Glad tidings! Today, Roy Moore faced an ethics panel for his defiance of a federal court order to remove a monument of the Ten Commandments from the Alabama Supreme Court building. And the news just in is that they have issued a formal complaint against Moore — suspending him from his duties on the Alabama Supreme Court while the complaint goes before the Court of the Judiciary. If the complaint is upheld in the Court, Moore could be removed from the bench — a victory not only for the rule of law, but for the people of Alabama: someone who is willing to defy a federal court order in order to pull a petty political stunt and push his fundamentalist agenda is a threat to all of us.

Whichever way it turns out, the Associate Justices have at least found the backbone to unanimously overrule Moore and order that the monument be removed from the rotunda [WSFA]. (They can overrule the normal administrative authority of the Chief Justice by a unanimous vote.) So the state of Alabama will most likely not be facing fines for non-compliance, and the damn thing will be moved.

This phase of the battle is winding down, and unless something unexpected happens, you can count on the story to drop out of the national limelight soon. Unfortunately, the whole chain of events has left the national press more or less mystified as to what was going on. Worse, they didn’t realize that they were mystified; they simply substituted their own cariacature of Southern politics for the facts of the matter — redneck jamboree might be an apt description of the picture you get of the events in Montgomery from the coverage in, say, the Washington Post or the New York Times. So let me take a moment to talk about some of these misconceptions.

First, while Moore certainly has a strong base of support amongst white conservatives in Alabama — that’s how he got elected, after all — the crazy-Right Christian fundamentalist demonstrators who have been picked out as mouthpieces for Moore are, by and large, not from Alabama. The events in Montgomery were coordinated on the ground by flacks of the Christian Coalition; supporting organizations flew people in from nearly every state. Although there were certainly Alabamians demonstrating outside of the courthouse, local newsreporters found that they were distinctly a minority amidst the crowds brought in by the Christian Defense Council, Christian Coalition, and others. Meanwhile in television punditry, the only major Alabama faces were John Giles of the Alabama Christian Coalition and Roy Moore himself. Most commentary came from yet more out-of-state professional Christians, such as representatives from Concerned Women for America.

The point of all this is that national media has gotten it wrong about who they are reporting on; it’s not a matter of Alabamians, but rather a matter of the nation-wide network of Religious Right fundamentalists, who happen to be using events in Alabama as their focal point. To say that this reflects one way or another on Alabama is no more accurate than to say the 500 attendees of Southern Girls Convention 2001 in Auburn make Alabama a hotbed of radical feminist activism.

Closely related to this misunderstanding are the incessant comparisons that the national press makes between Roy Moore and George Wallace. Sure, both of them are Southern demagogues who rode a hard Right white quasi-populism to public office and national attention. Sure, both of them acted in defiance of federal courts demanding protection of the civil rights guaranteed by the Constitution. Sure, both of them had a penchant for flamboyant confrontation and ultimately served to embarass the state of Alabama in the national spotlight. But the similarities end there. It is a fundamental misunderstanding of Roy Moore’s position and his motivations to read this as just another crisis over the powers of Southern states vis-a-vis the federal government. Although some of those supporting Roy Moore have given states’ rights as a reason against obeying the federal court, that is not the primary reasons that Roy Moore gives. Here are the reasons that Moore gives:

Separation of church and state never was meant to separate God from our government. It was never meant to separate God from our law.

The question is not whether I will remove the monument. It is not a question of whether I will disobey or obey a court order. The real question is whether or not I will deny the God that created us.

It’s not about states’ rights for Moore; it’s about Jesus. The issue is not his understanding of federalism but rather his understanding of the proper relationship between God and the State. His aims are not decentralist, but rather theocratic. To fail to understand this is to fail to understand the new breed of confrontational conservatism that Moore and his followers represent — a breed of conservatism that the Religious Right has been spreading for the past 30 years or so now.

Complaining about the Yankee press, of course, is not to say that there are not plenty of homegrown misunderstandings of Moore — there are lots, coming from his own defenders. But comments on the Right-wing deviationists will have to wait for a while. In the meantime, let’s just bask in the glow of these happy events: Roy Moore is suspended from his position as Chief Justice of the Supreme Court. Hosanna, and amen.

At the time I am writing this, Chief Justice Roy Moore of the Alabama Supreme Court has been in contempt of a federal court for half an hour. As of 12:00am he carried his battle against the Establishment Clause to a new level, as he officially stood in defiance of a federal court order to remove his two-ton Ten Commandments monument from the rotunda of the Alabama Supreme Court. In the process, he has created a national media circus; he has become yet another embarassment for Alabama in the Yankee press; and his actions may end up costing the State Treasury at the tune of some $5,000 / day if U.S. District Court Judge Myron Thompson makes good on the fine that he says he has been mulling over. But, as someone who’s spent the majority of my life in Alabama, right now I can feel nothing but excitement as Moore makes his lawless stand.

Why is that, you ask? Well, for those who have not followed Moore over the past decade or so of his career, he has made a long career of confrontational theocratic politics, from the original battle over his display of the Ten Commandments and other conduct in his Etowah County Circuit Court, to his ascent to the position of Chief Justice, to his use of the position to issue virulently homophobic tirades masquerading as case law. He is, at best, a dangerous zealot who is willing to use the State’s power of the sword to further his own ends. At worst, he is a demagogue and a charlatan blasphemously using a confrontational form of fundamentalist Christianity to pull media stunts for his own political and financial advancement. My own suspicion is that he is both–that he honestly believes in a version of fundamentalist Christianity that is actually much closer to a form of Gnosticism, a modern-day Right-wing revivalism that legitimates the use of such confrontational tactics and phony martyrdom.

Whatever his real motivations are, his presence on the Supreme Court bench in the state of Alabama has been a terrible liability for the state, and the more blatantly lawless he becomes, the worse it gets. The reason I am so excited is that Moore has gone too far out on thin ice. Tomorrow, the Southern Poverty Law Center will file a motion for him to be found in contempt of court, and if we are lucky, it will land his sorry ass in jail. More to the point, however, the SPLC is also initiating an ethics complaint against Moore, since his defiance of a federal court order is in obvious violation of several sections of the Canon of Judicial Ethics of the Code of Alabama. Moore’s latest exercise in demagoguery has given our state a wonderful opportunity–that is, it has made it quite likely that he will be thrown out of the Supreme Court within a matter of weeks.

Those of you who know me know that I don’t very much like petty vengeance in politics. I don’t usually delight in the misfortunes of people that I disagree with, even politicians that I loathe. It doesn’t fill me with glee to see Roy Moore act in defiance of the Constitution and the federal courts, or to know that it may well result in trouble for him. What makes me happy, and excited, is the prospect of a threat removed–I’m glad that very soon Moore may no longer pose a threat to the judicial system of Alabama.

(N.B.: Watch this space for more on the morrow. I have some more to say about Moore, as well as the local and national media coverage of the fracas. But it can wait; tonight I just want to celebrate the very real possibility of Moore’s impending fall.)

If there is some Evil Genius or cabal of Illuminati out there behind the cycle of repetitive human interest stories that somehow reach every corner of the United States mass media, they’ve at least picked up one of the interesting on-going stories for today.

Because of Father’s Day, a number of outlets have chosen to dust off a standing human interest story that is, at least, a somewhat interesting and quasi-positive feature: the growing number of stay-at-home fathers.

The trend is a good one: although households with stay-at-home fathers are still a tiny minority (about 4% as well as I can estimate) of all households, they are on the rise (the 2000 Census showed an increase of 70% over the 1990 Census). Now, Right-wing polemics to one side, there is absolutely nothing wrong with households in which both parents share childrearing duties and also work outside of the house. But—as feminists have pointed out many, many times–homemaking and childrearing are important work in society, and they are only regarded as not real work—or simply not mentioned at all in discussions of labor and the economy—because they are jobs that are gender-coded female. The result of more women entering workplaces outside of homemaking and childrearing has been a number of significant shake-ups in the cultural and material underpinnings of patriarchy. One can hope that the result of more men entering into homemaking and childrearing will be the same.

Of course, worry-wort that I am, I have plenty of cavils and downsides to worry about. In particular, although an encouragingly large amount of the coverage has been purged of this disease, the old Backlash refrains still come around: CNN, for example, reported on the increasing number of men helping with childcare, etc.—as if spending all day at home cooking, cleaning, taking care of the kids, etc., were some gift that men were chivalrously pitching in to help out the little woman, rather than necessary work that, in this particular household, a man is doing a disproportionate share of in return for financial support from his wife.

Another worry: every single family portrayed in these stories, as far as I can tell (including the San Fransisco Chronicle, Cherry Hill Courier Post, the CNN television report, etc.) has been a family where one or both parents have spent their time in white-collar, upper-middle class professional jobs. Nearly all of them have been white-skinned. Needless to say, all of them have been heterosexual married couples. Just a reminder of how constrained the debate is: all of the debating, measuring, studying, hectoring, and congratulating in the world is completely irrelevant to the many, many, households that simply can’t afford for either parent to stay at home or which are headed by single mothers or which are headed by gay, lesbian, or transgendered couples.

That’s to be expected, I suppose. But if it is important to open up our social norms to include stay-at-home fathers and make them visible, it is certainly just as important—and perhaps much more so—to open them up to include the huge variety of family structures that lie outside the whitebread, heterosexist norms that are standard requirements in the mass media human interest story. And we must continue to work for material improvements (like better access to childcare and healthcare, more flexible work arrangements, etc.) that can make happy, healthy families a reality—no matter what their demographic make-up happens to be.

While Donald Rumsfeld and his chuckle-headed apologists crow about the outcome of the Bush administration’s use of lies and deceit to justify war on Iraq, we might remember that the war zone created in Baghdad has led to a couple things: armed Islamist militias controlled by local clerics and the rise of rape and terror against women.

Zeinab, a 24-year-old computer science major who declined to give her last name, would drive her own car to college before the U.S. invasion, but now she’s only permitted to leave the house for school with the man she jokingly calls her driver-bodyguard-chaperon.

The beauty salons she used to frequent for pedicures and conversation are closed, so Zeinab spends much of her long hours at home in front of a mirror, practicing different hairstyles for the day she regains a social life.

Girls lost most of their freedom here a long time ago, but now we’ve lost it all, she said angrily. They want to protect our honor.

[LA Times]

And:

Sheik Nasseri, for instance, has been giving the Friday sermon at the main mosque in Sadr City, where he has railed against Americans as infidel colonizers and sanctioned the killing of unveiled women who refuse to comply with his rules, as well as the killing of Muslims or non-Muslims who sell liquor.

[NY Times]

Just in case you have forgotten: these are the same conditions–precisely the same conditions–that led to the establishment of the Islamist tyranny in Iran, and were used to justify forced veiling and other misogynist repression. And they are also the same conditions–precisely the same conditions that led to the horrors of the Taliban in Afghanistan.

So thanks, Donald, for lying to us about weapons of mass destruction in order to carry out your dirty little war. What an awful outcome indeed.

So, it’s official. I’m a Bachelor.

Saturday I graduated from Auburn University, with a B.A. in Philosophy (with a Computer Science minor tacked on for good measure). After the past few years of wandering the halls of learning (or, at least, the halls of Haley Center), I finally have to figure out a new gig. Usually at this point, someone makes some remark or another about leaving the bubble of the academy and being thrown out into the terrible freedom of the real world. You won’t hear it from me, though, for a couple of reasons.

First, I’ve been inhabiting the real world all along. I mean this in the truistic sense–Auburn University campus is no more illusory and no less material than the rest of the world–but I mean it in a deeper sense too. When people talk about school as not being part of the real world, they seem to have one of two things in mind (or, more likely, both). On the one hand, there is a particular picture of what academics do and how it relates to the world. The idea is that you’re dealing with the fabric of reality only when you’re in the midst of an active, practical life–that academics aren’t worldly wise enough to hack it in such a life–that the world of the academy doesn’t (and can’t) deal in experiential reality, because its whole purpose is to think rather than to do. On the other hand, there is a particular attitude towards school: it’s not part of the real world because it bears no deep relationship to what you intend to do with your life. At best, it’s a preparatory means, valuable purely instrumentally–it’s something that you do in order to get into a socio-economic position where you can strike off and do whatever it is that constitutes your real life–a career, a family, or what have you. At worst, it’s merely a holding pen where you wait around until you’re ready to go off the parental dole and get started on the real part of your life. The second picture is usually a direct result of the first. Going to school isn’t part of the real part of your life because the real part of your life consists of doing things, not of thinking about them.

I don’t want to deny that the second picture is an accurate empirical theory about how most people think of college in this day and age. But I think it is a pernicious picture if it is taken as a guide for how ought to spend your school years; those who act on a picture like that have basically been wasting their time and money for the past 4 years. It’s by no means necessary (however often it may be actual) for school to be cut off from the serious part of your life; such a dichotomy rests, I think, on a notion of the academic life that is completely false.

What I mean is this: in most other civilized times, we would hardly feel any need to defend the validity of the vita contemplativa, or the value of the way I’ve spent the past four years–learning and wrestling with important problems, for the sake of nothing except thought itself and knowledge of the truth. That is no small part of what I want to do with my life and to contribute to the world. The relationship between doing and thinking isn’t antagonism, or parasitism. Humans are rational animals; the very essence of how we live our lives is that we put thought into action, that thinking and doing are (for us) two sides of one coin. (Doing without thinking, in any literal and sustained sense, is a form of madness–indeed, a form of inhumanity.) So while I’m done being an undergraduate, my life for the past four years hasn’t been mere preparation for what is to follow. I’ve been doing what I want to do all along.

And I intend to keep on doing what I have been doing. But I’m out of school for the next year, and being a freelance academic doesn’t pay very well. So, I will be looking for a job, and working on graduate school applications for the academic year after the upcoming one. (If graduate school doesn’t work out, I might have to become a monk.)

In the meantime, however, I am on vacation. Right now I am reporting from Berea, Kentucky, where I’m visiting my old friend S. with the rest of my gang of friends from high school. S. pulls us into these fascinating conversations about sustainability and renewable energy and culture; we wander around the campus as if it were a swampy May night in Auburn again.

From there, it is a mere 12 hours by Greyhound bus to Detroit, where I will meet with my sweetheart. I can’t tell you how much I am looking forward to this–to the theological inside jokes, to talking again about philosophy and movies and the Middle Ages; to just having quiet time together to spend with absolutely nothing else eating time away. We’re heading out on a trans-continental road trip out to California, where the plan is (I think) to sit on the beach, C and talk and read and do as close to absolutely nothing as possible for a few days–then to meander around a few sites in Monterey and San Fransisco. My hope is that I won’t be heading back home until early June.

In any case, the plan from there is: (1) summer work, (2) break, (3) move, and (4) fall work. (1) will consist in serving as a T.A. in Philosophy of Mind for Johns Hopkins University Center for Talented Youth (except I won’t actually be at JHU; I’ll be at a program site in Loudonville, New York). After that I am moving to Ypsilanti, MI, and looking around to find out in what (4) will consist. Wish me luck!

Posting will be sporadic, but I fear that you are more than used to that already, gentle reader. I’ll try and drop a line from time to time, though, and when I get back some changes and updates the the site are in the works.

Ciao!