On Capital Punishment

It is immoral in principle, and unfair and discriminatory in practice.                                      American Civil Liberties Union

Liberals are divided on the issue but a majority of liberals are against capital punishment.  In a 2013 Gallup Poll 50 percent of liberals opposed the death penalty and 47 percent supported it.  Clearly, the more liberal position is to be against the death penalty.  Earlier in my life I supported the death penalty, but now am irrevocably against it.  There are several reasons why I and the majority of liberals cannot support this practice.  The nature of these reasons comprises both moral and practical concerns.

Morally, I begin with the principle that two wrongs don’t make a right.  To use lethal force against a perpetrator who is actively endangering the lives of innocents may well be justified, but to kill someone in state custody is simply murder.  Also, execution ends any possibility of   redemption for the criminal.  The Dalai Lama says, “My overriding belief is that it is always possible for criminals to improve and that by its very finality the death penalty contradicts this.”  John Dear, a Jesuit Catholic priest, wrote of capital punishment, “Behind it lies an illogical maxim: we kill those who kill to show that killing is wrong. If we really believed that killing was wrong, the state would set an example; official killing would be banished."  

In addition, the act of imposing the death penalty does not bring back any victims but only creates more.  It is a simple act of vengeance motivated by the emotions of anger and hate.  Most liberals see these motives as unworthy of a civilized judicial system and as little more than the vestigial relics of a primitive age of barbarism.  In 2013 only 22 countries (out of more than 200) carried out any executions.  The top eight were China, Iran, Iraq, North Korea, Saudi Arabia, the USA and Somalia.  America is the only advanced constitutional nation among them.  It is disgraceful to put ourselves in such company. 

The practical reasons against the death penalty are important too.  Chief among them are that by its very nature mistakes cannot be fixed, the death penalty is invariably applied unequally, and the record shows it does not deter crime.  When someone is wrongly convicted and sentenced to death, once that sentence is carried out there is no way to rectify the mistake.  We cannot know how many of the 1,200 Americans executed since 1973 may have been innocent, but according to the Death Penalty Information Center, over that time 144 inmates waiting on death row have been exonerated.  That makes it almost certain that some people have been executed erroneously.  Police, prosecutors, crime lab technicians, defense attorneys, judges and juries are only human.  And when they make a mistake in this arena, people can be put to death as a result.  There is nothing that can justify taking a risk like that.  

Plenty of studies have shown that the death penalty is applied terribly unequally in our country.  Maricopa County, Arizona, for example, has four times the death penalty cases of Los Angeles or Houston on a per capita basis. And thanks to the legacy of our race relations, a much higher percentage of minority defendants, especially African-Americans, are sentenced to death.  About 14 percent of murder victims are black, yet over 41 percent of death row inmates are black.  A  2011 study in North Carolina found that the chances of a defendant being sentenced to death were 75 percent higher if the victim was white than if the victim was black.  This is not equal justice.   

   

One of the most commonly cited justifications for capital punishment is its supposed effectiveness as a deterrent to crime.  The actual record, however, does not back up this assertion at all.  In fact, states with the death penalty have a higher murder rate than those without it.  Over the last twenty years the murder rate for states that have the death penalty averages 31% higher than states that do not.  If the deterrent effect were there, one would expect those figures to change, yet there has not been one year in the past 25 in which death penalty states had a lower murder rate.  

Given the immorality of capital punishment, the irrevocable nature of its judgment, the caprice and evident bias with which it is applied, and its ineffectiveness in reducing crime, many liberals can echo the sentiments of former liberal Senator Russ Feingold who said, “I oppose the death penalty because it is inconsistent with basic American principles of justice, liberty, and equality.”

Liberal Principles

Here is my list of the principles we liberals believe in:

Ethics as the bedrock of our worldview, founded on truth, honesty and love for one another.

Peace with our neighbors and among all nations, beginning with peace within ourselves.

Equality of all people at all times.

Freedom to be, love, do, say and believe as we will, and from preventable wrong and harm.

Community of others whose well-being we foster, particularly those in greatest need.

Opportunity to pursue our dreams.

Meeting Human Needs with compassion, ingenuity and resolve.

Democracy as the foundation of any just political system.  

Empathy for our fellows as the wellspring of the causes we champion.   

Progress or faith in the improvement of the human condition if we work for it in good will.  

Science as a means to discover and employ fact and reason to better our world.

Justice under the law and as the framework for fairness in society.

Security of our persons, rights and dignity, individually and as a nation.

Practicality in the ways we pursue our goals and implement our policies.  

Diversity of people celebrated within the  

Unity of the human family.

Civil Rights enshrined and protected.

Service as the means to realize these principles in our society and world.

Love as the source of all the good we do and are.

What Liberals Believe About Community and Putting People First

The sixth and concluding part in a series about the liberal perspective on human rights.

A sense of community is a core liberal value.  It is based on the idea that, as President Barack Obama is fond of saying, “We are not a red America and a blue America; we are one United States of America.” Bill Clinton likes to say, “We believe that ‘we’re all in this together’ is a better philosophy than ‘you’re on your own.’”  Or, as Martin Luther King put it, “We may have all come on different ships but we’re in the same boat now.”  

The impulse to put people and their needs first is a liberal imperative.  Dr. King said, “Whatever affects one directly affects all indirectly.  I can never be what I ought to be until you are what you ought to be.  This is the interrelated structure of reality.”  The liberal heart cannot stand idly by in the face of human suffering, want and need.  Franklin Roosevelt electrified the nation in the depths of the Great Depression by promising to do something about poverty and unemployment.  In his Inaugural Address he avowed, “This nation asks for action, and action now!”  He promised to give it to them, making the people’s government their partner in recovery in a New Deal that would directly create the jobs they needed.  He inspired confidence with his ringing exclamation against his predecessor and those minds shackled by ideology and inertia, those too timid to act, when he assured the American people, “The only thing we have to fear is fear itself.”  Afterward, these bold words were backed up by programs that put millions of Americans to work and ended the Great Depression.

Liberals do not believe the responsibilities of the people’s government end with defending the frontiers, arresting lawbreakers and enforcing contracts.  To ignore solvable problems and preventable human suffering is intolerable to liberals, because to them human needs come first.  An ideology based on what size government ought to be is nonsense to a liberal.  It ought to be whatever size it needs to be to fix those problems the people need fixed and cannot fix so well in their individual capacities. When the flood waters rise, the fire spreads or the epidemic grows people need help, not ideologies.  Liberals want to make sure that help is there.      

Where do these impulses come from?  Liberals are attracted to the insight of the English philosopher Jeremy Bentham, who wrote, “The greatest happiness of the greatest number is the foundation of morals and legislation.”  In the spiritual realm, Jesus of Nazareth commanded, “Do unto others as you would have others do unto you.”  Muhammad echoed this in Islam.  The Qu’ran states, "No one of you believes until he loves for his brother what he loves for himself."  The wellspring of all these statements is empathy, the ability to place one’s self in another’s shoes and want what is best for that person.  All politicians pay lip service to this quality.  How else could they get people to vote for them?  But to real liberals it is not something that has to be affected; it is part of their core.

The Affordable Care Act is a fine example of values reinforcing practicality.  Liberals believe it is immoral to deny human beings a basic necessity like health care.  Obamacare saves not only lives but also money compared to the previous system.  Liberals supported even more effective measures, such as giving the government stronger authority to use its massive purchasing power to negotiate lower drug costs from manufacturers, and by having a “public option” insurance plan as an alternative to those provided by for-profit companies to put some real competition into the mix.  Unfortunately, Representatives beholden to the insurance industry managed to defeat those provisions, but the Act even still is a major step forward for the American people, some 32 million of whom will be added to the rolls of the insured through its provisions. 

These principles underlie the many other liberal positions on human rights.  For community and “people first” reasons, liberals look at education as a human right, not a privilege.  They believe small rural communities deserve clean water supplies as much as large urban ones do.  It’s why they support the Violence Against Women Act, fight so hard against human trafficking and predatory clergy, make a big deal out of bullying, and call out demeaning and derogatory speech.  Some conservatives decry this as unwarranted “political correctness,” as though insulting people is a positive good that needs to be protected.  Liberals remember that the basis of political correctness is empathy for the feelings of other human beings.  You don’t use racial slurs and epithets.  You don’t go to the synagogue and tell jokes about the Holocaust.  It’s a form of bullying and fails the test of treating others the way one would like to be treated. 

The same goes for voting as a human right.  It is the foundational right upon which democracy itself stands or falls.  Liberals are consistently for making it as easy as possible, such as by encouraging voting by mail and making early voting widely available.  Conservatives, on the other hand, continue to raise obstacles and make it more difficult, following their age-old practice of trying to restrict voting to “the better sort of (wealthier) people.”  It is nothing but a sham designed to exclude liberal voters from the polls.  The first priority should be to facilitate people exercising their right to vote.  A secondary concern is to guard against fraud, which the actual facts show to be extremely rare.  If they are truly worried about this, I have often thought the way to go about it is to require the state to provide people with an ID card, at its trouble and expense, not the citizen’s.  Most people just use their state-issued driver’s license, but those without a driver’s license tend to be older folks who no longer drive (and who can be counted on to vote in support of Social Security and Medicare) and poorer people who have no car.  These are precisely the people for whom going through a lot of expense and trouble like taking time off from work, finding a bus or hiring a cab is a real impediment to exercising their right to cast a vote. 
       
Liberal opposition to the awful 2010 Supreme Court ruling Citizens United v. Federal Election Commission is also about human rights and putting people first.  The idea of declaring an entity like a corporation a “person” and allowing it to electioneer with unlimited and anonymous funding is a perilous step indeed.  This ruling on a razor-thin 5-4 vote by the Court’s conservative majority overturned forty years of sensible limitations imposed and agreed upon by both parties in the wake of the outrageous Watergate corruption scandals of the 1970s.  Liberals oppose this egregious miscarriage of justice and support overturning this decision.  The people of Montana, Colorado, and the councils of dozens of cities across the country have voted against it.  

To sum up, whatever the issue, you can always count on liberals to support communities and put the needs of people first.  Liberals value human rights, including equality, fairness, personal autonomy, security and community for their own sake.  The underlying principles behind this stance are a firm belief in those rights, compassionate empathy, a practical approach and the courage to pursue justice in the face of selfish and self-interested power.  As Martin Luther King taught us, “We must rapidly begin the shift from a "thing"-oriented society to a "person"-oriented society.  When machines and computers, profit motives and property rights are considered more important than people, the giant triplets of racism, materialism and militarism are incapable (of) being conquered.” 

What Liberals Believe about Personal Autonomy

Fourth in a series about the liberal perspective on human rights.

Liberals place a high value on personal autonomy, the principle that people should have the right to decide most things about their lives for themselves.   This pillar of freedom is the basis of a number of issues liberals have fought for and still fight for today.  Some of these include freedom of conscience about religion and from an imposed religion, women’s admission to college and to many career fields formerly restricted to men, the right to divorce, and reproductive rights such as to decide for one’s self about contraception and abortion.  It also applies to the liberal stance on consensual sexual relationships including the right to interracial and same-sex relationships and marriages. 

It may seem hard to imagine, but all of these practices were at various times forbidden by those who wished to impose their social and moral views on others through the force of law.  Freedom from state-sponsored religion was made unconstitutional in 1791 by the First Amendment’s clause against any “establishment of religion.”  Even so, “blue laws” were passed in most states that restricted commerce or various activities like playing baseball on Sundays under the premise that people ought to be in church instead.  Though most of these laws have been repealed, some still persist.  In thirteen states, for example, it is illegal to buy or trade a car on a Sunday! 

Women were completely excluded from higher education until 1837, when Mary Kellogg, Mary Caroline Rudd, Mary Hosford and Elizabeth Prall were the first women admitted in to Oberlin College in Ohio.   Sixty-three years later, in 1900, most colleges still accepted only men, and just 2.8% of women went to college.  As late as 1970 only 9% of college graduates were women.  Today they constitute the majority of college graduates.  This progress over time is not only a testament to the triumph of liberal egalitarian ideals over those who fought to keep women in their traditional subservient roles but also an example of what can happen when obstacles to personal autonomy are removed.  Just think how much more vibrant every field of endeavor is today, with America making use of 100% of its brain power instead of only half! 

The slow but inexorable movement of women into professions once limited to men is still going on.  It began with secretaries and teachers, continued with police officers and firefighters and finally spread to doctors and corporate executives.  The military is now about to open the combat arms to women volunteers.  It’s about time.  Will some women wash out because they will prove unable to carry an 80-pound pack on a 25-mile hike?  Doubtlessly so.  Then weed them out on their inability to perform the physical demands of the job, not because they are women.  There are some women who relish the challenge and will be able to do it, and our experience with law enforcement and firefighting tell us it will be more than many expect.  Leave it up to equality and personal autonomy, the values America was founded on, and marvel at the results. 

Bans on divorce or the requirement of an adversarial judicial process to determine “fault” were another vestige of the attitude that the state had an obligation to impose conditions on people’s personal lives.  It eventually became apparent to all but the most stubborn that trying to force people to stay in a marriage against their will was not working.  Common sense and the principle of personal autonomy won out.  Divorce laws were liberalized in the 1970s beginning with California, with the concept of no-fault divorce.  An interesting statistic is the higher incidence of divorce in conservative-voting states and lower incidence in liberal-voting states.  The Wall Street Journal conducted an analysis of census data and came to the conclusion that, “Overall, the report shows that people living in northeastern states have lower marriage and divorce rates. And while those in the southern states are more likely to get married, they also have higher divorce rates.”  It’s ironic that the very same socially conservative states that trumpet their commitment to “family values” and tried to prevent easily obtained divorce are the very states whose citizens have been the ones to most utilize it. 

Reproductive rights are another facet of personal autonomy.  The Supreme Court, in the case Griswold v. Connecticut in 1965 struck down the state’s authority to outlaw birth control, basing their ruling on the right to privacy. The Court extended that ruling in 1972, deciding in Eisenstadt v. Baird that Massachusetts could not deny access to birth control pills to single people.  There was another big dust-up over the provision of birth control pills under President Obama’s health care law.  Conservatives and some religious organizations tried to make a case that people’s employers and churches should get to decide whether they get access to contraception.  The liberal view prevailed, as it should.  Anybody is free to give advice, but the decision is up to the person involved, not their boss or church.  That is what freedom is.  If my boss is a Jehovah’s Witness I should not be denied a blood transfusion I need because he doesn’t believe in it.  It’s my life.  I get to decide, not him.  The famous case Roe v. Wade in 1973 held that a woman’s right to an abortion in the first trimester of a pregnancy, until the fetus is viable, is also protected.  The basic principle underlying all these, whether it is called privacy, personal autonomy or some other name, is that people are entitled to make their own decisions regarding these personal matters.  They are nobody else’s business.

The same idea holds true with liberals when the subject is personal relationships.  Conservatives imposed and then fought to maintain controls on interracial and same-sex relationships for many years.  Though most states had repealed or had never enacted anti-miscegenation (against racial mixing) laws, all the former slave states except Maryland still had them on their books when the Supreme Court ruled them invalid in the 1967 case Loving v. Virginia.  At that time only 20% of Americans approved of interracial marriages according to the Gallup Poll.  By 2011 the liberal view had largely swept the country, with 86% supportive of marriage between people of different races. 

The same is momentously underway with regards to same-sex marriage equality, support for which has surged from 27% in the late 1970s to near 60% today.  Acceptance of the principle of personal autonomy is largely behind this change, along with a better understanding that sexual orientation is biologically determined.  The American Psychological Association, for instance, stopped categorizing homosexuality as a disorder back in 1975 and unanimously endorsed same sex marriage equity in 2011.  With “Don’t Ask Don’t Tell” in the military repealed, marriage equality the law at the time of this writing in nine states and the District of Columbia, and the Supreme Court currently in 2013 weighing the federal Defense of (straight only) Marriage Act,  it now seems we are on the threshold of seeing the liberal position on this great human rights movement become widely enshrined across the land.  This is a struggle in which liberals, as allies of the LGBT community, can take special pride. Once again, personal freedom is triumphing over age-old prejudice thanks to those who have stood up for human rights and fought the good fight.   

The principle of personal autonomy has also played a part in other issues.  One is the right to conscientiously object to military service during those periods when America has had a military draft.  Another is the ongoing liberalization of marijuana laws in fifteen states, where possession is treated like a minor traffic infraction, or even full legalization, voted in by the electorate in Washington state and Colorado.  The failure of the Eighteenth Amendment in trying to enforce the Prohibition of alcohol from 1918 to 1933 is probably the strongest example of the futility of unduly trying to restrict personal autonomy.  The basic liberal perspective on human rights is therefore to favor personal autonomy, limiting it primarily when an action harms or interferes with the rights of others. 

What Liberals Believe About Fairness

Third in a series on the liberal perspective on human rights.

Liberals also support human rights because of an innate sense of fairness.  Liberals understand that legal equality does not mean equality of condition or results.  Some people will always be wealthier or smarter, some are good artists or athletes and others are not.  Not every student who applies will get accepted for enrollment into the college of their choice.  But what liberals really want to foster is a society where everyone has an equal opportunity to try, and a fair chance to acquire the tools for success. 

That’s why liberals always fight so hard to get better funding for poorer school districts, or poorer areas within a school district.  That’s why they are in favor of keeping college tuition as low as possible, with plenty of scholarship help available.  The statistics strongly show that kids from poorer families and families in which English is not the primary language do worse in school, have lower graduation rates, lower college attendance and graduation rates and lower lifetime incomes.  They also have higher incidences of unwed pregnancies, incarceration, chronic health problems and shorter life expectancies. 

Part of the reason liberals are concerned and want to do something about these problems comes from empathy and compassion.  It doesn’t feel right to send kids into the struggle of life with two strikes against them due to the financial conditions of their parents.  The other reason is pragmatic.  If equalizing school funding will help reduce crime, the dropout rate, the prison population, health care costs and result in more qualified students going to college and becoming successful members of the middle class, liberals wonder why would anyone not want to do it?The fairness issue goes beyond this to many facets of life and policy.  It’s why liberals favor a graduated income tax rather than the “flat tax” idea wealthy conservatives push.  In the early twentieth century Liberals and Progressives, including Republican and Democrats, passed the Sixteenth Amendment authorizing a federal income tax.  The principle was to make wealthier folks pay a higher rate of tax, based on the idea that first, they could afford it better, and second, they benefit more from what the taxes buy. 

How so?  Why not collect everything from, say, a sales tax, where everyone would pay the same percentage?  Well, the poor have to spend just about everything they earn just to get by.  Rent, groceries and the essentials of life take up almost the entire income.  So the poor would pay taxes on everything they earn.  The wealthy have a bigger cushion.  They don’t spend all their income, so they would not have to pay taxes on the part they invest or put away for things like college and retirement, things the poor person can scarcely do.  The rich also benefit more from the services government provides.  Police and fire protection guard the tycoon’s mansion, worth millions, from harm, conferring a much greater benefit than the same service provided to the average person’s humble house or apartment. 

Consider also that the same city street is worth different amounts to different interests.  Suppose a bank teller needs the street to get to work, and makes $30,000 a year.  Without the street this worker couldn’t get to the job, costing him or her $30,000 in earnings.  But the same street is worth a lot more to the bank.  Suppose the bank has 1,000 customers and $50,000,000 on deposit.  If the city doesn’t keep the street up and customers can’t get to the bank, they will likely take their deposits somewhere else.  The street, maintained at taxpayer expense, is worth $30,000 to the teller but $50,000,000 to the bank owner.  Is it fair to assess them the same amount for its upkeep?  Based on their relative abilities to pay and the relative value they get back, the liberal would say, “Definitely not!  That’s not fair.” 

What Liberals Believe about Equality

Second in a series on the liberal perspective on human rights.
 

Liberals believe in equality before the law, and they believe it for real rather than just paying lip service to the concept.  The Declaration of Independence famously states, “We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal…”  Liberals like Abraham Lincoln believed that meant slavery was inconsistent with the principles of freedom.  “No man is good enough to govern another man, without that man’s consent,” he said.  Conservatives looked for reasons to create exceptions.  Surely, they felt, equality, though a good concept for white, Christian, property-owning men, could not apply to blacks, people of other non-Caucasian races, slaves, Jews, Hindus, women and the landless.  All couldn’t really mean “all,” could it? 

The Fourteenth Amendment avows, “No State shall…deny to any person within its jurisdiction the equal protection of the laws.”  Liberals like Elizabeth Cady Stanton believed that meant women, as well as men, deserved the right to vote.  It took 72 years and a constitutional amendment, the Nineteenth, to accomplish that.  Some, such as conservative Supreme Court Associate Justice Antonin Scalia, still don’t think the equal protection clause of the Fourteenth Amendment requires equal rights for women.  Here is what he said about it:  “In 1868, when the 39th Congress was debating and ultimately proposing the 14th Amendment, I don't think anybody would have thought that equal protection applied to sex discrimination, or certainly not to sexual orientation. So does that mean that we've gone off in error by applying the 14th Amendment to both?  Yes, yes. Sorry, to tell you that.”  So, we still have people, even prominent ones, looking for reasons to deny equal rights. 

Liberals, on the other hand, take the wording at face value.  No one can be denied equal rights, period.  In proposing legislation to end the racial discrimination against African-Americans in his day, President John F. Kennedy observed, “We are confronted primarily with a moral issue.”  Kennedy based his views on strong sources.   Where should we search for the right answer to this issue?  He said, "It is as old as the Scriptures and is as clear as the American Constitution.  The heart of the question is whether all Americans are to be afforded equal rights and equal opportunities, whether we are going to treat our fellow Americans as we want to be treated.”  His answer, based on both, was an emphatic “Yes!”  Modern liberals are proud to emphatically agree.      

The uncompromising liberal view of equality has therefore been applied in a wider and wider circle over the centuries.  The principle was clearly enunciated in the beginning of the country, but was not realized in many people’s daily lives.  The pursuit of the dream to bring Jefferson’s words to fruition continues in our own time, concentrating now most urgently on the LGBT community.  This unfinished work shows liberalism at its best.  Carved over the entrance to the Supreme Court building are the words “EQUAL JUSTICE UNDER LAW.”  The views of certain retrograde Associate Justices not withstanding, that is what liberals continue to strive for, confident in the ultimate realization of America's egalitarian founding ethos.  As Martin Luther King declared, "the moral arc of the universe is long, but it bends toward justice."       

What do Liberals Believe?

Today I'll begin a series on liberal issue positions dealing with human rights. Today's short entry can stand as an introduction.

“Power concedes nothing without a demand. It never did and it never will. Find out just what any people will quietly submit to and you have found out the exact measure of injustice and wrong which will be imposed upon them, and these will continue till they are resisted with either words or blows, or both. The limits of tyrants are prescribed by the endurance of those whom they oppress.” Frederick Douglass

Does it bother you when you hear someone say gay people shouldn’t be allowed to get married or adopt children?  That somebody who was brought to America from a foreign country by their parents as an infant and can remember no other home should be deported to that foreign country?  That it’s OK to deny people medical care if they are too poor to afford it?  That demonstrators can only exercise free speech in fenced, restricted areas designated and kept under surveillance by the police?  That companies can be allowed to hide things in fine print that let them share your personal information and commit you to things you are not aware you are agreeing to?  That kids from wealthy neighborhoods in your area go to modern, well-equipped schools while kids from poorer areas go to ramshackle, poorly-equipped schools?  That it’s all right to torture a suspect if someone thinks they might be a terrorist?  That women, on average, still earn only 77% of what men earn doing the same job with the same number of years of experience and similar performance evaluations? 

If your consistent answer to these questions is yes, you are likely a liberal.  Liberals have always been in the forefront of extending and expanding human rights because liberals are imbued with a set of principles that promote freedom.  These principles include equality, fairness, personal autonomy, security, community, and a priority system that places human needs first because it is infused with empathy. 

Don't Ask Don't Tell Repeal Caps Memorable "Lame Duck" Session

Today marked a historic day in American history, as another redoubt of prejudice and discrimination was breached. President Obama's signing of the repeal of the 17-year-old "Don't Ask Don't Tell" military policy on gay service members, wherein some 13,000 serving personnel have been expelled after their gay or lesbian sexual orientation was found out, is a further step along the path that has led the nation through the abolition of slavery, the extension of voting rights to women and blacks and the outlawing of racial segregation. As the President said at the signing ceremony, "We are not a nation of don't ask don't tell. We are a nation of e pluribus unum; out of many we are one."

Once the new policy is phased in over the next year America's forces will see the same changes that have happened with the British, Canadian and Australian forces. That is, essentially nothing of any note will happen at all. Years from now people will wonder what all the commotion was about. Either that or they will look at it in the same way they do now when they think of such controversies as thirty years ago over whether women could serve as police officers or sixty years ago about whether blacks could play major league baseball.

In an interesting side note, there was a pronounced regional cast to the 65-31 Senate vote. In the former slave states the vote in favor was 12 out of 30, forty percent. Senators representing the rest of the country voted in favor 53 to 13, eighty-one percent. Those areas that historically denied people their rights continue to have a residual predilection for doing so. In terms of party, all 55 Democrats and the 2 Independents who caucus with them voted yes. 8 Republicans voted yes and 31 voted no, or twenty-one percent. Republicans as a group were thus twice as opposed to gay rights as Southerners as a whole. That is remarkable.


The rest of the "lame duck" congressional session saw stunning action on a number of Obama initiatives that had been given up for dead after the "shellacking" Democrats took in the November election. They passed by such wide margins it is apparent Republican delays were primarily political rather than over any real substantive issue. Once they had the tax bill compromise they wanted in hand they went ahead and let their members vote as they wished. These included approval of the Strategic Arms Reduction Treaty (START) with Russia. It had been held up 13 times and then passed 71-26.

Another was the First Responders Health Bill that provides $4.2 billion for the police, firefighters, and others who worked ground zero after 9/11 and have developed all manner of cancers and lung diseases. That passed unanimously in the Senate and better than three to one in the House.


A much tougher regimen of inspection, essentially tripling the frequency and giving the FDA authority to order rather than request recalls, was approved in the Food Safety Act. It passed the Senate 73-25.


The lone defeat was over the DREAM Act. It would have provided a path to citizenship for an estimated 1.2 million children whose parents brought them to America illegally if they maintained a clean record and spent two years in college or the armed forces. It narrowly passed the House 216-198 but did better in the Senate, garnering a 55-41 yes vote. Unfortunately, since the GOP filibusters everything in the Senate, it did not get the 60% vote it needed for passage.

Politically, the break in the logjam shows the Republican strategy of obstinately opposing everything Obama and the Democrats have proposed for two years was a smart strategy for them. After yesterday's DADT signing and passage of the other measures, the President's approval rating improved from 41% to 56% in the overnight Opinion Research/CNN poll. Congressional Democrats got 44% approval; congressional Republicans 42%.