What's black and white and red all over?

I don't normally address the vapid, pointless things MJS columnist Patrick McIlheran spews onto his blog, but today's little screed bears some tweaking.

Taking umbrage with a piece written by Leonard Pitts Jr. that deals with the problem of black scapegoating in this country, McIlheran goes into full-on sarcasm mode and answers with this gem:

...why did you – yes, you again – deny Pitts a job and then call him a thief? Read to the bottom of his column. That’s what he says you did. And you blew up his school and then called him ignorant. Why did you do that, huh? Why did you kill his father and then complain he was filled with rage?

What, you say you didn’t? You were born after Jim Crow died, after MLK was already regarded a martyr? You grew up thinking black people were just as good as anyone else because “Sesame Street” and every adult you’ve ever known has told you precisely that?

Not only did he miss the entire point of the original article, but apparently the only reason anyone, including himself, might think "black people were just as good as anyone" is because "Sesame Street and every adult you've ever known has told you" to think that. Nice.

I guess McIlheran hasn't made the acquaintance of many African Americans in his day. How else would you explain such a dreadfully ignorant statement?

But it's not entirely uncommon for people to get up in arms when the issue of racism comes up. It's an incredibly complex and highly personal subject. But I don't think Pitts was blaming all racist attacks, past and present, on every white person now living. There's a little something called artistic license going on in his column, wherein stronger language choices are made to get a point across. And the fact remains that we all--black, white, and red-faced McIlheran--still have our own demons to face. Whether that's blatant racism, or the insidious sort that leads us to lock our doors when we see a person of a certain ethnicity walking nearby, the spectre still looms.

Ultimately, this just seems to be a case of McIlheran making knee jerk assumptions based on his own discomfort with the subject. We elected a black man president! This is a post-racial society! We have no more difficult discussions to have or self-examination to do!

Only, clearly, we do.

McIlheran doesn't quite get separation of church and state

Columnist Patrick McIlheran can't seem to wrap his head around the concept of separation of church and state. In his latest opus, he opines that the IRS can penalize and potentially revoke a church's tax exempt status simply because its preacher decides to endorse a specific candidate for public office from the pulpit.

This is in response "Pulpit Freedom Sunday", an event coordinated by the right-wing Alliance Defense Fund wherein 33 pastors gave sermons that explicitly urged parishioners to vote for a specific presidential candidate (mostly McCain), and then sent those sermons to the IRS as a way to openly defy the tax law.

Americans United for Separation of Church and State, along with several former IRS officials, have all sent briefs to the IRS urging them to investigate the churches that participated.

McIlheran rambles on about how this shouldn't be an issue at all, because "preachers were utterly free to rail for Lincoln or against Hoover for 178 years, and the nation seemed no more prone to divisiveness then than now. The civil rights movement was born in black churches, many of which have long been bravely, openly political. Pulpit speeches and endorsements from African-American pastors remain a staple of Democratic political campaigns."

What he utterly fails to see is that 1) because it was done in the past, does not mean it should be done now, 2) any preacher that makes an edorsement from the pulpit should be penalized, but endorsing from the pulpit is not the same as endorsing when you're just out and about. Martin Luther King Jr., it's worth noting, never endoresed a specific candidate, but he was still an active and strong force for social and political change.

McIlheran incorrectly and misleadingly asks "since when is it OK in this country for the government to rule there are certain political things certain people simply can’t say?" but that's not what's happening here. Preacher's are free to endorse a candidate so long as their church doesn't enjoy tax emept status. But once they accept the government's break, they are beholden to that one simple rule. Even then, they're free to support whatever political and social positions they so wish--just leave the specific candidates and their campaigns out of it. This seems entirely reasonable to me, and I'm a little baffled as to why the likes of the Alliance Defense Fund and McIlheran don't get it.

Separation of church and state works both ways: it keeps the government out of the pews, and, in theory, the pews out of the government. You can't have it both ways--accepting tax exempt status (the government out of your pockets) while simultaneously demanding to openly and actively meddle with who might run said government.

I hope the IRS does penalize these churches. We need to get back to maintaining some vague sense of balance. Lately it seems like organized religion has spread its fingers deep and wide into governmental affairs, whereas any attempts to back that off are met with allegations of persecution. It's ridiculous, and such ill-informed, published opinions on the matter like McIlheran's don't help at all.

More people, more problems

Yesterday, I expressed by incredulity at Patrick McIlheran's bizarre claims that greens don't want cheap energy and don't think civil rights are as important as preserving the environment. Not to mention his weird support for DDT.

Well, today he's expounded on his idea, making sure to add that he believes we need to get crackin' with the baby making:

A couple of chaps said -- and I'm quoting the money lines -- "All we have to do is make fewer babies," and "I rarely hear a discussion about how we have too many people!"

Actually, in much of the world, people are making fewer babies. Most of Europe, Japan, China, so on are already lining up for population plunges as fertility rates have fallen far below the replacement rate. Even the United Nations has been predicting a declining world population after 2050. This, by the by, isn't particularly good. Hard to have human societies without humans.

So now, not only do we need to forget about saving the environment, we also need to add more bodies to it. Apparently, six billion strong and growing doesn't cut it.

You may be curious to know that the numbers predicted for the 2050 date he throws out as the falling off point of the world population are around 9 billion. That's 9,000,000,000 people. If we think we're having a hard time keeping everyone fed these days, imagine what it's going to be like if/when we reach those kinds of numbers. Yet despite this looming human catastrophe (the Earth's resources are already at or possibly beyond breaking point), McIlheran wants us to work hard at making more babies. Screw family planning! Get humpin'.

At the core of this view, though, seems to be a creeping (and probably subconscious) fear-of-brown-people dread. Because while a number of western and developed countries are, indeed, facing stagnating or declining birthrates, places like India, China, and many African countries are booming over with people.

The other argument being made here is that to curb population growth, environmentalists want to force abortion, sterilization, and even infanticide onto people. That's quite the claim, and one hell of a straw man.

No sane person is arguing that we should institute any of those things, or that we should suddenly sacrifice already living people in the name of curbing growth. What we are (or should be) arguing is that there are too many people on this Earth, and that we need to find compassionate, sustainable and effective ways of, at the very least, slowing that trend. Happily, this appears to already be the case, but it may be too little too late, meaning that we may well be headed for a massive catastrophe.

The equation is simple. There are only so many resources to go around, and they're not even particularly well distributed. We're talking the miracle of the loaves and fish times 1.2 million, something that would likely exhaust even the best efforts of the messiah himself (no offense, JC).

How someone can argue for the need of more people is beyond me. We're not anywhere near being in danger of extinction or even the downfall of society as we know it. At least, not for the reasons McIlheran and his ilk seem to think.

McIlheran loves people, DDT, but misses the point

I read with some interest and confusion Patrick McIlheran's recent Milwaukee Journal Sentinel editorial, "Consider the humans on Earth, too" - his reaction to the Earth Day holiday. In it, he says that "Greens have long argued that energy is too cheap..." and that environmentalism has blinded some people in malaria-struck regions enough to refuse the use of DDT in fighting the disease. Among other things.

McIlheran seems to be making the argument that preserving the environment is incongruous with producing cheap energy and making sure people, especially those in developing countries, have enough to eat.

He's right to call out those people who claim to be environmentalists and make demands without consideration for how they will immediately effect communities around the world. We need to be careful about the measures taken to protect our world--there is a balance to be struck between being green and being affordable. This is a balance that is emminently doable, too, but where McIlheran goes wrong is in his assertion that "activists" think we need to cut back to "Haitian levels" of energy consumption, and that "Environmental policy is, instead, a set of trade-offs, and what is traded for cleanliness is someone's portion of economic prosperity."

I disagree, and strongly.

We all want cheap, abundant energy. It should not come at the cost of the health of our people and our planet, though. Poorly planned and executed environmental policy may indeed limit someone's portion of economic prosperity, but it needn't be that way. There are projects currently underway in all corners of the globe that aim to (and often succeed at) helping the poorest of the poor to get things like clean water, electricity, education, and agriculture, all with a greener, more sustainable bent. If done right, being more environmentally sound can lead to greater economic sustainability, too. If the source of your livelihood--the land--isn't degraded, you can live off of it indefinitely.

As for DDT, McIlheran is wrong when he claims that the pesticide is both safe and banned. While DDT has long been banned outright in most developed countries (with good reason), its use for "vector control" is still approved in many areas afflicted by malaria. When used carefully and in smaller amounts, it can be just as effective, but without the many environmental and health problems that result from widespread usage.

I'm also uncomfortable with his implication that "activists whose main concern is the environment have appropriated the moral high ground once used by those demanding racial equality." If someone were to actually do this, I'd be inclined to give 'em a good smack, but I've yet to meet someone dedicated to a greener way of life who also thought that one was more important than the other.

One should not overshadow the other. They're both extremely important, and frankly, I think they're also somewhat tied together. If we're talking about the rights of working class and poor communities, then the discussion must include the effects of pollution on their lives. Pollution often caused by large, poorly regulated corporations that feel they can get away with dumping on less wealthy, less empowered people. We can combat these situations with better regulation of industry, greener business practices, and by empowering these communities with ways to help themselves through sustainable means.

So yes, we need to care for our fellow human beings. But a major part of that is wrapped up in how we treat our environment. We should be thoughtful and careful about how we do this, but you cannot separate the two. After all, we can't survive without the Earth, but the Earth can survive without us. I'd rather it not come to that.

Do you bite your hypocritical thumb at me sir?

Bouncing around ye olde blogosphere today, as I'm wont to do, I stumbled across a post by Milwaukee's own folkbum, who noted an article written by MJS editorialist Patrick McIlheran about the recently passed access to emergency contraception bill. Folkbum rightfully points out both the hypocrisy and plain old disgusting nature of the article, homing in on one passage in particular.

Jones-Nosacek points out that Plan B amounts to an extra-large dose of contraceptive drugs. If people worry about trace amounts of endocrine-disrupting chemicals in water, Plan B ought to be at least a little worrying, given that endocrine disruption is what it's all about, she says. Yet the law doesn't let doctors apply any medical judgment to the patient before giving the drug: It must be given on request to any woman of any age.

A man who has consistently railed against environmentalists who speak out against pollutants trying to use their own arguments against something he opposes? I think I just threw up in my mouth a little.

Beyond that, the article argues that religious hospitals shouldn't have to make emergency contraception available to rape victims because it violates their right to refuse to do something that goes against their beliefs. It's a common argument, and one with some merit: after all, I'm a huge proponent of the separation of church and state, so just as I believe that no one should dictate what religion I should or should not follow, I also believe that no one should force someone to do something that goes against their beliefs (unless, of course, we're talking about life-and-death situations and cases involving abuse).

But here's the thing: those Catholic (and other religious) hospitals? They're getting something like half of their operating expenses from public programs like Medicare and Medicaid. Very little of their funding comes from churches or other religious sources. Here's the breakdown:

• Combined Medicare and Medicaid payments accounted for half the revenues of religiously-sponsored hospitals in 1998.
• In 1998, religious hospitals nationwide received more than $45.2 billion in public funds: $35.7 billion in Medicare payments, an estimated $8.8 billion in Medicaid payments and nearly $700 million in other types of government appropriations. In 1999, Medicare alone provided $41.3 billion of sectarian hospitals’ patient revenues.
• The other half of religious hospitals’ operating revenues came almost entirely from insurance companies and other third party payers, not from churches or other religious sources.
• By 1999, of all community hospitals, religiously-sponsored facilities were the most reliant on Medicare payments, with Medicare alone accounting for 36 percent of gross patient revenue (compared to 34 percent for all hospitals). Religious hospitals, like nonsectarian facilities, used federal funds from the 1946 Hospital Survey and Construction Act (better known as Hill-Burton) to rapidly expand in the 1950s and 60s. Many of those same hospitals now utilize tax-exempt government bond issues to obtain low-cost financing of reconstruction and further expansion, the study found In two large states, New York and California, religious hospitals received at least $650 million from such government bond issues in 1998. Like other non-profit entities, religious hospitals enjoy the benefits of tax-exempt status, including exemption from property taxes and eligibility for charitable donations.

If an organization is getting most of its funding from public, governmental sources, then it ought to be beholden to the rules and mores codified in state and federal law. Otherwise all the arguments for "separation of church and state" being thrown around by opponents to the Plan B laws are rendered the hideously hypocritical bleats we've long suspected they were.

A hospital wishing to turn their noses up at the law should cease accepting public funding, period. Otherwise, there is simply no excuse for forcing a rape victim to jump through a series of hoops to get EC. It's about as uncharitable and uncaring as you can get.


(image credit: ec.princeton.edu)