Election 2012 Quotes

A lot of particularly fun and interesting things are being said in the run up to the 2012 election, and the staff of Religion, Politics, and Sex decided that we should post one of these each day! We hope you will enjoy and find them thought provoking. Feel free to make a comment with your own suggestions.

"My party, unfortunately, is the bastion of those people — not all of them, but most of them — who are still basing their positions on race. Let me just be candid: My party is full of racists, and the real reason a considerable portion of my party wants President Obama out of the White House has nothing to do with the content of his character, nothing to do with his competence as commander-in-chief and president, and everything to do with the color of his skin, and that's despicable." — Former Colin Powell chief-of-staff Col. Lawrence Wilkerson

"This well may be a generation-defining moment. What will America's future be? Will this still be a land of opportunity and freedom for all people or just for the favored few? Because we still hope, we endorse for president Barack Obama, whose heart — unlike his challenger — has not wavered nor his principles changed." — Pittsburgh Post-Gazette, Oct. 28

“I’ve struggled with it myself for a long time, but I came to realize that life is that gift from God. And, I think, even when life begins in that horrible situation of rape, that it is something that God intended to happen.” — Indiana Senate Republican candidate Richard Mourdock

“Slavery was cruel, but as a result of slavery, we have African-Americans living in this country today who are living here in situations that are probably much better to endure than if they were living in Sub-Saharan Africa. If you had the choice knowing the lifestyle of people living in Africa and knowing the lifestyle of people living in the United States, which would you choose? Pure and simple.” — Jon Hubbard, (R) Arkansas State Senate

"All that stuff I was taught about evolution and embryology and the big bang theory, all that is lies straight from the pit of Hell. It's lies to try to keep me and all the folks who were taught that from understanding that they need a savior. ... I don't believe that the earth's but about 9,000 years old. I believe it was created in six days as we know them. That's what the Bible says." — Rep. Paul Broun (R-Ga.)

"I'm sorry, Jim, I'm going to stop the subsidy to PBS. I'm going to stop other things. I like PBS — I love Big Bird. I actually like you, too. But I'm not going to keep on spending money on things to borrow money from China to pay for it." — Mitt Romney to Jim Lehrer, on the importance of the cutting the 1/100th of 1% of the federal budget devoted to public broadcasting.

"I thought the format accomplished its purpose, which was to facilitate direct, extended exchanges between the candidates about issues of substance. Part of my moderator mission was to stay out of the way of the flow and I had no problems with doing so. My only real personal frustration was discovering that ninety minutes was not enough time in that more open format to cover every issue that deserved attention." — Jim Lehrer

"I believe in free enterprise. I don't think the government should be telling people what you pay and what you don't pay. I think it's about freedom." — Rep. Todd Akin (R-Mo.), on why it is OK for employers to pay women less than men

"I pick up Mitt Romney's trash. We're kind of like the invisible people. He doesn't realize ... the service we provide ... Picking up 15, 16 tons by hand, that takes a toll on your body. When I'm 55, 60 years old, I know my body's gonna ... break down. Mitt Romney doesn't care about that." — Richard Hayes

"I don't have the time. It would take me too long to go through all the math." — Paul Ryan, in response to a request he explain his tax plan

"I think my biggest concern obviously would just be for [Mitt's] mental well-being. I have all the confidence in the world in his ability, in his decisiveness, in his leadership skills, in his understanding of the economy. ... So for me I think it would just be the emotional part of it." — Ann Romney

"Only in America can you be pro-death penalty, pro-war, pro-unmanned drone bombs, pro-nuclear weapons, pro-guns, pro-torture, pro-land mines, and still call yourself 'pro-life.'" — John Fugelsang

"As the election approaches, many Americans, I am certain, are still struggling with the question of who they will vote for. Is Obama like Carter, a micro-managing school teacher who doesn't even carry a one wood, let alone hit the long drive? Is Romney like George Bush Sr., a white-glove, Wall Street handmaiden who wouldn't know a subway token from the buttons on a doorman's uniform?" — Alec Baldwin, Huffington Post

"When you have a fire in an aircraft, there's no place to go, exactly, there's no - and you can't find any oxygen from outside the aircraft to get in the aircraft, because the windows don't open. I don't know why they don't do that. It's a real problem. So it's very dangerous." — Mitt Romney

"Here at this site, Solyndra expects to make enough solar panels each year to generate 500 megawatts of electricity. And over the lifetime of this expanded facility, that could be like replacing as many as eight coal-fired power plants." — President Barack Obama

“Guess what, the cheerleaders in college are the best athletes in college. You think, I’m joking, they’re almost all gymnasts, the stuff they do on hard wood, it blows my mind.” — Vice President Joe Biden, Newport, N.H., September 21

"The thing about not having much money is you have to take much more responsibility for your life. You can’t pay people to watch your kids or clean your house or fix your meals. You can’t necessarily afford a car or a washing machine or a home in a good school district. That’s what money buys you: goods and services that make your life easier. That’s what money has bought Romney, too. He’s a guy who sold his dad’s stock to pay for college, who built an elevator to ensure easier access to his multiple cars and who was able to support his wife’s decision to be a stay-at-home mom. That’s great! That’s the dream. The problem is that he doesn’t seem to realize how difficult it is to focus on college when you’re also working full time, how much planning it takes to reliably commute to work without a car, or the agonizing choices faced by families in which both parents work and a child falls ill. The working poor haven’t abdicated responsibility for their lives. They’re drowning in it." — Ezra Klein, Bloomberg

"Who are these freeloaders? Is it the Iraq war veteran who goes to the V.A.? Is it the student getting a loan to go to college? Is it the retiree on Social Security or Medicare? ... The people who receive the disproportionate share of government spending are not big-government lovers. They are Republicans. They are senior citizens. They are white men with high school degrees." — Conservative columnist David Brooks, New York Times

Blue Texas — A State of Ambivalence

By Michael O. Varhola

Sometime in the coming years, for a variety of reasons, die-hard Red state Texas will almost certainly become a Blue state. That is, in fact, something I have been personally working to help achieve. It would be fair to say, however, that I have very mixed feelings about this imminent political sea change.

It bears mentioning that I am not now and never have been a Democrat per se; many years ago, I was actually registered as a Republican, and for much of the past two decades I have strived to be strictly apolitical and non-partisan, which I think behooves someone working as a journalist. I am, however, a liberal — perhaps even a radical liberal — and am also revolted by and strongly opposed to most of what the Republican party stands for these days, which I consider to be regressive and contrary to the interests of the majority of the citizenry. In short, liberalism is based on an informed view of the world and the value and rights of the individual, whereas conservatism essentially represents the inverse of these ideas. Because most "liberals" also happen to be "Democrats," those two terms are often used synonymously. This is problematic in any number of ways, however, as I have recently had brought to my attention.

Some of what I have seen in Texas from the Democratic party during the current election season is commensurate with the liberal ideal and some of it most definitely is not and has, consequently, given me some pause. Following are some of the negative and positive things I have recently experienced in this regard:

(-): In January, I received a many-times-forwarded email message with the subject “Congressional Reform Act of 2011” that appeared to be a typical piece of Tea Party/neocon invective containing a number of blatant lies and which otherwise reflected a rightwing ethos. What stunned me, however, was that this message originated with the chair of the Democratic Party of the county I live in! “While I personally do not fully agree with all of these suggestions, they are a good place to start,” this lady wrote at the beginning of the message. Concerned that Democratic leaders in our area have no idea what their own party stands for, I contacted her to let her know I was planning on posting an article about the message to this blog but was willing to talk to her about it first. She did not, however, respond to any of my attempts to reach her.

(-): After I posted an article about the message, I contacted nearly 40 people affiliated with the Democratic Party of Texas and that of the county I live in, including one who as at that time running for the Senate and is now running for Congress (and who had contacted me via Facebook after I posted the afore-mentioned article, which it turned out was about his wife; he cut off contact with me when I would not take what was apparently meant to be a hint about removing this piece). Even though I identified myself as pro-Democrat journalist who was concerned with the way the party was being presented, none bothered to respond, not a single one saw fit to dispel misconceptions associated with their party, to respond to misconceptions perpetrated by one of their representatives, or to bolster the efforts of a liberal blogger desperate to support their agenda.

(+) A few weeks ago, I attended a pro-Democratic event at the home of some people in my neighborhood and was grateful to them for hosting it and giving me the opportunity to meet other like-minded people. Pro-Republicans in this area are often publicly vocal about their views — something people with any beliefs in my former East Coast home would have considered rude and coarse and avoided doing — and it was nice to see that there are more people with a liberal bent living all around me than I would have imagined.

(+): At that event, I met and spoke with some of the Democratic political candidates in Texas, including John Courage, who is running for Texas State Senate District 25, and Rebecca Bell-Mettereau, who is running for a place on the State Board of Education District 5. Suffice it to say that I was impressed with their demeanor, intelligence, and sincerity and that they strengthened my resolve to support the Democratic cause in Texas and that I voted for both of them when I went to the polls on October 22. If they get elected I believe they will do everything they can to make Texas a better place for its citizens.

(-): Last week, I attended a training session organized by the Democratic Party in my county so that I could learn how to serve as a clerk at a polling station on election day. Without going into details that might seem overly mean-spirited, it would be fair to say that if the level of organization at this meeting was indicative of the party's efforts throughout the state in general then it is abundantly clear why a state that has as many Democrats as it does Republicans is still solidly Red. Nearly two hours after the session began, it ended without the training having been accomplished, with an indication that it would have to be held again at a future date, with promises that materials pertinent to it would be sent out via email (which, as of this writing, has still not happened).

Disorganization, confusion, and indifference in the Democratic Party in Texas notwithstanding, the Lone Star State will nonetheless ultimately shift from Red to Blue as the Hispanic population of Texas inexorably grows and achieves majority status. But one has to question whether it will truly be a victory for the Democratic cause to have the state turn Blue not because its citizens have become more enlightened, educated, or socially conscious, but merely because one ethnic group has become more predominant than another. We will not, in fact, come much closer to the Great Society envisioned by one former president from the state of Texas if all we do is swap out the political party favored by people who mostly look alike in one way for the political party of people who mostly look alike in another way. (Shown here is Rebecca Bell-Mettereau, one of the hopes for the Democratic cause in Texas.)

So, suffice it to say, I am ambivalent about the shift of the Lone Star State from Red to Blue. Overall, I am confident that Texas and America overall will be better off for this change and will continue to work for it — but it is sad to contemplate how much less meaningful that change will be than it could be.

A Union by Any Other Name, Part 3

By Richard T. Balsley

See Part 1 and Part 2 if you have not already!

The Use and Application of Labor
Offices and factories allow people to pool their efforts. This has the added bonus of multiplying the output of each individual as they specialize to handle key areas of the process to produce the product or service offered by the company. Having such proximity to one’s fellow workers makes it easier to cope not only with the stresses of the job, but it also helps to alleviate any sense of isolation between members of the same profession. Some of these concerns may have led to the guild halls for the same reason that people gather in offices or hold trade conventions today. As everything has a trade-off, there is a downside to the ability to congregate and perfect one’s skills on a daily basis.

The individual worker has no say in where he can perform his job nor does he have any input into the conditions of the facility. Government ordinances do, certainly, but they are outside the power of a specific person. These conditions are under the control of the person who owns the worksite. Additionally, most workers do not own the equipment necessary to do their jobs regardless of their level of skill. Herein lays the problem for the worker: having a desire to perform meaningful work for meaningful pay without losing access to the means of production where such criteria can be met. If the chief aim of the company is to provide a product for profit, then it behooves the board members to maximize earnings, but where to take the money is another question.

For good or for ill, all workplaces that employ groups of people are sites of labor extraction. There is nothing inherently wrong in this idea. Not only is it convenient and require less logistics, a centralized work location, and also a place where quality and safety controls can be instituted, but it is also a place where efforts can be coordinated. It is this last point where one can see the need for a supervisor. No longer burdened with teaching a new apprentice how to create the entire product, a supervisor or foreman can train a worker to perform a specific series of tasks along the assembly line style of industrialized production. The foreman likewise only needs to know how to do the jobs under his purview. Some of these changes between one job and the other are often minimal so that workers may graduate from one position to another in some industries. The purpose of this is nominally for standardization of quality.

Owning the sites of labor extraction and the means by which to do it is a central point of contention. In a truly communistic culture, the people who do the labor would own the site, giving them complete control over how, when, and the value of their efforts for whatever capital or other assets are exchanged to obtain what the workers produced. Whether it is a cultural or biological imperative for people to stratify themselves, the most likely result is the concentration of power in the hands of fewer people, not more. This is what capitalism does efficiently and effectively and why it is mentioned near the end of the last installment as a natural extension of feudalism. In a democratic republic, the people are legally equal in all respects. Within the site of labor extraction and the laws that govern how such labor may be extracted, this is not the case.

People are paid based not on the work they actually do in a factory or an office, but rather for what the company thinks the position each person occupies is worth. The individual is replaceable. As a result, the wages are deflated just enough to make the job enticing without making it too repellant and costing the company more money than what they would earn by paying the higher wage. Unions have helped keep the pressure on companies to provide benefits while keeping wages stable. Given the cut in profits that such wages and other forms of compensation unions work to secure in exchange for their members’ labor to be extracted, it is easy to see why both have an antagonistic relationship.

The disintegration of union power through right-to-work laws is not a bad thing in light of some of the problems that union control has had over the job market. Anyone attempting to enter a trade had to be a member of a union or be barred from work in a facility where the union oversaw employee relations with the company owners. Unfortunately, those very laws have given corporations more leverage in dictating what workers will receive in compensation for their labor. The rise and prominence of unions has been at times a barrier to the growth of any single business, but when strikes spread across several companies in support of work stoppages in other locales, it becomes harmful to the economy overall. Hence, there exists the need for balance in the legal system to prevent abuse by either organization.

The data for the past forty years or so shows a correlation between the decline of the middle class wage and the decline of the unions. Whether this is because corporations have worked so diligently to break the corporations or is in part a result of the changes in technology and the outsourcing of so many manufacturing jobs is not necessarily so clear. The increasing disparity between wages of blue collar and white collar workers, however, is. Unpacking the reasoning for this is beyond my purview, but what I can comment on is the mentality that defines the two sides of the argument and how that has helped lead to the entrenchment.

Essentially, the divide between unions and corporations comes down to a quasi-ritualistic structure that imposes a moral order on the thinking of the members of each group. The effect is a cultural indoctrination which Joseph Campbell described in The Masks of God, Volume 4: Creative Mythology as part of the ritual which serves “as the enforcement of a moral order: the shaping of the individual to the requirements of his geographically and historically conditioned social group” (p. 5). The result is the belief that the opposed group is the Other bent on eradicating the culture’s existence, and to some extent this may be true with all the legal wrangling that have informed both union and corporate culture. The strategies and tactics used by both groups are not so different, however; how they manifest is.

'It's Supernatural' TV Show Commentary

By Michael O. Varhola

When I saw "It's Supernatural" listed on the Daystar television network, the first thing that struck me was that the religious networks had joined Animal Planet, National Geographic, and just about every other basic cable network in tapping into the ghosthunting craze. The show's description, "Investigative reporter Sid Roth explores the supernatural," reinforced this impression (Roth is shown at right). I expected, naturally, that they would put their own spin on paranormal activity, and that everything would end up having an explicitly Christian justification. It was, in fact, not nearly so subtle, nor was it much like the references to angels and other phenomena in the opening credits suggested it would be -- or the narrator who intoned "It's supernatural" in his creepiest voice -- suggested it would be. Always nice when deception is the basis for a show on a religious channel.

Indeed, the studio audience format for the show was its "tell" and dispelled any hopes for haunted, ancient, exotic, or even interesting sites. No, our venue for "It's Supernatual" was instead a cheap stage set with a crowd of spillovers from "The 700 Club" (i.e., white, working class, baffled and slightly scared looking). That, of course, is the standard for a Fundamentalist show, and even when they are pretending to do something else they apparently can't resist falling back on this format that was tried and true by the time Jim and Tammy Faye Bakker perfected it as a device for fleecing the flock.

Once the show I watched started, it took the form of an "interview" between Roth and Craig Hill, an author who has written a book extrapolating his theory that the practice of Jubilee observed by the ancient Israelites explains the financial crisis we have experienced since 2008, the Great Depression, etc. What followed was pretty much an apologia of right-wing financial theory justified in Biblical terms. The studio audience liked it because the hosts kept using the words "Bible," "Jesus," and "salvation," but you could see from their glazed eyes that they really had no idea what they were talking about.

There was one thing that definitely made this show worth watching, and that was the revelation that Jews are successful because of magical techniques they unknowingly apply! Hahaha! Ah, scratch a Jew and find a wizard. But most of us kind of suspected that about Jews anyway, right? What Roth points out, however, is that the rest of us can also make use of these techniques to enrich ourselves.

Craig Hill does make what I consider to be the valid and interesting point that people should not work particular jobs just because they offer financial rewards and should instead be driven by a sense of vocation. This is all part of what I found to be a rather confusing mixed message, because the whole point of the show -- or at least this episode -- seemed to be how to achieve financial success. Such success is not achieved by worshiping Mammon through inappropriate jobs but rather through magical techniques that Roth and his guests can teach you: "God will supernaturally compress time in your life if you follow these principles." And the goods and services you need to learn those principles are advertised on the show and can, conveniently, be purchased though Roth's website!

Roth himself is, as his name might suggest, Jewish. So, basically, he is either an apostate who has abandoned the faith of his people, or he is a classic, amoral, and stereotypical Shylock. Ironically, to a Fundamentalist audience who sees Jews not as human beings but rather as devices for fulfilling prophecies, it does not matter which of these he actually is.

So, if you are looking for a new take on the paranormal, "It's Supernatural" is not going to be it. But if you are looking for 30 minutes of "Prosperity Christianity" and have some coin to drop as the price for buying into it, the wily Roth will be glad to accommodate.