Lamar W. Hankins : Religion and Secularism in the Public Square

Sen. John F. Kennedy speaks attempts to allay fears about his Caltholicism before the Greater Houston Ministerial Association on Sept. 12, 1960. Photo from Houston Chronicle / AP.
Religion and secularism in the public square

Opposing the promotion of religion and religious practices by government is not the same as opposing religious expression...

By Lamar W. Hankins / The Rag Blog / March 13, 2012

Whenever he speaks, it has become common for Republican presidential aspirant Rick Santorum to state that because of the beliefs or actions of various public figures or the society at large, people of faith no longer have a role in the public square.

Santorum has claimed at various times that this was the position of John F. Kennedy, and is the position of President Obama. And he seems to believe that there are others, many others, who want to prevent religious people from having their say about public policy.

A fair and complete reading of what John F. Kennedy said in 1960 cannot possibly lead to such a conclusion. If anything, Barack Obama sometimes has seemed to agree with Santorum on this issue.

With this repeated assertion, Santorum makes what is often called a “straw man” argument. He has set up a false premise so that he can easily knock it down. But this straw man argument has a purpose beyond mere deception: to galvanize the evangelical vote in his favor. And many evangelicals claim that if the government doesn’t promote their brand of Christianity, then they are being denied access to the public square.

To understand the deceit inherent in this argument, we need to understand what is meant by the “public square.” Generally, and quite literally, the public square is an open public space found near the center of a community and used for public gatherings. It may refer also to all areas of public property which may be used for a variety of events, either with or without permission of the government that controls the property -- reference the Occupy Movement in the last half year.

In another sense, public square refers to the use of public places for exercising our rights to free speech. Some communities have areas where people hold forth on whatever topic may interest them and the passers-by who linger to listen to what they say.

This activity was likely more prevalent in the days before the media took information to the masses through newspapers, magazines, radio, and television; and now individuals do so by email, Facebook, and tweets. Of course, we have had mail service since the founding of the country, but that was not a way to reach the masses about public policy concerns until the advent of direct-mail political campaigns, which started about 30 years ago.

In some cases, public buildings have been open for public expression, much like the open areas owned in common by the people. But normally, public expression has taken place in these venues only when the governmental authority responsible for their maintenance has allowed them to be used in this way. Otherwise, the buildings are designated for particular uses, rather than any use a member of the public desires.

For instance, a high school gymnasium or a meeting room at a city activity center is not a public forum unless a group or individual pays a fee to use the facility for such a purpose, or the government opens the facility at a specific time for the purpose of having a public forum.

When an area becomes a public place for free speech, the government may not limit what views are expressed there. All views, including religious views, may be expressed, which gets us to the claim that religion is being driven from the public square. Presidential candidate Rick Santorum recently declared that the First Amendment’s guarantee of the free exercise of religion by all Americans “means bringing everybody, people of faith and no faith, into the public square.”

On this I agree completely.

But Santorum went on to claim that presidential candidate and later President John F. Kennedy said that “faith is not allowed in the public square.” I have quoted Kennedy’s 1960 Houston speech in which he discussed this matter in previous columns and have read it many times. Nowhere in that speech did Kennedy say that faith is not allowed in the public square, but in Santorum’s mind, Kennedy’s views would “create a purely secular public square cleansed of all religious wisdom and the voice of religious people of all faiths.”

Santorum’s thoughts on this issue are so ridiculous that I address them only to suggest that Santorum has it wrong. Kennedy was not trying to drive religion or religious values from the public square with his 1960 speech to a group of Protestant ministers. He was trying to allay fears among Protestants that, as a Catholic, he would perform presidential duties under orders from the Pope.

Of course, considering Santorum’s membership in Opus Dei, which strictly follows traditional Catholic doctrine, he might seek the Pope’s advice on U.S. policy were he to become President.

But this is not the first time a political figure has distorted the views of Americans to deal with a fictitious issue. In 2006, Barack Obama spoke about religion in public life in a speech at a religious conference in which he accused secularists of asking “believers to leave their religion at the door before entering the public square.” He also equated secularism with a lack of moral values, as though moral values come only from religion.

While I know more religious people than secularists, I have never read or heard a secularist (a non-religious person) who claims that religion and religious ideas are forbidden in the public square. What I have often thought, however, is that if your only argument on a matter of public importance is that God has a position on the issue, you might not have a winning argument.

God’s views are hard to document -- something I learned as a pre-ministerial student at a Methodist-related university. Even the “holy texts” leave much room for interpretation and differences of opinion about meaning.

In 2002, a San Marcos city council member explained his vote in favor of a resolution supporting the War in Iraq by quoting Ecclesiastes -- “there’s a time for war.” I thought then that the remark was less than shallow and a poor excuse for actual thinking about the matter. Of course, people use “holy texts” frequently to bolster some position or other -- against homosexuals, against prostitutes, against money-lending, against slavery; or in favor of slavery, child-beating, war, adulterer-stoning, capital punishment, mass murder, etc.

As to the origin of moral values, perhaps the most universal moral precept is what we usually term The Golden Rule: do unto others as you would have them do unto you. It has ancient origins that have been traced back nearly four millennia to the birth of writing in Egypt (though writing may have begun about the same time in Mesopotamia). But even the Golden Rule has its drawbacks. I certainly would not want a delusional or masochistic person treating me the way she might want to be treated.

What is important to me is that moral values do not depend on religion. Moral values have risen wherever there are people capable of thinking about themselves as distinct entities related to others. In fact, self-reflection may be what distinguishes humans from other species.

In America’s public square, broadly conceived, all people can be participants in the discussion. Perhaps the most inclusive definition of the public square is found in David E. Guinn’s paper written for The Encyclopedia of American Civil Liberties:

[The public square is] that forum in which the people discuss, debate, and evaluate public activities with the idea of persuading their compatriots and influencing the state in the development, enactment and enforcement of public policy. It is a forum, by definition, available to all...

The public square is not necessarily a place or a building. Today, forums are developed anywhere ideas can be discussed. In the on-line world, anyone wanting to make a comment can participate in that discussion.

As anyone who has read the Constitution knows, religion is mentioned three times -- to guarantee religious freedom, to prohibit government establishment of religion, and to assure that there be no religious test for holding public office. God does not appear in the document except in relation to the date given at the end.

This should not prevent God and religion from entering public discussions, but it does suggest that the government should neither dominate religion, nor religion government. Opposing the promotion of religion and religious practices by government is not the same as opposing religious expression in the public square. Those who equate the two are not being intellectually honest.

According to a 2011 study by the nonprofit, nonpartisan research and education organization Public Religion Research Institute, “Nearly two-thirds (66 percent) of Americans agree that we must maintain a strict separation of church and state.” And 88% of Americans “strongly affirm the principles of religious freedom, religious tolerance, and separation of church and state.” Religious freedom is for everyone.

Contrary to the assertions of people like Rick Santorum and those who use fear to promote their theocratic views, the public square in America is doing fine, open to all ideas, religious as well as secular. And the public square can be used to promote moral values by everyone who has moral values, be they religious or secular.

It is possible to be good without God, even if some people claim otherwise. If you don’t agree, just listen to the values being expressed in the public square and observe the public behaviors represented there. Morality is not exclusive to our religious brethren, nor does being religious assure moral behavior.

[Lamar W. Hankins, a former San Marcos, Texas, city attorney, is also a columnist for the San Marcos Mercury. This article © Freethought San Marcos, Lamar W. Hankins. Read more articles by Lamar W. Hankins on The Rag Blog.]

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Bill Ayers : Doublespeak at the University of Wyoming

Doublespeak at the University of Wyoming

"President Tom Buchanan's self-satisfied bromides do nothing to disguise the fact that the principle of free and open intellectual exchange has suffered a defeat at the University of Wyoming. As the AAUP has argued since 1915, it is precisely prevailing public opinion that must not shape what views get heard on campus." -- Cary Nelson, national president of the American Association of University Professors

By Bill Ayers / The Rag Blog / April 6, 2010

On March 30, 2010, officials at the University of Wyoming, citing “security threats” and “controversy,” canceled two talks I was invited to give in early April, one a public lecture entitled “Trudge Toward Freedom: Moral Commitment and Ethical Action,” and the other, a talk to faculty and graduate students called “Teaching and Research in the Public Interest: Solidarity and Identity.” I’d been invited in August 2009, but one week before I was to travel to Laramie, I was told I had been “disinvited.”

In February, as the University began to publicize my scheduled visit, a campaign to rescind the invitation was initiated on right-wing blogs, accelerating quickly to a wider space where a demonizing and dishonest narrative dominated all discussion. A wave of hateful messages and death threats hit the University, and was joined soon enough by a few political leaders and wealthy donors instructing officials in ominous tones to cancel my visit to the campus.

On March 28 an administrator wrote to tell me that the University was receiving vicious e-mails and threatening letters, as well as promises of physical disruption were I to show up. This is becoming drearily familiar to me, as I’ll explain.

A particularly despicable note from Frank Smith who lives in Cheyenne and is active in the Wyoming Patriot Alliance, said, “Maybe someone could take him out and show him the Matthew Sheppard (sic) Commerative (sic) Fence and he could bless it or something.” He was referring to Matthew Shepard, the young gay man who was tortured and murdered in 1998, left to die tied to a storm fence outside Laramie.

Republican candidate for Governor Ron Micheli released a letter he’d sent to all members of the University of Wyoming Board of Trustees asking them to rescind the invitation. Matt Mead, another gubernatorial candidate, said through a press release that while he is a self-described “fervent believer in free speech and the free exchange of ideas,” that still allowing me to speak would be “reprehensible.” He concluded that I should have “no place lecturing our students.”

I sympathized with the University, and told the folks I was in touch with how sorry I was that all of this was happening to them. I also said that I thought it was a bit of a tempest in a tea pot, and that it would surely pass. Certainly no matter what a couple of thugs threatened to do, I said, I thought that Wyoming law enforcement could get me to the podium, and I would handle myself from there, as I do elsewhere. I said I thought we should stand together and refuse to accede to these kinds of pressures to demonize someone and suppress students’ right to freely engage in open dialogue.

After all a public university is not the personal fiefdom or the political clubhouse of the governor, and donors are not permitted to call the shots when it comes to the content or conduct of academic matters. We should not allow ourselves to collapse in fear if a small mob gathers with torches at the gates.

I wouldn’t force myself on the University, of course, but I felt that canceling would be terribly unfair to the faculty and students who had invited me, and would send a big message that bullying works. It would be another step down the slippery slope of giving up on the precious ideal of a free university in a free society.

President Tom Buchanan, University of Wyoming.
No good. On March 30, 2010 the University posted an announcement of the cancellation of my visit with a long and rambling comment from President Tom Buchanan. He begins with the obligatory assertion that academic freedom is a core principle of the University, but quickly adds that “freedom requires a commensurate dose of responsibility.” We are charged to enact free speech and thought “in concert with mutual respect.”

Nothing that I did or said in this matter was disrespectful or irresponsible, and yet, in the absence of specific references, readers are led to imagine all kinds of offenses.

The announcement is punctuated with a deep defensiveness: anyone who thinks the University “caved in to external pressure,” Buchanan writes, would be “incorrect.” Anticipating what any casual observer would conclude, he builds a strained and somewhat desperate counter-narrative. Buchanan pleads that UW is “one of the few institutions remaining in today’s environment that garners the confidence of the public,” and that a speech by me would somehow undermine that confidence.

He concludes that “this episode illustrated an opportunity to hear and critically evaluate a variety of ideas thoughtfully, through open, reasoned, and civil debate, it also demonstrates that we must be mindful of the real consequences our actions and decisions have on others.”

That’s some sentence, and while it’s impossible to know definitively what he’s referring to as the “episode” (it might be the public lecture itself, but then it could be the cancellation of the lecture, or even the barbarians at the gates threatening to burn the place down, or withhold funds, that would provide the opportunity to critically evaluate matters).

It has an unmistakable Orwellian ring: we canceled that lecture as an expression of our support for lectures! And it’s eerily similar to the classics: we destroyed that village in order to save it! Work will make you free! War is peace!

One of the truly weird qualities of the Buchanan statement is a hole in its center, the deafening silence concerning why the campaign against me was organized in the first place. The reason is familiar to me as noted: in the 1960’s I was a leader of the militant anti-war group, Students for a Democratic Society, and then a founder of the Weather Underground, an organization that carried out dramatic symbolic attacks against several monuments to war and racism, crossed lines of legality, of propriety, and perhaps even of common sense.

And then during the 2008 presidential election I was unwittingly and unwillingly thrust upon the stage because I had known -- like thousands of others -- Barack Obama in Chicago. The infamous charge that the candidate was “pallin around with terrorists,” designed to injure Obama, also demonized me.

I’ve been an educator and professor for decades, but the hard right has accelerated the lunacy against thousands of folks -- activists and artists, academics and theorists, outspoken radical thinkers -- and wherever possible mounted campaigns exactly like the one in Wyoming.

Often university officials stand up on principle and resist the howling mob, as they did recently at St. Mary’s in California; sometimes -- as at a student-run conference at the University of Pittsburgh in March -- they compromise, restricting access to talks and surrounding a speaker with unwanted and unnecessary police protection; sometimes, as in this case, the university turns and runs. It’s a sad sight.

Of course I wasn’t invited to speak about any of this, and it’s unlikely any of it would have come up without the active campaigning and noisy thunder from the relatively tiny group that is the ultra-right.

I would have focused my talk on the unique characteristics of education in a democracy, an enterprise that rests on the twin pillars of enlightenment and liberation, knowledge and human freedom. Education engages dynamic questions of morality and ethics, identity and location, agency and action.

We want to know more, to see more, to experience more in order to do more -- to be more competent and powerful and capable in our projects and our pursuits, to be more astute and aware and wide-awake, more fully engaged in the world that we inherit, the world we are simultaneously destined to change.

To deny students the right to question the circumstances of their lives, and to wonder how they might be otherwise, is to deny democracy itself.

It’s reasonable to assume that education in a democracy is distinct from education under a dictatorship or a monarchy; surely school leaders in fascist Germany or Albania or Saudi Arabia or apartheid South Africa all agreed, for example, that students should behave well, stay away from drugs and crime, do their homework, study hard, and master the subject matter; they also graduated fine scientists and musicians and athletes, so none of those things differentiate a democratic education from any other.

What makes education in a democracy, at least theoretically, distinct is a commitment to a particularly precious and fragile ideal: every human being is of infinite and incalculable value, each a unique intellectual, emotional, physical, spiritual, and creative force. Every human being is born free and equal in dignity and rights; each is endowed with reason and conscience, and deserves, then, a sense of solidarity, brotherhood and sisterhood, recognition and respect.

Democracy is geared toward participation and engagement, and that points to an educational system in which the fullest development of all is seen as the necessary condition for the full development of each, and conversely, that the fullest development of each is necessary for the full development of all.

In a vibrant and participatory democracy, we might conclude that whatever the wisest and most privileged parents want for their children is precisely the baseline and standard for what the wider community wants for all of its children. If children of privilege get to have small classes, abundant resources, and a curriculum based on opportunities to experiment and explore, ask questions and pursue answers to the furthest limit -- if the Obama kids, for example, attend such a school, one where they also find a respected and unionized teacher corps -- shouldn’t that be good enough for the kids in public schools everywhere?

Any other ideal for our schools, in John Dewey’s words, “is narrow and unlovely; acted upon it destroys our democracy.”

We want our students to be able to think for themselves, to make judgments based on evidence and argument, to develop minds of their own. We want them to ask fundamental questions -- who in the world am I? How did I get here and where am I going? What in the world are my choices? How in the world shall I proceed? -- and to pursue answers wherever they might take them. Our efforts focus not on the production of things so much as on the production of fully developed human beings who are capable of controlling and transforming their own lives, citizens who can participate fully in civic life.

Professor William Ayers appears during an interview on ABC’s Good Morning America. Photo from AP.
Teaching in a democracy encourages students to develop initiative and imagination, the capacity to name the world, to identify the obstacles to their full humanity, and the courage to act upon whatever the known demands. Education in a democracy is always about opening doors and opening minds as students forge their own pathways into a wider world.

How do our schools at every level -- K-16 -- measure up to the democratic ideal?

Much of what we call schooling forecloses or shuts down or walls off meaningful choice-making. Much of it is based on obedience and conformity, the hallmarks of every authoritarian regime. Much of it banishes the unpopular, squirms in the presence of the unorthodox, hides the unpleasant. There’s no space for skepticism, irreverence, or even doubt.

While many long for an education that is transcendent and powerful, we find ourselves too-often locked in situations that reduce schooling to a kind of glorified clerking that passes along a curriculum of received wisdom and predigested and often false bits of information. This is a recipe for disaster in the long run.

Educators, students, and citizens must press for an education worthy of a democracy, including an end to sorting people into winners and losers through expensive standardized tests which act as pseudo-scientific forms of surveillance; an end to starving public schools -- including public higher education -- of needed resources and then blaming teachers for dismal outcomes; and an end to the rapidly accumulating “educational debt,” the resources due to communities historically segregated, under-funded and under-served.

All children and youth in a democracy, regardless of economic circumstance, deserve full access to richly-resourced classrooms led by caring, qualified, and generously compensated teachers.

We might try now to create open spaces in our schools and our various communities where we expect fresh and startling winds to blow, unaccustomed winds that are sure to electrify and confound and fascinate us. We begin by throwing open the windows. We declare that in this corner of this place -- in this open space we are constructing together -- people will begin to experience themselves as powerful authors of their own narratives, actors in their own dramas, the essential architects and creators of their own lives, participants in a dynamic and inter-connected community-in-the-making.

Here they will discover a zillion ways to articulate their own desires and demands and questions. Here everyone will live in search of rather than in accordance with or in accommodation to. Here we will join one another and our democratic futures can be born.

A primary job of teachers and scholars and journalists, and a responsibility of all engaged citizens, is to challenge orthodoxy, dogma, and mindless complacency, to be skeptical of all authoritative claims, to interrogate and trouble the given and the taken-for-granted. The growth of knowledge, insight, and understanding depends on that kind of effort, and the inevitable clash of ideas that follows must be nourished and not crushed.

As campuses contract and constrain, the main victims become truth, honesty, integrity, curiosity, imagination, freedom itself. When college campuses fall silent, other victims include the high school history teacher on the west side of Chicago or in Laramie or Cheyenne, the English literature teacher in Detroit, or the math teacher in an Oakland middle school. They and countless others immediately get the message: be careful what you say; stay close to the official story; stick to the authorized text; keep quiet with your head covered.

In Brecht’s play Galileo the great astronomer set forth into a world dominated by a mighty church and an authoritarian power: “The cities are narrow and so are the brains,” he declared recklessly.

Intoxicated with his own insights, Galileo found himself propelled toward revolution. Not only did his radical discoveries about the movement of the stars free them from the “crystal vault” that received truth insistently claimed fastened them to the sky, but his insights suggested something even more dangerous: that we, too, are embarked on a great voyage, that we are free and without the easy support that dogma provides.

Here Galileo raised the stakes and risked taking on the establishment in the realm of its own authority, and it struck back fiercely. Forced to renounce his life’s work under the exquisite pressure of the Inquisition, he denounced what he knew to be true, and was welcomed back into the church and the ranks of the faithful, but exiled from humanity -- by his own word.

A former student confronted him in the street then: “Many on all sides followed you... believing that you stood, not only for a particular view of the movement of the stars, but even more for the liberty of teaching -- in all fields. Not then for any particular thoughts, but for the right to think at all. Which is in dispute.”

This is surely in play today: the right to talk to whomever you please, the right to read and wonder, the right to pursue an argument into uncharted spaces, the right to challenge the state or the church and its orthodoxy in the public square. The right to think at all.

This is some of what I would have discussed in Wyoming, but that will not happen, at least not this week. Canceling this talk underlines the urgency of having multiple and far-ranging speeches, dialogue, and discussions at every level and throughout the public square.

[William Ayers is Distinguished Professor of Education and Senior University Scholar at the University of Illinois at Chicago.]

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Sen. Al Franken : The Internet is the Town Square

This may be the clearest, most useful exposition on Net Neutrality that I have yet seen.

-- Thorne Dreyer / The Rag Blog

The Internet:
It's not a truck, It's a town square

The Internet is a platform for speech, debate, creativity. And it is neutral. And government has a role to play in making sure it stays that way.

By Senator Al Franken / October 7, 2009

As you know, I got to the Senate a bit late.

But I didn’t get here too late. Because we’re debating issues of major consequence right now -- health care, the economy, the course of the war in Afghanistan. And one of the issues you don’t hear about as much -- but one that will impact our lives, our economy and, yes, the future of music -- is Net Neutrality.

Several years ago, in the middle-to-late 90s, I went and gave a speech to the folks at DARPA, the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency. I remember asking what cool things they were working on.

One guy took me aside and told me he was working on an unmanned aerial vehicle the size of an insect. I was really excited about that, though I’m pretty sure it didn’t happen. But they did succeed in creating the ARPA-net forty years ago. And the ARPA-net grew into the Internet... which is almost as cool.

And today, the Internet is the town square. Thomas Jefferson famously said that given a choice between government without newspapers and newspapers without government, he “would not hesitate to prefer the latter.” If he were here today, I think he’d see the Internet in much the same light.

Now, fortunately, we don’t have to make that choice because the Internet is a platform for speech, debate, creativity. And it is neutral.

And government has a role to play in making sure it stays that way. Let me add that this is the fundamental political philosophy that I bring as a senator to so many of our national challenges. It’s not government’s job to make sure that everyone gets to the finish line, but government does have a role to play in making sure everyone can at least get to the starting line.

That’s how the Internet developed. The FCC treated the Web as a common carrier similar to the phone – meaning that anyone had the right to access it however they wanted so long as they weren’t breaking the law.

But as high-speed Internet became available, the cable and telecom industries convinced the FCC to change the rules -- to give corporate Internet service providers the power to use “network management” as code for “finding ways to squeeze more cash out of their networks.” As a result, the freedom and openness that are the Internet’s hallmarks are being seriously challenged.

Moving at the same speed

Right now, a blog loads just as quickly as a corporate Web page. An e-mail from your mother comes through just as smoothly as a bill notification from your bank. An independent bookstore can process your order as quickly as Barnes & Noble. A garage band can stream its songs just as easily as a multi-platinum superband like REM can.

But recently, business executives from top ISPs have declared their interest in offering “prioritized” Internet service to companies that can pay for it. In other words, a company like Microsoft or Amazon could pay for its content to be delivered over a high-speed network -- relegating a blogger or a mom-and-pop business to the slow lane.

That would transform the Internet from a free, open and competitive playing field into a “pay-for-play” arena in which citizen bloggers, nonprofits and small businesses are simply muscled out by major media conglomerates. That would transform the World Wide Web into a system of separate and unequal networks.

Censoring the Net

And it raises two major issues, as I see it.

First, it raises the issue of censorship. Once service providers are in the business of deciding what kind of content moves at what speed, they come very close to deciding what kind of content moves at all.

Second, this is about entrepreneurship and innovation. Great innovations only take place on an even playing field, where the little guys can go head-to-head with the big guys. If we change the rules of the game to benefit the big guys, innovation will suffer.

So the issue here isn’t only what might be blocked, but what might never be developed in the first place. Let me talk for a minute about each.

First, censorship. Take a look at Iran. In Iran, every Internet provider uses filters to control the Web sites and e-mails that users can access. They use a technology called “Deep Packet Inspection” to filter every e-mail, Facebook post and Tweet that anyone sends, and –- in real time – block content that’s deemed objectionable.

You might say, “Well, that’s a terrible situation, but it’s happening in Iran, and we are not Iran.” No, we’re not Iran, but that isn’t stopping several companies from taking the same or similar technology for a test drive.

First, you may remember that in 2007, Verizon refused to allow the pro-choice group NARAL to send text messages to its supporters – even though they had signed up to receive them. Verizon’s explanation was that it had the right to block “controversial or unsavory” messages. Like, for example, that a woman should have control of her reproductive system.

A second example: Comcast has used Deep Packet Inspection to block lawful peer-to-peer applications.

And you may remember that during a live Webcast of a 2007 Pearl Jam concert, AT&T killed the audio for a few beats. Turns out the missing lyrics were critical of President Bush.

ISPs want to profit from a closed Net

Stifling openness on the Internet isn’t always about censorship. In the future, it could simply be a product of business at work – of ISPs turning a profit. The chief technology officer for BellSouth recently said, “I can buy a coach standby ticket or a first class ticket... I can get two-day air or six-day ground.” He asserted that the Internet should be the same way.

The CEO of Verizon made the same point when he said, “We need to make sure there is the right economic model... we need to pay for the pipe.” And one provider proposed a system where consumers could pay a cheap monthly rate for light Internet use, a higher fee for heavier use... but with an exception for people who accessed only the content created by that network provider.

That’s a business motive, but it has the effect of limiting speech, and as far as I’m concerned, free speech limited -- or free speech delayed -- is the same as free speech denied. Because the truth is that the Internet is the town hall of the 21st century.

In the 1997 decision Reno v. ACLU, Justice Stevens wrote:

“Through the use of chat rooms, any person with a phone line can become a town crier with a voice that resonates farther than it could from any soapbox. Through the use of Web pages, mail exploders, and newsgroups, the same individual can become a pamphleteer.”

I serve on the Judiciary Committee, and on my fourth day in the Senate -- my first hearing on that committee -- we were dealing with the nomination of Judge (now Justice) Sonia Sotomayor.

I asked her specifically about whether she thought the American public has a compelling First Amendment interest in ensuring the Internet stays open and accessible. And if I could paraphrase her answer, it was “yes.” As noisy and messy as it may be, the Internet is a democracy. And because of that, it is a critical part of our democracy. But without strong legislation prohibiting ISPs from regulating content, that may not always be the case.

Let me add that among the people who would be hurt the most are rural users, who, like many in my home state of Minnesota, often only have access to a single ISP. If that rural ISP decides to favor or cut special deals with big companies -- or with the companies that ISP also owns –- then rural users would only receive the viewpoints that the ISP favors. ISP profit margins should never come at the cost of a free and open Internet.

The economic future of our country

While ISPs may benefit from a closed Internet, we all lose. And it’s not just the material that could be slowed or censored. It’s innovation itself.

In America, we think that an individual with a big idea is just as worthy of competing as a company with a big market share. But the loss of a neutral Internet means that the market is no longer competitive. It’s no longer a meritocracy.

Consider the case of YouTube. YouTube was founded in 2005 above a pizzeria in San Mateo, California. At the time, the most popular video application was something called Google Video -- an app that most people came to realize was slow and clunky.

Because it was so well designed, YouTube quickly gained a user base, and gradually overcame Google Video. As we know, Google actually bought YouTube and retired Google Video.

This all happened because YouTube and Google Video competed on the same playing field, accessed the same Internet, and, in a meritocratic system, consumers saw that YouTube was better. But in a world where Google could pay an ISP for “premium” access, Google Video could have secured priority status, leaving YouTube on a second-tier track. YouTube would have loaded too slowly to win viewers. We’d be stuck with Google Video.

Again, what’s at stake here isn’t just what could be taken away. It’s what could never be created in the first place.

The Internet has been a tremendous platform for innovation and entrepreneurship. Guaranteeing its continued success isn’t just about giving consumers better apps; it’s about the economic future of our country.

The FCC takes on Net Neutrality

Now, I know many of you in the music and entertainment industry are concerned about where Net Neutrality fits in with your efforts against piracy. Having spent much of my life as a writer and entertainer, I own copyrights, too, and I share your concerns.

But Net Neutrality is and must be explicitly a matter of protecting lawful content, applications and usage. Whether we do it through statute or regulation, ISPs must and will retain the right to combat unlawful usage of the Internet.

Now, how we do that technologically is an enormous question. You may remember when Sen. Ted Stevens insightfully pointed out that the Internet “is not something you just dump something on. It’s not a truck. It’s a series of tubes.”

In making that statement, I think Sen. Stevens illustrated why some members of Congress might not be the right people to answer this technological question. That’s why it is good news that the FCC is now taking the lead on this battle.

Recently, Chairman Julius Genachowski announced that the commission would be issuing pro-Net Neutrality regulations. The commission rules will emphasize nondiscrimination –- barring ISPs from favoring or disfavoring particular Internet content or applications –- and transparency, requiring ISPs to be open about their network management practices. And Genachowski’s right.

An ISP should not be able to prioritize certain traffic over other traffic. A company cannot pay to have a “fast track” over the Internet.

And we need to be serious about transparency. ISPs should have to disclose to consumers any practices that may affect communications between a user and an application, content or service provider. This ensures that when ISPs do take actions that slow down one content provider and speed up another, users will find out.

We also need to acknowledge that sometimes, it is citizens, and not the government, that are in the best position to protect the Internet. We need to empower Internet users to file complaints directly with the FCC, and to allow them to recover damages in certain cases.

Finally, and I think the FCC will agree with me on this one, we need to give the experts at the FCC the flexibility they need to solve this complicated problem.

So rest assured, even though Sen. Stevens is no longer here to lend us his “tube” expertise, I will be standing ready to work with knowledgeable leaders in Congress -- Sen. Dorgan, Sen. Snowe, Congressman Markey, and Congresswoman Eshoo -- to make sure we get it right.

For the first time, it looks like we might actually do this. The FCC is on board, and so are critical leaders in Congress.

Obama on Net Neutrality

In addition, President Obama has consistently voiced support for Net Neutrality. Recently, he put Net Neutrality at the top of his national innovation agenda. So although previous efforts to pass Net Neutrality have failed, we now have both a president and an FCC chairman who strongly support the cause.

This is not to say that this debate is over and won. Some of my colleagues have already introduced legislation to block Net Neutrality efforts. And just last week, a Washington Post editorial declared that “federal regulators should not be telling Internet service providers how to run their businesses,” and that Net Neutrality will “micromanage what has been a vibrant and well-functioning marketplace.”

Ignore for a moment the irony that a leading newspaper would come out against a bill whose purpose includes protection of free speech, and let me say that Net Neutrality is not a matter of needless government intervention. It is a necessary response to verifiable instances of ISPs discriminating against users based on the applications they use or the content they access, and of ISPs voicing their support for a separate and unequal Internet.

It is a 21st-century reiteration of one of our most important constitutional rights –- the right to free speech. And it doesn’t interfere with the free market. It protects the free market.

A century ago, President Teddy Roosevelt wrote, “Above all else, we must strive to keep the highways of commerce open to all on equal terms.”

He may have been writing in a different time, and addressing different technology, but his purpose is just as relevant today.

[From a speech delivered by Sen. Franken at the Future of Music Coalition Policy Summit at Georgetown University in Washington, D.C.]

Sen. Al Franken on keeping a neutral net


Source / Save The Internet / freepress

The Rag Blog

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UofM Students: It's About the First Amendment

Porn Flick Screening at U-Md. Still On, as Is Funding Threat
By Maria Glod / April 5, 2009

Neither side is prepared to lay down its sword.

University of Maryland students -- protesting what they see as an intrusion by Big Brother -- are planning to defy authority and screen a hard-core porn movie in the name of free speech and academic freedom.

"What we're upset about is somebody is trying to control what goes on on campus. This is symbolic," said Liz Ciavolino, a sophomore who is active in the group Feminism Without Borders.

In response, one conservative state legislator revived his threat: If the porn flick is shown on campus, the university might just kiss some state dollars goodbye.

A university spokesman declined to comment last night.

The tale of the scheduled screening of "Pirates II: Stagnetti's Revenge" has roiled the university's flagship campus and hit newspapers as far away as Australia.

The movie was initially to be shown in the student union last night. But university officials canceled it after Sen. Andrew P. Harris (R-Baltimore County) introduced a bill to withhold state funding from any public university that allowed the screening of a triple-X film.

The fight might have ended there. But some students, adamant that state lawmakers were practicing censorship, have launched plans to show the 2 1/2 -hour movie on campus tomorrow night, the Baltimore Sun first reported. The Student Power Party, a slate of campus leaders, has reserved a lecture room.

A discussion about free speech will precede the movie.

"It's not about porn at all," said Kenton Stalder, a junior helping to arrange the screening. "The content doesn't matter. It's the precedent of a legislator pulling funding for an entire university based on an issue of morality."

Harris, who says that X-rated belly dancers and pirates have no place in a public university, is not backing down, either. He withdrew his initial amendment to withhold funds from the operating budget but said he would consider renewing his protest as lawmakers take up the capital budget in coming weeks.

University officials "should stop any showing of it right now until a clear policy is developed by the university regarding the conditions under which a triple-X-rated, hard-core pornography movie will be shown on campus," Harris said. He said that policy should consider "the dangers of pornography, the detrimental effect on women and families, and the addictive nature of pornography."

The movie, produced by Digital Playground, has been marketed to colleges and has been shown at several across the country without major controversy. The Fresno Bee reported that an overflow crowd was turned away for lack of space during a recent screening at the University of California Davis.



Sen. Jamie B. Raskin (D-Montgomery), a professor of constitutional law at American University, said he has never watched a porn film. But he said state lawmakers have no place dictating which movies are shown on campus.

"Pornographers and censors thrive on one another," Raskin said. "I would hope that Sen. Harris would be content with having gotten the pornographers hundreds of thousands of dollars in free publicity for the movie and would leave well enough alone. They could not have paid for the publicity they got on TV and in newspapers."

[Staff writer John Wagner contributed to this report.]

Source / Washington Post

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Supremes : Mummified Dogs, Homophobes Figure into Decision on Religious Freedom

Signs from Westbury Baptist Church in Kansas: They want to build a statue of slain gay student Matthew Shepherd, with an inscription claiming he's in Hell. Photo from Westboro website godhatesfags.com
Mummified Maggie. The Supreme Court is hearing "Pleasant Grove City v. Summum." Summum is a fringe Gnostic sect that mummifies pets. Photo from Animal Mummy Gallery at Summum website.
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The Summum of All Fears...

Can a fringe religious sect that believes in mummifying pets and their owners force a landmark Supreme Court decision on free speech?
By Stephanie Mencimer / November 13, 2008

Reverend Fred Phelps, the infamous head of the Westboro Baptist Church in Kansas, runs a website called www.godhatesfags.com and wants to erect a monument in Casper, Wyoming's Historical Monument Plaza depicting Matthew Shepard, the gay University of Wyoming student who was murdered in 1998. The caption would read, "Matthew Shepard entered Hell October 12, 1998, in defiance of God's warning 'thou shalt not lie with mankind as with womankind; it is abomination.'"

The city of Casper has declined to host Phelps' monument. But whether the city can keep it out hinges on how the US Supreme Court decides a major free speech case involving a fringe religious sect that specializes in mummification of its adherents and, occasionally, their pets. If the court comes to the rescue of the religious group, whose cause civil libertarians would normally support, cities and towns across the country might have no choice but to showcase all manner of bizarre or hateful monuments, like the one proposed by Phelps.

On Wednesday, the court heard oral arguments in Pleasant Grove City v. Summum, a case that is essentially forcing the justices to decide which is worse: letting the likes of Phelps fill public plazas with a parade of horrors, or allowing governments like Pleasant Grove to discriminate against religious minorities when it comes to adorning public space. The case got its start in Utah, a perennial hotbed of church/state separation litigation, and centers on a Ten Commandments monument in Pleasant Grove's Pioneer Park. The monument is one of many erected around the country by the Fraternal Order of Eagles in the 1960s and '70s with backing from Cecile B. DeMille, who was promoting his Charlton Heston movie. The monuments have generated a host of litigation in the past few years, and at least one previous Supreme Court decision.

Summum is a small religious sect founded in 1975 by the late Summum Bonum Amon Ra (who also went by Corky). The group operates out of a pyramid in Salt Lake City and is most famous for carrying on the Egyptian tradition of mummification, a practice that is also the sect's primary source of income. Over the past 15 years, the group has become a thorn in the side of Mormon Utah towns that have public displays of the Ten Commandments. Summum first sued several towns to have the monuments removed in the mid-1990s. When those efforts failed, the group sought to erect monuments of its own, displaying its "Seven Aphorisms." Summum believe that God gave Moses the Aphorisms before he handed down the Ten Commandments, but that Moses destroyed the original tablets because the people weren't ready for the received wisdom. The Aphorisms, in the shortened version, are "Psychokinesis, Correspondence, Vibration, Opposition, Rhythm, Cause and Effect, and Gender."

As you might expect, the Utah towns, including Pleasant Grove, all said no to the Aphorism monuments. In response, Summum sued them for violating the Establishment Clause, the constitutional wall between church and state that bars the government from favoring one religion over another. These would normally be slam-dunk cases because the towns so clearly discriminated against the sect. (In Pleasant Grove's case, the town elders made up new rules for monuments after Summum's request that conveniently excluded the Aphorisms.) This being Utah, where other nontraditional religious theories are mainstream, the case is anything but simple.

In 1973, the 10th Circuit Court of Appeals, which covers Utah, ruled in Anderson v. Salt Lake City that the Ten Commandments aren't a religious symbol at all but are principally secular in nature, so governments can display them at will without any fear of violating the Establishment Clause. The case was one of the first to challenge a religious display and has remained the law of the Land of Zion ever since, even though the Supreme Court has found otherwise since then. That's why Summum's original attempts to eradicate these monuments initially failed.

Stymied, the Summum changed tactics. To get around the 10th Circuit's finding, the group argued that favoring one faith over another in public monument selection constitutes not religious discrimination under the Establishment Clause but "viewpoint discrimination," a free speech violation. That decision proved pivotal, and timely, as it was the same argument that many Christian-right groups were using to score big victories in the Supreme Court to win permission for religious groups to use public school facilities, among other things. Under its free speech argument, Summum won a trio of lawsuits, though still failed to get the Aphorisms installed. The cities of Ogden and Salt Lake chose to remove the Ten Commandments rather than install the Aphorisms. In 2003, the city of Duchesne took the extraordinary measure of privatizing a 10-by-10-foot square around its Ten Commandments monument to prevent a Summum installation.

In 2003, the group sued Pleasant Grove for violating its free speech rights. Again, the case went to federal court. But this time, the court ruled against Summum. The group appealed to the 10th Circuit, where a three-judge panel ordered Pleasant Grove to let Summum install their monument. Pleasant Grove asked for a rehearing on the case by the full circuit, which was denied. But the conflicting opinions of the judges on the rehearing issue, particularly that of Judge Michael McConnell, who is regarded as one of the country's leading experts on religion and the law, practically begged the Supreme Court to take up the case. (The decision also emboldened Reverend Phelps to make his request for the Matthew Shepard monument.) The case attracted the attention of the religious right and its leading public interest law firm, the American Center for Law & Justice, which had pioneered the use of free speech arguments to expand religion into the public sphere. But in this case it took the exact opposite position, coming out against the sect. With help from the well-known ACLJ lawyer Jay Sekulow, Pleasant Grove appealed, and Wednesday, Sekulow argued the case before the Supreme Court.

Sekulow's position in the case conflicts with his earlier arguments against religious discrimination. Based on his litigation record, you'd think he'd support more religion in public space, not less. But Sekulow and his supporters don't want just any religion in public space—just their own. They want the government to be able to discriminate among religious faiths. Christian-right groups also fear that if Pleasant Grove loses this case, Ten Commandment monuments nationwide will be threatened, and ultimately removed, as they were in Ogden and Salt Lake. Hence the brief in Summum filed by Roy Moore, the former Alabama Supreme Court chief justice who lost his job after he ignored a federal court order to remove an enormous Decalogue from his courthouse. Now head of the Foundation for Moral Law, Moore issued a statement on the Summum case saying, "Neither the U.S. Constitution nor the radical opinions of federal courts give judges a right to act as park managers to install the beliefs of a new age religion foreign to our culture and heritage."

You'd think that in a case like this, civil liberties groups would be eager to defend Summum's free speech rights from the right wingers in the high court. Instead, the case has totally befuddled the usual defenders of religious minorities. Sadly for Summum, most of those groups are sitting this one out. Americans United for Separation of Church and State and other civil liberties groups filed amicus briefs, but supporting neither side. They simply argued that the case should not be decided on free speech grounds at all and suggested that the court instead correct the 10th Circuit's screwy 1970s-era decision on the Establishment Clause that said the Ten Commandments weren't a religious icon. The ACLU chose to abstain from the case altogether. Summum's supporters are few and far between. The reason, of course, is Fred Phelps. A win for Summum would bar governments from discriminating in its choice of monuments in places like the National Mall, and essentially force federal and state authorities to either let everyone in or get rid of the monuments altogether.

As much as the ACLU and Americans United oppose the government's discrimination against a religious minority, in this case, there is simply no good outcome for them. "You're dammed if you do, you're dammed if you don't," says Ayesha Khan, the lawyer for Americans United.

The only hope for Summum is Chief Justice John Roberts' prediction in oral arguments on Wednesday: They'll be back. The current case only involves the First Amendment free speech rights. Summum never asked the court to consider whether Pleasant Grove had violated the Establishment Clause by turning down its Seven Aphorisms, which it appears the city clearly did. Roberts noted that the court could expect to see Summum before the court in about five years after it litigates the other issue. After all, Roberts asked, "What is the government doing supporting the Ten Commandments?"

[Stephanie Mencimer is a reporter in Mother Jones' Washington, DC, bureau and the author of Blocking the Courthouse Door: How the Republican Party and Its Corporate Allies Are Taking Away Your Right to Sue (Free Press, 2006).]

Source / Mother Jones

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Net Neutrality : Not a Sexy Issue, But Worth Fighting For

'The concept of net neutrality is the guiding principle of a free and open Internet.'
By Dustin Michael Harris / October 23, 2008

Does anyone remember Y2K?

I realize eight years ago seems like an eternity, another lifetime even, but think back and recall how you approached the Y2K "crisis."

Did you stock up on canned goods and batteries? Did you spend the New Year in an underground bunker?

Don't get me wrong, I'm not making fun of you if you did. At the time, a lot of people were nervous. Some people even thought it might be the end of the world. Planes were supposed to fall out of the sky, while your kitchen appliances finally exacted their revenge on you and your family.

Largely, nothing happened. Y2K was a wash. The ball dropped, the planes kept motoring along and the blender stayed put.

I bring up Y2K not because I like mentioning irrelevant pop culture items, although that is a favorite hobby of mine. Does anyone remember "Alf?" But I digress ...

No, I bring up Y2K because something good came out of it - institutions and government realized how important technology is to our society.

Many local, state and federal institutions upgraded their computer systems and improved the technology infrastructure as a result of the Y2K threat. The same is true for some corporations and private businesses.

Now, eight years later, the role of technology is even more important. We are a wired world with a wired global economy. It's no wonder that both Barack Obama and John McCain address the issue of technology and network neutrality in their campaign literature.

Network neutrality is not something you'll hear a lot about on CNN. It's not a hot button issue, but it is very important and could have lasting effects on how the Internet shapes and delivers information.

The concept of net neutrality is the guiding principle of a free and open Internet. Net neutrality prevents Internet service providers from blocking, speeding up or slowing down content based on the source.

For example, net neutrality prevents Comcast from tampering with the bandwidth regarding certain sites, essentially deciding which pages open right up and which pages won't load at all.

Understandably, major communications giants are against the concept of net neutrality. There's a lot of money to be made should ISPs be allowed to function as gatekeepers to the Internet. Users might have to purchase extra applications to open familiar sites or be forced to "pay for speed" at certain sites.

The site SavetheInternet.com has been a leader in the fight to preserve net neutrality because obviously there's more at stake than simply being able to quickly download that old Devo tune you've been dying to hear. Allowing major corporations the ability to make difficult, even restrict, some of the information we view on the Internet is a very slippery slope. In many ways, it could become the digital version of burning books.

According to each of their Web sites, Obama and McCain differ in their support for network neutrality. Obama firmly supports it, while McCain "does not believe in prescriptive regulation like 'net-neutrality,' but rather he believes that an open marketplace with a variety of consumer choices is the best deterrent against unfair practices." The McCain site goes on to champion the senator's efforts to protect consumer privacy and prevent spam.

Net neutrality is one of the many issues that will get lost in the economic firestorm we find ourselves in. But the question is, can we afford to ignore it?

Source / Naperville Sun

Thanks to Media Reform Daily / The Rag Blog

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Censorship Revisited : Tommy Smothers Gets his Due

Tommy Smothers overlooking a valley in his Sonoma vineyard - he still gets together with brother Dick to perform their routine. Photo by Kim Komenich / San Francisco Chronicle
Tommy Smothers: 'I dedicate this Emmy to all people who feel compelled to speak out, not afraid to speak to power, won't shut up and refuse to be silent.'
By Joel Selvin / October 22, 2008

"No comedian's wife thinks he's funny," Tommy Smothers says as he surveys the panoramic vista from his hilltop home and vineyard in the middle of Sonoma's Valley of the Moon. "The first few years of the marriage, maybe. I was funny as hell the first couple of years."

Smothers first repaired to this peak 40 years ago to lick his wounds after CBS abruptly pulled the rug out from under the top-rated "Smothers Brothers Comedy Hour" on the eve of its fourth season, the culmination of constant harassment and surveillance by the network's censors during the show's three seasons.

At last month's Emmy Awards, Smothers accepted a belated trophy for his contributions to the team that won the 1968 writing award for the show's final season; Smothers left his name off at the time, fearing the inclusion would draw controversy. When he accepted his Emmy last month, he was typically plainspoken and eloquent at the same time, a Smothers hallmark. (The speech is on YouTube.)

"Freedom of expression and freedom of speech aren't really important," he told the audience, "unless they're heard. The freedom of hearing is as important as the freedom of speaking. It's hard for me to stay silent when I keep hearing that peace is only attainable through war. There's nothing more scary than watching ignorance in action. So I dedicate this Emmy to all people who feel compelled to speak out, not afraid to speak to power, won't shut up and refuse to be silent."

September was a watershed moment for the Smothers Brothers in another respect: The long-awaited release of the comedy show's third and final season on DVD, this time including the portions of the show CBS censored, including Harry Belafonte singing "Don't Stop the Carnival" as footage of violence outside the 1968 Democratic National Convention in Chicago rolled behind him.

NPR television critic David Bianculli will publish his oral history of the Smothers Brothers show next year. What started as a last-ditch effort by the network to salvage TV's dying variety-show format became a landmark series in television history.

Act of repression

The muzzling of the Smothers Brothers at the height of the Vietnam War and the era of student protest was an emblematic act of political repression three months after Richard Nixon was elected president. But the firing of the Smothers Brothers has echoed through the years, becoming a case study in mass media censorship. The brothers, who arrived on the small screen as clean-cut, wholesome folk song parodists, stumbled into the turbulent times.

"Instead of vacuous comedy, we thought, 'Let's do something with some bite,' " Smothers, says. "There was the Vietnam War, voters' rights - all sorts of issues that we thought we could reflect and develop a point of view. We didn't even know it was important until they said 'You can't say this.' Forty years later, people are still talking about it. Isn't that amazing?"

The Emmy sits on the top of a grand piano cluttered with family photos. Smothers, 71, and his wife of 18 years, Marcy, have two teenagers (Smothers also has a grown son from an earlier marriage). Medical school skeletons, some wearing costumes, are stationed around the spacious living room that looks out over the valley. Smothers sits in a chair next to a table with a pair of lamps shaped like giant kernels of candy corn.

"I had mixed feelings," he says about the award. "It's in the past - what's the difference? Then my wife and kids got excited about it, and I started to think maybe this is pretty cool. I started to think about what am I going to say. Because we were silenced for it 40 years ago doesn't mean we have been converted. So I made my little statement. Steve Martin introduced me. My brother thought it was cool, pretty neat."

From the standpoint of today's TV fare, the old Smothers Brothers shows look decidedly tame. One of the first bits that raised the network's ire involved nothing more flagrant than comedian David Steinberg saying Moses burned his feet on the bush, and "there are many Old Testament scholars who to this day believe it was the first mention of Christ in the Bible."

But it wasn't the lame anti-war jokes or comedian and presidential candidate Pat Paulsen's editorials on gun control that earned the "Smothers Brothers Comedy Hour" its place in history. "The silencing made it more important, the issue of being censored," Smothers says. "If they had just not picked up the show, it wouldn't have been that big an issue."

Government censorship isn't necessary in a free-enterprise system, Smothers says, citing reasons that prove he hasn't mellowed a bit in four decades. "The country doesn't have to stop people from saying stuff. The corporations do it for them. Look at the Dixie Chicks. The corporations are fighting things for other people. That's fascism in action. Fascism is when private industry owns the government."

Tom and Dick Smothers started out as a folk-singing comedy team, then got political on their "Comedy Hour" in the '60s. SF Chronicle File Photo 1971.
Developing the act

The two brothers (and a sister - Tom, Dick and Sherry) grew up in Southern California. Tommy and Dickie began to develop an act while students at San Jose State, an act they polished at North Beach nightclubs in the '50s. Their 1961 album, "Live at the Purple Onion," established them as leading clowns on the folk-music scene. They are celebrating their 50th anniversary in show business and perform as many as 60 concerts a year.

"We were famous before we were good," Smothers says. "Now we're good, not famous."

The act has changed little over the years. Tommy Smothers started playing yo-yo about 25 years ago - when he does yo-yo tricks, they are funny, and when they don't work, even funnier - and he usually carries one in his pocket.

Tom and Dick Smothers not only mined the fascination of the day with folk songs, but also the passive-aggressive relationship between brothers - "Mom always liked you best" - a role that often spilled over into their offstage life.

"We've been 2 feet apart for 50 years. He's always on my left. I'm always on his right. Same with our baby pictures. We've been looking at each other that far away. We'll get offstage and he'll look at me and say, 'When are you going to have that cyst fixed?' "

Smothers says all that stopped after an 18-hour couples-counseling session about 15 years ago.

The counselor "changed everything basically by saying, 'Stop the nonsense - you're professionals, cut out all this brother s-,' " Smothers says. "We could fight. We could clear a room."

Smothers replanted 45 acres on the hillsides surrounding his home after phylloxera took the old grapevines. When he and Dick, 68, first moved to Sonoma and bought property outside Kenwood, they started producing Smothers Brothers Wine, but long ago changed the name to Remick Ridge, after their grandfather.

"People would say Smothers Brothers is a good wine, but it has a funny finish - things like that," says Smothers.

Dick left Sonoma long ago for Florida, but his older brother has developed a keen appreciation of the role the straight man plays in comedy teams.

"The straight man in vaudeville was paid more than the comic," he says. "That was the skilled position. The straight man could introduce acts, and you could put him with a funny guy and have him control that. If you don't believe the straight man, you don't believe the comic. Look at Bud Abbott, Dean Martin, Dan Rowan. I learned this in 50 years in the business - the quality of the straight man defines how good the act is."

When he first moved to the property, he lived in a cabana next to the swimming pool and then slowly built a barn, garage and magnificent home over the years. He has grapevines trained to grow along his rooftop, a tomato plant sprawling onto his patio and rosebushes he prunes himself.

The firing clobbered the Smothers Brothers, who spent years recovering their careers and, in many ways, their lives as well.

"It took three years to get my sense of humor back," he says. "I started taking everything seriously. I became the temporary poster boy for the First Amendment, freedom of speech. Twenty years later, there's Howard Stern."

Humor reclaimed

He and his brother went off separately, as Smothers struggled to find himself. "Everything was so serious," he says. "Then I saw Jane Fonda on the 'Tonight Show' one night talking about burning babies. I think Cesar Chavez was on the same show. It was like an epiphany for me - there was no joy, no sense of humor, no laughter. It just turned me around."

He leaves and returns with a calligraphic print he and his wife sent out some years before as a Christmas card. It is a quote from Alistair Cooke that reads:

"In the best of times, our days are numbered anyway. So it would be a crime against nature for any generation to take the world crisis so solemnly, that it put off enjoying those things for which we were designed in the first place: the opportunity to do good work, to enjoy friends, to fall in love, to hit a ball, and to bounce a baby."

With a playwright's timing, his wife arrives, fresh from working out, a trim woman who hosts a radio talk show in Santa Rosa.

"OK, so she's 25 years younger," says Smothers. "If she dies, she dies."

"I didn't think that was funny the first time," says his wife.

In Tommy Smothers' life, everybody else is a straight man.

Source / SFGate

Thanks to Carlos Lowry / The Rag Blog

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Report from Nicaragua : Repression in the Revolution

Nicaraguan president Daniel Ortega when he was a leader of the Sandinistas
‘I met Martin Vega just after the Nicaraguan revolution when we all saw such promise there.’
By Mercedes Lynn de Uriarte / The Rag Blog / October 14, 2008

Below is a dispatch from Martin Vega about conditions in revolutionary Nicaragua followed by remarks by Rag Blog contributor Ron Ridenour.

I am lucky that Martin Vega has been a close friend for almost 30 years. He is a University of Texas alum with a MA in Business. I usually stay with him and his family when I visit New York. I have always admired his personal and political ethical life.

I met him just after the Nicaraguan revolution when we all saw such promise there. When I met him he was working to help Nicaragua realize that promise. He was in the Foreign Ministry, having gone there from his home in San Francisco to help in the Revolution. He was eventually a key staff member with the Nicaraguan Ambassador to the United States.

He recently spent several months there with a funder trying to bring some assistance to the nation. His news below is so disheartening that I pass this along with a hope you can help with his request to let others, especially press people and human rights advocates, know about these abuses.

Nicaraguan poet Ernesto Cardenal: Government has frozen his bank account and threatened to jail him.
Repressive tactics in revolutionary Nicaragua
By Martin Vega / The Rag Blog / October 14, 2008

I never thought I would see the day when the forces of the current Nicaraguan government would be used in such a coercive and repressive style as I have observed today. [As has been reported in El Nuevo Diaro and El Prensa], the judicial, fiscal bodies as well as the police forces of the state have been unleashed and are being instrumentalized for political ends to attack and denigrate members of civil society, the opposition press and political parties, the intelligentsia and cultural artists, etc. In the past few months the government has ostensibly closed most avenues of free expression while resorting to increased levels of intimidation and violence against those it deems its "enemies".

Until today I had refrained from making any type of comment on the worsening situation in the country hoping that officials within the Nicaraguan government would reflect and seek some form of accommodation and dialogue with its growing opposition. But quite the contrary, the government has seen fit to falsely accuse persons of Carlos Fernando's stature of "laundering" money; it has denigrated Nicaragua's revered poet Ernesto Cardenal threatening to jail him and frozen his bank accounts; it has falsely accused one of Nicaragua's most competent journalists, Sofia Montenegro of being a "CIA dupe" given her critical position towards the government's corruption; it has declared Nicaragua's main feminist organization, MAM to be "illegal" merely because it has advocated for women's reproductive rights and taken a critical stand against the government's prohibition on abortion rights; it has eliminated Nicaragua's two main opposition parties via legal fiat and through the control of the Electoral Council; and just two weeks ago, it unleashed virulent attacks against a civic and political rally of the opposition, resorting to the use of mortars, machetes, clubs and the burning down cars.

Because of these and other untoward developments, I feel that I have a moral duty not to remain quiet but let all of you know of my serious concerns about the Nicaraguan situation and ask that you move your consciences in any way possible towards the alleviation of this aggression against the Nicaraguan people. I ask that if any of you have any contacts in human rights organization, press associations, etc. that you please make known your outrage at this type of behavior and request that the Nicaraguan government cease committing arbitrary acts such as those outlined above. I would also be important for you to express your solidarity towards Carlos Fernando Chamorro B. who is being threatened with jail for merely expressing his views as as a renown and widely-respected journalist and intellectual.

Daniel Ortega and his wife Rosario Murillo (in Gucci?) wave to the press Nov. 6, 2006, in Managua. Photo by AFP / Getty Images.
'The problem is: Nicaragua is so divided into so many factions and not one of them is trustworthy.'
By Rod Ridenour / The Rag Blog / October 14, 2008

[Prominent writer Ron Ridenour, who wrote a series of articles on Venezuela for The Rag Blog, has expertise in Latin American politics. He provides these remarks as historical perspective.]

I was unaware of these events but they don't surprise me too much. I know [Nicaraguan President] Daniel Ortega and his aristocratic wife, for whom I worked as PR director when she was head of the ASTC, cultural workers association, in 1984. I wrote the book, "Yankee Sandinistas" (Curbstone, 1986), about which Ernesto Cardenal, then cultural minister, wrote a lovely blurb. I knew Tomas Borge and thought he should have been president. The Ortegas have always been suspects in that they lie, love the wine and dining life, the fancy houses, etc.

Ortega lost the 1990 election, in part, because he offered a hand out to the rich one day and then another hand to the workers another day. He hired a New York political spin doctor firm to run his campaign and bought Gucci clothes and expensive sunglasses in NY while the Yankees were murdering his people. To re-win at all costs the high post of president, Ortega has stooped lower than any politician, at least on the left, that I know of. He hired a vice-president who had been a torturing-murdering contra; he kissed the ass of the worst cardinal in current times; he rejected the right of women to decide over their bodies.

The problem is: Nicaragua is so divided into so many factions and not one of them is trustworthy, as I see it from far far away now. The original FSLN, which had three main factions somewhat united for a good many years, broke into opposing groups and none of them -- including the best of guerrilla leaders – ended up being revolutionary, rather they went towards the right. Ortega's FSLN, what is left, was the "best" of evils. But I knew from the day he won that something rotten would occur in his regime.

The next problem is that Ortega is supported by Fidel and Chavez. He uses the rhetoric they use when he is with them and in context of ALBA etc.

And, all the three dailies are (were) run by the Chamorro family, which split into three factions. And when one of them, El Nuevo Diario (for which I did some writing), calls what is happening now "worse than Somocismo" so are we really down in the pits of bullshit and exaggeration. As I read the situation today no one has been tortured, jailed or murdered, and that was daily occurrence in Somoza's time.

Of all the many original leaders very few remain by Ortega's sleazy side, but Tomas Borge is his ambassador to Peru, I think. At least he was. He was one of the few I trusted. Martin Vega I do not know. He lives in New York. We need some voice(s) we can trust who is (are) in the struggle within Nicaragua to give validity to what is going on.

That will take some time. If I were you, I'd wait a bit and find some backup, find some balance. This is quite delicate but I am not recommending throttling the matter. This is the kind of situation where [activist, writer and Latin American expert] James Petras would have a strong argument.

The Rag Blog decided to publish Martin Vega’s dispatch, along with Rag Blog contributor Ron Ridenour’s comments, but we will also seek other input on the situation in Nicaragua. We do not believe in uncritical support, even for a revolutionary movement. We encourage the readers to add their comments to this post.

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Victory for Free Speech at University of Texas

Sign supporting Obama and Rick Noriega on dorm window at UT-Austin.
Administration gives in; allows political signs in dorm windows.
By Jay Root / October 9, 2008

AUSTIN — Facing a free-speech uproar, the University of Texas backed down Thursday from punishing two students who refused to remove political signs from their dormitory window.

Connor Kincaid and his cousin and roommate, Blake Kincaid, said they were barred from registering for spring classes after refusing Wednesday to take down their signs supporting Democratic presidential candidate Barack Obama.

"Effective immediately, I am suspending the prohibition on signs in individual students' residence hall room windows and any sanctions related to its enforcement," UT President Bill Powers said in a written statement.

Powers said he had formed a committee to study the policy and make recommendations. In the meantime, he said, school policy now "expressly allows the display of signs and posters in students' residence hall room windows."

The Kincaid cousins were told during an administrative hearing Wednesday to take down their signs supporting Obama.

"This is an important free speech issue," said Connor Kincaid, a 20-year-old junior who claimed during the hearing that he saw a sign supporting Republican candidate John McCain in the window of another dorm.

The university says the dispute had nothing to do with either candidate. UT has had a policy for more than 10 years forbidding the posting of signs in dorm windows in order to control the look of the campus and avoid the appearance that the university is supporting any candidate, said Jeff Graves, an associate vice president for UT legal affairs.

The crackdown sparked an outcry among students, and university Democrats and Republicans worked together to fight rules they said were unconstitutional. They had encouraged students across campus to put signs in their dorm windows as a form of protest.

Graves said he wasn't aware of a prior case of a student facing an administrative hearing over the policy.

"It's never been an issue," he said. "Obviously this is a hot political issue, and it got pushed this time."

UT officials believe the policy was constitutional as written but thought it made sense to allow signs to be posted inside the windows of individual living quarters, Graves said.

Source / AP / Google News

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BANNED BOOKS : 'Grapes Of Wrath' And The Politics of Book Burning

Clell Pruett burns a copy of The Grapes Of Wrath as Bill Camp and another leader of the Associated Farmers stand by. At the time this photograph was taken, Pruett had not read the novel. Years later, after he read the book at the behest of Rick Wartzman, Pruett declared that he had no regrets about burning it. Image from Kern County Museum.
Judith Krug: 'They're not afraid of the book; they're afraid of the ideas'
by Lynn Neary / September 30, 2008

Read an excerpt from Obscene in The Extreme: The Burning and Banning of John Steinbeck's "The Grapes of Wrath," Below

Sept. 29 marked the beginning of the American Library Association's annual "Banned Books Week," a commemoration of all the books that have ever been removed from library shelves and classrooms. Politics, religion, sex, witchcraft — people give a lot of reasons for wanting to ban books, says Judith Krug of the ALA, but most often the bannings are about fear.

"They're not afraid of the book; they're afraid of the ideas," says Krug. "The materials that are challenged and banned say something about the human condition."

John Steinbeck's 1939 classic, The Grapes Of Wrath, which chronicles an Oklahoma family's hapless migration westward, is a perfect example. The book was an immediate best-seller around the country, but it was also banned and burned in a number of places, including Kern County, Calif. — the endpoint of the Joad family's migration.

Though fictional, Steinbeck's novel was firmly rooted in real events: Three years before the book was published a drought in the Dust Bowl states forced hundreds of thousands of migrants to California. Penniless and homeless, many landed in Kern County.

When the book came out, some of the powers that be in the county thought that they had been portrayed unfairly; they felt that Steinbeck hadn't given them credit for the effort they were making to help the migrants. One member of the county board of supervisors denounced the book as a "libel and lie." In August 1939, by a vote of 4 to 1, the board approved a resolution banning The Grapes Of Wrath from county libraries and schools.

Rick Wartzman, author of the new book Obscene In The Extreme, says what happened in Kern County illustrates the deep divide between left and right in California in the 1930s.

One powerful local player who pushed for the ban was Bill Camp, head of the local Associated Farmers, a group of big landowners who were avid opponents of organized labor. Camp and his colleagues knew how to get a bill passed in the state Legislature — and they also knew how to be physical.

"They knew how to work with tire irons, pick handles and bricks," says Wartzman. "Things could get really ugly and violent."

Camp wanted to publicize the county's opposition to The Grapes Of Wrath. Convinced that many migrants were also offended by their depiction in the novel, he recruited one of his workers, Clell Pruett, to burn the book.

Pruett had never read the novel, but he had heard a radio program about it that made him angry, and so he readily agreed to take part in what Wartzman describes as a "photo op." The photo shows Camp and another leader of the Associated Farmers standing by as Pruett holds the book above a trash can and sets it on fire.

Meanwhile, local librarian Gretchen Knief was working quietly to get the ban overturned. At the risk of losing her job, she stood up to the county supervisors and wrote a letter asking them to reverse their decision.

"It's such a vicious and dangerous thing to begin," she wrote. "Besides, banning books is so utterly hopeless and futile. Ideas don't die because a book is forbidden reading."

Knief's argument may have been eloquent, but it didn't work. The supervisors upheld the ban, and it remained in effect for a year and a half.

Still, says Krug, the censorship of The Grapes Of Wrath was a key event in the creation of the Library Bill of Rights, the statement Krug describes as ensuring that "as American citizens we have the right to access whatever information we wish without anyone looking over our shoulders. ... that we have the right to utilize this information once we have acquired it."

Excerpt: 'Obscene In The Extreme'
by Rick Wartzman

The lights dimmed and dimmed some more, and darkness fell upon the Big Room. No one talked or even dared to breathe too loudly. The children had been shushed, whispers stifled, and cigarettes snuffed. The only sound to be heard was the thwack-thwack-thwack of limestone water dripping onto rock. It is impossible to know, of course, what those in the crowd felt as this black blanket swallowed them completely, engulfing the afterglow and playing tricks on their eyes. They had come here, to Carlsbad Caverns, to vacation and take their minds off their workaday concerns; and for some, sitting 750 feet below the surface of the earth, surveying a gargantuan stalagmite known as the Rock of Ages, this undoubtedly was the high point of their trip. Before the lights had gone out, the tourists had soaked in the spectacle: several million years old, wrinkled and tinted with orange, rising up nearly forty feet, as huge as a house. The Rock of Ages was such a wonder that Robert Ripley, Mr. Believe It or Not, had visited this spot just weeks earlier to make a radio broadcast, his voice carried upward by telephone cables and then out across the country by CBS. And yet one can imagine that for others, descending deep into the ground and watching the last trace of light vanish would have brought feelings not of joy and adventure, but of angst and foreboding. It wouldn't have taken much of a leap, in those thirty seconds when all was quiet and still, to see that darkness was settling upon the world as well.

It was an uneasy time, late summer 1939. Hitler's troops were amassed along the fifteen-hundred-mile German-Polish border. The Soviets and Japanese clashed along Mongolia's Khalka River. And Franco was ruthlessly consolidating his power in Spain. At home, America teetered on the edge of war. The worst of the Depression was over, but the economy was still sick. The Roosevelt Recession — in which industrial production had tumbled by 40 percent, unemployment had jumped by four million, and stock prices had plunged by nearly 50 percent — was barely more than a year past. The jobless rate hovered above 17 percent, and personal income and total economic output were no higher than they had been a decade before. Even the national pastime had taken on a melancholy cast: in June, Yankees slugger Lou Gehrig had been diagnosed with amyotrophic lateral sclerosis, cutting short his extraordinary career. He may have just described himself as "the luckiest man on the face of this earth," but it seemed like an awfully tough break for a thirty-six-year-old dubbed "the Iron Horse." As for politics, things were as crazy as ever. President Roosevelt's popularity had ebbed in the last few years, and a volatile mixture of -isms was boiling and bubbling all over the place — Communism, Socialism, Fascism, Coughlinism, Longism, Townsendism. It was hard to tell sometimes which one might slosh out of the pot and stick.

Of all the eyes staring into the cave, among the weariest must have been Gretchen Knief's. She had trekked to New Mexico by way of theSouth and was on her way back home, to California's San Joaquin Valley, where she was the chief librarian for Kern County. She was a tall woman, impeccably dressed, her smile warm. No one would have called the thirty-seven-year-old a beauty, and she could be a little awkward at times. But it was an endearing awkwardness, and everybody admired her smarts. Knief had spent a portion of her trip examining libraries in Florida and Louisiana, and she had walked away feeling pleased with how Kern County's far-flung network of seventy-one branches, many of which she had single-handedly expanded, stacked up by comparison. But pressures were mounting too. Kern's main library was housed in the basement of the county courthouse in Bakersfield, in quarters so cramped that some of its materials were buried beneath old lighting fixtures, furniture, and other bric-a-brac. A proposed $300,000 bond issue to finance a new facility was scheduled to go before the voters in the fall. But who knew what they'd decide, given the budget squeeze afflicting the county? The situation showed no signs of easing, either, the way people were still streaming in to California's heartland, taxing public services of all kinds. "Authorities Predict Increase in Migrant Flow to Kern Soon," read the headline in the August 7 edition of the Bakersfield Californian.

The exodus had been underway for nearly a decade, with as many as four hundred thousand folks from Oklahoma, Arkansas, Texas, Missouri, and other states flocking to California in search of a better life. They were by no means exclusively poor. But many were. And the plight of these human tumbleweeds, as one observer had labeled them, had by now worked its way into the national consciousness. Leading periodicals had sent their correspondents to rural outposts up and down Highway 99 to chronicle the suffering. "Uncle Sam Has His Own Refugee Problem," the Providence Journal declared during the spring. "Lured to the West, They Find Misery, Squalor, Disease." Collier's magazine put it this way: "Perhaps the native and adopted sons of California pitched their voices a note or two too high when they warbled praises of the Golden State. Anyway, they got the idea across, and now they're sorry. An army is marching into California — an army made up of penniless unemployed, desperately seeking Utopia. 'Here we are,' say the invaders, 'what're you going to do about us?' And nobody knows the answer."

That may have been a tad hyperbolic, but coming up with answers was in no way simple. Kern County, for one, had seen its population swell by more than 60 percent in the last five years, and although health officers had cleaned up the squatter camps that once plagued the area, many migrants were still living in slums with inadequate sewers and drains, ramshackle houses, and litter-strewn dirt roads that would turn to mud after a hard winter rain. Who, though, was culpable for such conditions? Were they the fault of a grudging local government? Or were the newcomers themselves guilty somehow? Many suggested as much. The migrant community in Kern was branded as being full of "drunks, chiselers, exploiters and social leeches" — and that was in an official county report that had just been released. The language used on the street was even more blunt; in the lobby of a Bakersfield movie theater, a sign was posted: "Negroes and Okies Upstairs."

An alternative view, however, had also found its voice. This one laid the blame for the migrants' deprivation at the door of California agriculture, an industry that since the late nineteenth century had been defined by one main thing: its enormity. The state's giant landowners had made a travesty of the Jeffersonian ideal of 160 acres, assembling dominions that ballooned to one thousand times or more that size. "We no longer raise wheat here," said one grower. "We manufacture it." This wasn't family farming; it was agribusiness. And with it came a caste system in which relatively few got rich while many remained mired in the worst sort of poverty: Chinese in the 1870s, Japanese two decades later, Hindustanis early in the new century, Mexicans and Filipinos during and after World War I. Joining this ethnic parade were Armenians and Portuguese, Italians and Swiss — wave after wave of low-priced labor. Among the leviathan landholders were those who took care of their workers, some patronizingly, others with a genuine measure of respect. But many big farmers regarded their hands as expendable — "beasts of the field," in the words of an 1888 edition of the Kern County Californian. In many ways, things hadn't changed much in the fifty years since that description had been written, and with the Okies and Arkies now faring so terribly, social critics were pointing their fingers at California's agricultural elite.

The most articulate and powerful of the finger-pointers was author John Steinbeck, whose book The Grapes of Wrath had not only leapt onto the best-seller list after its publication in April but was also well on its way to becoming seared into the public's imagination forever. Darryl Zanuck was already busy with the film version of the story, starring Henry Fonda, and Woody Guthrie would soon record his ode to Steinbeck's protagonist, Tom Joad: Wherever little children are hungry and cry / Wherever people ain't free. / Wherever men are fightin' for their rights, / That's where I'm gonna be, Ma. / That's where I'm a gonna be. First Lady Eleanor Roosevelt had called her reading of The Grapes of Wrath "an unforgettable experience." And in the coming months, the president would tell the nation that he, too, had read of the Joads' journey from the bone-dry plains of Oklahoma to the bountiful lands of California, where they and others toiled away for a pittance and found themselves wishing "them big farmers wouldn' plague us so." "There are 500,000 Americans," the president said, "that live in the covers of that book." By 1940, The Grapes of Wrath would be invoked so often that it almost seemed to cheapen the novel. Good Samaritans, looking to raise money to aid the migrants, would hold "Grapes of Wrath" parties. The union seeking to organize California's farm fields — the United Cannery, Agricultural, Packing and Allied Workers of America — recruited five young Broadway actors to tour the West and Southwest, with ticket sales going into UCAPAWA's coffers. The troupe's name: The Grapes of Wrath Players. Meanwhile, pundits of all stripes would reference the Joads in articles and speeches, as if they were real: "Meet the Joad Family," "The Joad Family in Kern County," "What's Being Done About the Joads?" "The Joads on Strike." Men began to wear a hat called the "Joad Cap."

Knief peered into the inky cavern, and slowly the lights came up, like a sunrise in the distance. Then a ranger's voice washed over the Big Room:

Rock of Ages, cleft for me,
Let me hide myself in Thee;
Let the water and the blood,
From Thy wounded side which flowed,
Be of sin the double cure;
Save from wrath and make me pure.

In that very instant, it is conceivable that Knief and all the others assembled in the Big Room let their worries — the weight resting on "our troubled and confused generation," as she once expressed it — melt away. Whether that sense of tranquility lasted very long is another matter. As Knief headed back to Bakersfield, her vacation done, she motored along Route 66, the same stretch of highway on which the migrants "scuttled like bugs to the westward," as Steinbeck wrote. The Mother Road, as she was known, was the path to California's promise. Knief counted herself a Steinbeck devotee, having briefly met him during one of his research outings to the area. And on the eve of the publication of The Grapes of Wrath, she had lauded him as "one of our major creative writers in America today," a literary force on par with Faulkner, Hemingway, Saroyan, and Dos Passos. In "The Reading Hour," a column that she wrote for the Bakersfield paper, Knief had also noted that this tale of migratory labor was bound to be "of more than passing interest" to local readers.

As she'd soon discover, that would prove to be quite an understatement.

[From the book Obscene in the Extreme by Rick Wartzman. Reprinted by arrangement with PublicAffairs, a member of the Perseus Books Group. Copyright © 2008.]

Source / National Public Radio

Also see Jonathan Yardley on 'Obscene in the Extreme' / Washington Post / Sept. 14, 2008

Find Obscene in the Extreme: The Burning and Banning of John Steinbeck's the Grapes of Wrath on Amazon.com.

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