “infinite” universe containing other stars, planets and even life on those other worlds.
Tragically, Bruno ran afoul of the Roman Catholic Church, which imprisoned and killed him. Bruno’s story was told by Tyson through wonderful animated shorts that enhanced his awesome storytelling abilities.
Andrew Leonard takes it from there:
If you are the kind of Christian liable to get upset when scientists deploy their annoying facts to prove crazy stuff like their “theories” that the Earth is older than 6,000 years or that the universe began with a Big Bang, then the resurrection of “Cosmos” must be extremely irritating. First, those damned progressives stopped allowing the Church to burn heretics at the stake; now even Fox News is broadcasting “science” documentaries. Truly, to quote the great Erick Erickson, “we do live in a fallen, depraved world destined for the fire.”
Some of the poor souls oppressed by Neil deGrasse Tyson’s return to the Promised Land first pioneered by Carl Sagan took to Twitter with their predictable grumblings. My favorite: “Dear #cosmos, the origin of the universe actually is not mysterious. God had Moses write about it in the #Bible. You should read it sometime.”
So THERE!
But the folks at Evolution News and Views chose a more sophisticated approach, preferring instead to engage in a convoluted argument about Tyson’s decision to focus part of the first episode on the martyred Giordano Bruno.
That was the problem:
The revisionist “Cosmos” critique concerning Bruno goes like this: He wasn’t even really a scientist, and he was burned to death because of his theological heresies and not his belief in Copernican theory, (SO HE DESERVED IT!) and the main reason he showed up on “Cosmos” at all was because he was “the only one with even a passing association with a scientific controversy to be burned at the stake during this period of history.”
Maybe it’s just me, but reading between the lines of this piece I detected what seemed to be a tinge of regret that unbelievers can no longer be punished for straying from the Gospel with purging fire. Neil Tyson – WATCH YOUR BACK!
Leonard is only half-joking about the folks at Evolution News and Views:
The best part: “Cosmos” is labeled “a glossy multi-million-dollar piece of agitprop for scientific materialism” as if that’s a bad thing. I mean, I understand why religious zealots might think it’s cool to slander a science documentary in language suggesting it’s all a Communist plot. (The Big Bang – brought to you by Stalin and the good ole boys at the KGB.)
That certainly is that is clear, simple, and wrong. Where’s that Mencken fellow when you need him? And there’s this exchange:
Bill O’Reilly and guest Bernie Goldberg think they may have hit upon the real reason the rest of the media hasn’t focused on the IRS story as obsessively as has Fox News. It’s the usual liberal media bias, sure, but it’s something more than that – it’s because President Obama is black.
“It’s obvious to me and to you… that the American national media is protecting President Obama,” O’Reilly said to Goldberg on Monday night’s edition of his Fox News show. “This, beyond any reasonable doubt, is the smoking gun, because this [IRS] story is an important story, and yet the New York Times, the Wall Street Journal, all the network evening newscasts, they didn’t mention it…”
Goldberg agreed that the IRS story was extremely important and said that the media ignored it “because Barack Obama is president.”
“I know that sounds simple, maybe too simple, but it’s the truth!” Goldberg said.
“What other explanation could there be?” O’Reilly said in response.
Later on in the segment, after Goldberg had claimed the media is “covering for their guy,” O’Reilly attempted to explain why, exactly, the media has decided Obama is “their guy.”
“And he’s their guy because he’s a liberal African American; is that why he’s their guy?” O’Reilly asked.
“Yeah, yeah,” said Goldberg.
That also is that is stunningly clear and simple – the guy’s black, so he gets a pass, and he’s a liberal too, so he can do no wrong. Black men get all the breaks in America – it’s a PLOT – or, alternatively, there’s no story there. All the other news organizations, even Rupert Murdoch’s own Wall Street Journal, looked into the IRS thing, carefully, and came up empty and moved on. It would seem Rupert Murdoch’s own Fox News isn’t exactly a news organization, but maybe the IRS is behind the massive War on Christmas.
You never know – but when the unthinkable happens – you lost the culture wars long ago, and then the presidential election twice, and your own network is running a new series that will make science look cool again – and you know none of this can be your fault – you do look for that clear and simple answer that has nothing to do with you. The odd thing is that it’s always wrong. H. L Mencken was a rather nasty fellow, full of bile and venom, but he was right about our impulse to see enemies where there are only folks standing there with that verified data in their hands, waiting patiently for things to calm down. Unfortunately, they never do.