Thanks to Gene Elliott for bringing this column to my attention. George Will generally writes from a conservative perspective, but he thinks independently and writes as well as anybody in the business. Having spoken to inmates like Ramsey Muniz who have been subjected to prolonged stretches of solitary confinement, I know just how cruel and usual it can be. It is particularly encouraging to see that opposition to mass incarceration has recently become bipartisan. If anything, folks on the right have been more inclined in recent years to inveigh against the warehousing of US citizens than avowed liberals. This piece is highly recommended.
“Zero Dark Thirty,” a nominee for Sunday’s Oscar for Best Picture, reignited debate about whether the waterboarding of terrorism suspects was torture. This practice, which ended in 2003, was used on only three suspects. Meanwhile, tens of thousands of American prison inmates are kept in protracted solitary confinement that arguably constitutes torture and probably violates the Eighth Amendment prohibition of “cruel and unusual punishments.” (more…)
This story by Bob Allen of the Associated Baptist Press should excite Baptists who care about justice. The fact that the Cooperative Baptist Fellowship nominated a woman for the position of Executive Coordinator is itself reason for rejoicing. A woman like Suzii Paynter who possesses an unusually deep passion for justice is more than we had any right to hope for.
A few months ago, I wrote an opinion piece called “A Candle in Search of Darkness” after attending a Cooperative Baptist Fellowship gathering. “Every good story needs an antagonist, a villain,” I wrote, “and the Cooperative Baptist Fellowship story doesn’t have one.”
Formed in the wake of the infamous fundamentalist takeover of Southern Baptist institutions, the CBF seemed determined to recreate a world in which “moderate”, politically savvy preachers could nuance their way to professional security. As a result, I said, Cooperative Baptists shy away from anything potentially controversial, including the immigration and criminal justice systems.
Paynter is smart enough to avoid my candle critique (that’s the role of independent voices like mine), but she clearly wants to lead the CBF upward to holy ground.
Suzii Paynter, executive coordinator nominee for the Cooperative Baptist Fellowship, sees advocacy on social-justice issues as consistent with the Fellowship’s longstanding dedication to ministry to the “least of these.”
By Bob Allen
A woman nominated to the Cooperative Baptist Fellowship’s top leadership post says her extensive background in lobbying and public policy would bolster the Fellowship’s holistic missions strategy of targeting critical needs among the world’s most neglected peoples.
Suzii Paynter, director of the Texas Baptist Christian Life Commission, said in a Skype interview on EthicsDaily.com that if elected Feb. 21-22 by the CBF Coordinating Council, one of her primary interests as the group’s next executive coordinator would be “the intersection between our missions and justice.”
“In looking at our missions, we have eight communities of missions in CBF — poverty and transformation missions, disaster recovery, missions with internationals, economic development, missions around economic development, missions education, medical care — and in all these areas we have the opportunity not to just do hands-on missions on the ground but to also use the responses of our congregations and the interests of our many lay people to advance policies and to advance advocacy for issues that affect all of those areas,” she said.
As head of the ethics agency of the Baptist General Convention of Texas, Paynter has been assigned to speak on a wide variety of ethical issues including citizenship and public policy, family life, religious liberty, ethnic reconciliation, faith in the workplace, hunger and poverty, substance abuse, environmental justice and creation care, war and peace, gambling, bioethics and more.
She was Baptist representative for an international delegation to Africa sponsored by the Gates Foundation and Bread for the World and has worked on national think tanks including the Council on Foreign Relations and Institute for American Values.
She has been recognized for her work on issues including immigration ministries, environmental stewardship, predatory gambling, underage drinking and prison reform. She has established interfaith and ecumenical relationships around common-good initiatives that she hopes to keep intact in the years to come.
Paynter cited Together for Hope, the Fellowship’s 12-year-old rural poverty initiative focused on breaking cycles of economic disparity in 20 of the nation’s poorest counties, as “a great example of places all over the country where we can match the love and experience we’ve had in missions with an advocacy word and voice on the national level.”
I am re-posting this review of David Kennedy’s Don’t Shootbecause it addresses the issue of gun violence in realistic, practical and non-ideological terms that make sense to me. America is obsessed with guns and violence. The reform movement is right about the need for common sense gun reform. The NRA is right about the toxic impact of violent movies and video games. But when you ask why the murder rate in this country is six times as high as most other western democracies, you’re talking about several hundred inner city neighborhoods.
If you want to know how these neighborhoods turned into killing fields, the best place to begin is with William Julius Wilson’s When Work Disappears. If you want a primer on felon disenfranchisement and the horror of the war on drugs, read Michelle Alexander’s The New Jim Crow. But if you just want the shooting to stop, David Kennedy’s Don’t Shoot is by far the best advice going. Here’s my summary of his argument.
David M. Kennedy: Don’t Shoot: The End of Violence in Inner-City America
David Kennedy
David Kennedy directs the Center for Crime Prevention and Control and teaches criminal justice at New York’s John Jay College of Criminal Justice. He is bright, intense, and haunted by the horrors he has witnessed on the streets of inner-city America. He doesn’t place his hope in the conversion of white suburbanites; his focus is on a perception gap that keeps police officers and residents of high-crime neighborhoods from really seeing one another.
Kennedy isn’t dreaming of a drug-free utopia; he just wants children to be able to walk to school without encountering open air drug markets. He isn’t trying to build crime-free communities, he just wants the killing to stop. “The killing’s wrong,” he says. “The killing’s terrible, it’s got to stop. Even the street guys, almost all of them, think that.” (more…)
In The Rise of the Conservative Legal Movement, Steven Teles describes how the conservative movement was able to undermine and largely replace what he calls the Liberal Legal Network (LLN for short). By the late 1960s, liberal ideas inspired by New Deal politics and the civil rights movement were deeply entrenched within the American legal establishment. To change this picture, Teles says, conservative counter insurgents had to realize that they were dealing with a hegemonic regime.
A regime is most likely to endure when it can make its ideas seem natural, appropriate, and commonsensical, consigning its opponents to the extremes . . . A regime that has achieved hegemony makes its principles seem like ‘good professional practice,’ ‘standard operating procedure,’ ‘the public interest,’ or ‘conventional wisdom.’ Those who fail to affirm these principles are stigmatized, and their arguments are dismissed.
In order to overcome this kind of hegemonic reality, Teles suggests, “intellectual entrepreneurs” must “‘denaturalize’ the existing regime, by exposing the hidden normative assumptions embedded in seemingly neutral professional, scientific, or procedural standards and practices, forcing those assumptions to be justified and alternatives to them entertained.”
This analysis got me thinking. Friends of Justice is encouraging American churches to embrace a biblical “common peace” perspective on immigration and criminal justice issues. This agenda makes perfect sense to most Latino and African American Christians, but is greeted with a mixture of bewilderment, suspicion and hostility in Anglo religious circles. I’m not talking about conservative evangelical congregations or the religious right; the churches I’m describing are a mix of standard issue evangelicalism and big steeple Protestantism. People in these churches value niceness above all other virtues, but they have a hard time wrapping themselves around the concept of a Common Peace Community.
We are dealing with a hegemonic regime rooted in deeply embedded assumptions that, in Anglo churches at least, have attained the status of the ‘good professional practice,’ ‘standard operating procedure,’ ‘community interest,’ or ‘conventional wisdom’ Steve Teles talks about. Why does a politically irrelevant religion seem natural, appropriate, and commonsensical to so many white Christians, and why do I so often feel stigmatized and dismissed when I do my thing?
If Friends of Justice is serious about exposing the conventional wisdom at work in white churches these assumptions must be identified. Here is my first stab at culling out the assumptions that make it hard for people like me to apply biblical norms to immigration and criminal justice. If you think I’m being unfair, please tell me why in the comment section below.
Six assumptions that keep white churches from applying biblical norms to immigration and criminal justice
The immigration and criminal justice systems should be left to lawyers and politicians. It doesn’t really matter what Christians think about these issues because we lack the expertise and standing to form a credible opinions or impact public policy decisions.
Churches should avoid partisan politics. Institutional tranquility demands that the political implications of our religion must never be discussed in religious settings.
Crime and illegal immigration threaten my personal security, so I am reassured by political tough talk.
Religion is about saving souls, promoting a sense of personal well-being, nurturing personal relationships, and sustaining a spiritual family. Public policy issues conflict with these priorities.
It’s great that racial minorities attend churches and have religious ideas. But American Christianity has always been a white person’s religion and should be restricted to issues directly affecting white people.
It’s great that racial minorities are taking an interest in politics. But American politics is designed to maximize the prosperity and personal happiness of white people.
Daniel Kowalski provides a much needed corrective to much of the political blather surrounding the immigration debate. The biggest myth about the immigration line is that most people who want to live in the United States have a line to get in. They don’t.
I was particularly struck by this bold statement:
Our immigration policy runs counter to our national ethos of civil and human rights. Over the past century, we have come to believe that discrimination on the basis of race, gender, faith and sexual orientation — things that cannot be changed or that we cannot demand be changed — is morally wrong. Yet the Immigration and Nationality Act, by setting quotas on how many people can come from certain countries, is another form of discrimination.
Is there a national ethos of civil and human rights? The anti-immigrant movement, and much of the historical information Kowalski provides in this essay, suggest that two equally powerful ethoses (ethi?) are vying for the upper hand. This explains why our immigration policy is so radically unfair and why no politician dares tell the truth.
Daniel M. Kowalski is a senior fellow at the Institute for Justice and Journalism and the editor of Bender’s Immigration Bulletin. He practices citizenship and visa law in Austin at the Fowler Law Firm.
The “line” of people seeking American citizenship or legal status has become an integral part of our immigration debate. In a speech Tuesday, President Obama said that undocumented immigrants should go to “the back of the line” behind those who are going through the process legally. The immigration reform blueprint presented a day earlier by a group of senators contained the same requirement. But misinformation about this line abounds.
1. There is one line.
The federal government has issued more than 1 million green cards per year, on average, for the past five years. But there are several lines — which one immigrants end up in depends on whether they have a job or family in the United States. (more…)
If crime rates have fallen dramatically in recent decades, why do most Americans think crime is on the rise? Because, as Scott Henson makes clear in this blog post, the American media sees crime as entertainment and, like they say, the show must go on!
The debate over the proposed “comprehensive immigration reform” bill is intensifying, with a “gang of six” senators attempting to hash out a bill that would regularize the status of some undocumented immigrants but may also include increased funding for harsh border enforcement policies.
This debate overlooks the astounding fact that federal spending on immigration enforcement now surpasses all other federal law enforcement activities combined. One of the most costly of these programs is Operation Streamline, a little-known enforcement program that is part of broader trend funneling immigrants into the criminal justice system. These policies channel billions of dollars to private prison corporations and are fueling the explosive growth in numbers of Latinos in prison. The “gang of six” are reportedly considering expanding funding of Operation Streamline. (more…)
Presidential inaugurations are designed to draw the nation back together after a season of partisan bloodletting. As Barack Obama delivered his second inaugural address, conservative jurists like Antonin Scalia and Texas Senator John Cornyn looked on grim-faced. Democracy is a team sport in which the other side often wins. When you lose you suck it up, adjust your game plan, and get ready for the next game.
Obama has often been compared to Abraham Lincoln and Martin Luther King Jr., the two Americans most closely associated with the principle of racial equality. Like Lincoln and King, Obama wields the familiar cadences of our American civil religion in an effort to summon the better angels of our national nature, or at least the best angels on offer at the moment. Heralds of a new tomorrow, if they are wise, remind us of the journey we have been on and, in so doing, redefine the significance of that journey. Remember who you are. Remember who we are. We may have wandered into strange and dangerous valleys, but we were created for higher ground! (more…)
Over at Grits for Breakfast, Scott Henson has a great post on the high cost of Waco’s tough on crime policies for McLennan County tax payers. According to the Waco Tribune Herald, “One of every four dollars is now being spent to house and care for inmates — up from $900,000 in fiscal year 2009 and destined to hit as much as $5.5 million this fiscal year.”
Two facts struck me last night as I watched The Abolitionistson PBS. First, the amazing characters who shaped the movement were all people of faith. Second, the abolitionists were not warmly received by the institutional churches of their day.
Thus has it always been. Movements and institutions have a troubled relationships. It’s the way of the world.
In early December I listened to Brian McLaren describe the awkward but potentially fruitful relationship between institutions and movements. Institutions, in Brian’s understanding, conserve the gains made by past social movements. Movements make proposals or demands to current institutions to make progress toward new gains. Organizations and movements need one another but inevitably frustrate and anger each other.
Movements harden into institutions so they can survive. New movements are created when institutions become too inflexible to respond to present challenges.
Without movements, institutions stagnate. Without institutions, movements evaporate.
McLaren notes that some movements successfully inject their values into the institutions they challenge. Other movements create their own institutions or pass away–it must be one or the other. (more…)
Alan Bean
If crime rates have fallen dramatically in recent decades, why do most Americans think crime is on the rise? Because, as Scott Henson makes clear in 
By Alan Bean
By Alan Bean
Friends of Justice 