Category Archives: My (largely correct) political views

School Policy Says It Can Kick Out Students With Gay Parents

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Given the debate and confusion in our society about marriage and human sexuality it is vital that Trinity families agree with and support the school’s traditional, Christian understanding of those issues.  Therefore, when the atmosphere or conduct within a particular home is counter to the school’s understanding of a biblical lifestyle, including the practice or promotion of the LGBT (lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender) lifestyle or alternative gender identity, the school should have the right, in its sole discretion, to deny the admission of an applicant or discontinue enrollment of a current student.

Source: School Policy Says It Can Kick Out Students With Gay Parents | ThinkProgress

Waiting to hear how they’ll handle adultery, swearing, mouthing off to mom and dad, lying, and coveting thy neighbor’s fancy new electronic devices.

Who’s ‘They’? – The New York Times

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From last Sunday’s NYT Magazine, called “Who’s They” online and “Multiple Choice” in the dead trees edition:

In December, the Post copy editor Bill Walsh called “they” “the only sensible solution to English’s lack of a gender-neutral third-person singular personal pronoun,” with “sensible” being the key word. The singular “they” gained favor with The Post’s standard-bearer partly because the presumptive “he” “hasn’t been palatable for decades,” but also because a generic “she” feels “patronizing” and “attempts at made-up pronouns” — like “xe,” “xim,” and “xir” — strike Walsh as “silly.”

But then, ten years ago, wouldn’t we have thought “text” as a verb or “blog” as any sort of word at all were silly?   How about “tweet”?   Or earlier, “fax”?  “Email”?

Xe, xim, and xir maybe new, unfamiliar, not-yet-widely-adopted, or (is it just me?) hard to pronounce, but they are not silly.

Asshole.*

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* Widely-adopted pronoun indicating (among others things) an arrogant, misguided fool.  Example: “Hey, asshole, take a sec to think about the fact that you sound like a cis-privileged old fart before you publish.”

Musing on the passing of Justice Scalia

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Randomly:

These two sayings have been bouncing around in my head:  Thumper’s Mother* —  “If you can’t say something nice, don’t say nothing at all;”  Alice Roosevelt Longworth — “If you can’t say something good about someone, come sit right here by me.”

Many people, possibly casting about for something nice to say, praise Scalia’s “fine legal mind” or words to that effect.  But that seems to me like eulogizing someone for having really good looking toes.  Or excellent hair.  Your brain is just another body part.   The fact that it worked quickly, or generated scathing bons mots, or was especially astute at plumbing the intentions of the long-dead committee who stapled together our Constitution, seems secondary or tertiary or hundred-ary to how you used your brain.  (Or your feet.  Or your . . . hair?)   On that score, it is very hard to find anything good to say.  Scalia’s jurisprudence insulted and excluded LGBT and Black Americans, closed the courthouse doors on non-corporate citizens, and sent hundreds of our fellow human beings to their death at the hands of our own states.  And often that fine mind of his refused to stop with a legal analysis of why our LGBT friends and family should not be able to marry or why universities should not be permitted to open their doors a bit wider for people whose great-grandparents WE HELD IN CHAINS.  So often, especially in dissent, he used that fine mind to craft scathing insults for those who disagreed with him.

He was a bully, and he used his powerful brain the way a bully uses his powerful fists.  We would not eulogize a bully for his awesome fists.

There is no universe in which Antonin Scalia could have been considered a good person.  Honestly, I would have trouble eulogizing a liberal judge who decided every case just the way I would, but insulted and demeaned his sibling judges, the litigants before him, and his fellow human beings.

Am I speaking ill of the dead?  Yes, I suppose I am.  But as one Tumblr philosopher noted, “we don’t speak ill of the dead in America unless they were unarmed and black.”  It’s time to make that practice more inclusive.

Update:  Don’t miss Lao Bao’s second comment below — and be thankful that he’s teaching our next generation!

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* Oddly, I had remember this as Peter Rabbit’s mother, possibly because my father used Beatrix Potter as the source of a fair amount of conveyed wisdom.

 

Imagine for a moment . . .

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. . . that CAIR (Council on American-Islamic Relations) published a photo of Donald Trump with a scattering of bullets next to his head.  How about a Black Lives Matter tweet with photos of police and bullets?  Heads would explode.  Pundits would rant.  Investigations would be launched.  Conservatives would be outraged.

But this?  It’s apparently acceptable for a leading conservative cause to use this image:

Image: copy of tweet from NRA with showing photos of a black woman in a red-checked suit jacket and a white woman in a green turtle-neck and black suit jacket with four bullets arrayed next to the photos. Text reads: "sounding off on one of the most ridiculous anti-gun schemes introduced in some time.

Why isn’t this terrorism?  If terrorism is “the use of violence and intimidation in the pursuit of political aims,” this certainly qualifies.  Violent intimidation in pursuit of political aims.  The only silver lining is that they are losing and this shows their desperation.

Texas Governor Orders Founding Fathers/Constitution Display Removed from State Capitol (but the Nativity Can Stay)

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The governor of Texas removed an approved display involving the Statue of Liberty because . . . Texas has a budget surplus that it would like to redistribute to ACLU lawyers?

Source: Texas Governor Orders Atheist Display Removed from State Capitol (but the Nativity Can Stay)

BTW the headline originally read, “Texas Governor Orders Atheist Display Removed  . . .” but there’s nothing anti-God there, just pro-America and pro-Constitution.  Honestly, the full-support-for-civil-liberties-lawyers theory is the only one that really fits.

White Affirmative Action

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I wrote this op-ed for the Denver Post* after we got a flyer under the door of our law office.  It was published on January 18, 1998.  Given that we have just recently been treated to the clownshow of a white Supreme Court justice announcing that African-American students would be better off in “less-advanced” or “slower track” schools, rather than the University of Texas, I thought it would be fun to re-run this.  The Post called it “Clear the bench (and bar) of privilege.”  I thought of titling it “Gimme a Fucking Break,” but went for the more descriptive “White Affirmative Action.”

We recently received — under the front door of our law firm’s office, sans postage — an interesting missive announcing the organization of a group called VICTIMS OF AFFIRMATIVE ACTION (all caps in the original).  This group (we’ll call them VAA) opposes affirmative action  — from context, the race-based variety — and proposes to shed light on “the appointment of lawyers holding unmerited law degrees to the federal court bench” (underline in the original) and to “deny . . . admission of scholasically unfit ‘minorities’ to law schools.”  The letter concludes by asking for our “assistance, financial or otherwise.”  I choose “otherwise” and offer my invaluable assistance through the formation of what VAA will surely recognize as an important allied organization:  VICTIMS OF PRIVILEGE AND NEPOTISM.

VAA argues that their group is necessary because they have found at least two black judges they claim are unqualified for the federal bench:  one because the judge invented a story about his youth in Mississippi; the other because the judge — at the trial court level — had no previous judicial experience.  (The letter does not mention the law board scores, law school grades, scholastic honors, professional experience or judicial competence of either man.) This got me thinking:  In my ten years of legal practice, I have encountered not only a few incompetent white judges but scores of incompetent white attorneys and I have begun to suspect that these lawyers, too, are the recipients of unmerited law degrees.

To remedy this situation, VAA will have to agree, will require our new group to deny law school admission to scholastically unfit white applicants who rely on such illegitimate factors as where their parents went to law school, who their parents know in the admissions department, or how much money their families have contributed to the school over the years.  Also in our cross-hairs will be such system-abusers as white kids with lower-than-acceptable scores who try to get admitted based on international travel, internships with friends of the family, political work with same, and other life-enhancing experiences open only to those of wealth and connection.  Practicing lawyers who were admitted to law school based on any of these factors must be deemed to hold “unmerited law degrees,” right VAA?

And it doesn’t stop with law school.  We’ll also have to get rid of any white lawyer who got his job because he or his parents knew someone at the firm, because his family attended a church or country club with one of the partners, or because the supervisor from a previous — nepotistically-acquired — job made a recommendation.  Any white judge appointed based on political connections developed through contact with other privileged white lawyers or contributions to the campaigns of privileged white senators cannot be considered qualified to serve.  Finally, of course, any white lawyer who has received the benefit of the doubt based simply on having white skin, good clothes or a standard accent or because a boss or judge of the same ethnic background felt “comfortable” around him — where an equally talented minority lawyer would have been passed over — must step aside.

Well, I’m outta here.  And so are most of the white lawyers and judges I’ve worked with over the years — the good, the bad and the ugly.  Truth is, it is we who benefit from affirmative action and always has been.  Sure merit matters — that’s why we have a bar exam.  But if we think merit was ever all that mattered or that affirmative action was invented in the 1970s to assist minorities and women, we are living in a fantasy world.

We white people have been enjoying the fruits of affirmative action ever since a white skin was all you needed to not be enslaved.  Even after discrimination was declared officially illegal, our prospects in the school-admissions and job markets still benefit overwhelmingly from affirmative action through nepotism, connection, economic privilege and — above all — the largely subconscious sense of most white bosses and faculty that we are like them, that we fit in, that they are comfortable around us, or that we remind them of their kids.  Affirmative action that favors minorities — both the type that requires outreach to non-white populations and, on a larger scale, the type that keeps an eye on the numbers — is necessary and will be until our economy and workforce are sufficiently diverse that the affirmative action working against minorities has faded away.

So whaddya say, VAA?  Are you ready to address the plight of all VICTIMS OF NON-MERIT-BASED SELECTION PROCEDURES?  We’d like your assistance  . . . but skip the “otherwise,” I’ll take financial assistance.

The Post asked me to add a one-sentence biographical description.  I chose confession and tribute:

Amy Farr Robertson is a Denver lawyer who graduated from Yale Law School 28 years after her father, who taught her to appreciate all the ways she has benefited from affirmative action.

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*The link will make you pay $2.95 to read the above.

New/old rule: no one gets to criticize the way other people mourn

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The days since the attacks in Paris and Beirut have followed a predictable Scold Cycle:

  • Massive coverage by Western news sources of the attacks in Paris.
  • Outpouring of sympathy for Paris with associated profile-photo-changing, Marseillaise-singing, and awkward-French-speaking.
  • Outpouring of hypocrisy-pointing-out with calls to acknowledge the recent attacks in Beirut.

Rinse repeat.  Although I guess this blog may be the next round in the cycle:  the criticism-of-hypocrisy-pointing-out.  But ever since Republicans decided to launch a media campaign denouncing the way grieving liberals spoke at Paul Wellstone’s funeral — one of the most craven political acts in a sea of cravenness — I’ve decided that people get to say pretty much whatever they want when they are grieving.  Perhaps all the Tricolour profile photos belong to people who have traveled to France, or have loved ones there.  Or maybe it is because they identify with white Europeans more than brown Lebanese.  I don’t know.  Let them process their shock and grief for a bit before telling them that it’s racist or colonialist.

Corollary:  this is not the time to point out that France has done all sorts of First World colonial bad shit.  Yes.  True.  This is not the time.  Like that time you attended the funeral of a guy who had done both good stuff and bad stuff in his life.  The funeral, right then, was not the time to point out the bad stuff.

Obviously, the media are in a different situation.  They need to be more evenhanded in the way they cover violence.  Yet the American media still cover the rest of the world according to Spy Magazine’s “Death News Equation:”  a calculation that involves the number killed or injured, the “sensitivity . . . of Times editors to the episode,” and the proximity of the incident to Times Square.  And by “sensitivity,” I think they meant “resemblance of the victims to actual Times editors.”  That equation still holds up, though I’ve always thought — based on my experience living in Taiwan — that it was a fairly universal phenomenon.  The day Benigno Aquino was assassinated, the banner headline in the main Taiwanese newspaper read, “China Airlines service to Philippines suspended” with a smaller headline and article below explaining that Mr. Aquino had been shot on the tarmac after disembarking from a China Airlines plane.  We’re all about ourselves, wherever we are.

Trump:  shockingly unaware of how the First Amendment works.

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If I become president, we’re all going to be saying Merry Christmas again, that I can tell you.

The free speech clause and the establishment clause: both a mystery to Trump. Or maybe he’s just planning a bullyocracy.

 

Drive Like Your Kids Live Here*

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Image: Red lawn sign with white letters that read "Drive Like Your Kids Live Here." Other lawns in the background have the same sign.These preachy little signs are popping up all over our neighborhood. Every time I see one, two thoughts float through my head:

First thought:  I don’t have kids, you sanctimonious shit, so I’ll drive the way I would if my imaginary kids lived there and my imaginary kids all drive for NASCAR.

Second thought:  let’s apply this standard universally:

  • Provide access like your kids used wheelchairs.
  • Provide interpreters like your kids were Deaf.
  • Locate fracking like your kids lived there.
  • Make cops treat all kids like your kids.
  • Fund public education like you had one imaginary kid in each school in the country.  (Hey, if the Duggars can do it . . .).
  • Generally do unto others like you would do unto your kids.

Wasn’t there some guy a while back who had a whole philosophy, a religion, actually, IIRC, around a concept sort of like this?

Actually, a third thought often sneaks in, which is this:  I HATE this sort of sanctimony . . . FLOOR IT!  I honestly think this reaction would not be unusual, and that they’d have better results with a sign that read something like, “radar speed camera ahead.”

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* Shouldn’t it be “like your kids lived here.”  It’s the subjunctive, you sanctimonious UNGRAMMATICAL shits!

Dignify THIS!

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I’m done. I’m done being polite.* I’m done shutting up about good liberals who seem to get every sort of civil rights and civil liberties except the equality of rights, respect, and dignity of our brothers and sisters with disabilities. I’m done with disability rights as a “when we get around to it” right. I’m done with people who are willing to use respectful terminology except — *big sigh* — avoiding using the word “retard” is just one step too far toward thought control.  And I’m done with “civil rights” law firms in inaccessible offices and “civil rights” lawyers who don’t hire interpreters. I’m done.

What pushed me over the edge was this voicemail, from a fellow attorney who would, I believe, describe himself as favoring civil rights. I suppose it’s my one last shred of not-yet-quite-doneness that leads me to keep him anonymous.

But who he thinks he is and who his words and actions show him to be should not be anonymous. It needs to be out there for good liberals — chock full of self-righteousness and non-disabled privilege — to observe and perhaps see themselves.  And become real civil rights lawyers by according people with disabilities the same rights and respect you accord other groups you work so hard for.

First let’s play the “protected class switcheroo” game. Imagine I got this voicemail:

Hey Amy, [Name Redacted] here. Trying to get in touch with you and/or Tim. I’m working with a group that is sponsoring legislation to increase penalties for disrespecting police officers. They got bogged down because of some African-American, ah, community concerns – said it would be used as a sword instead of a shield. Um, I think it’s miscommunication. I think the African-American community should be absolutely in favor of it and I wanted to hook up with folks, the right folks, in the African-American community and I thought you would know the behind the scenes politics of who best to contact. . . . .

Pretty gross, eh? No good liberal would talk that way, at least not in public in 2015. This is, in fact, the voicemail I received. Verbatim.

Hey Amy, [Name Redacted] here. Trying to get in touch with you and/or Tim. Um, I’ve done work in the past through when I was at the ACLU with the Hemlock Society; they’re now the Compassion and Choices organization and they sponsored some legislation about right to choose or to refuse treatment. They got bogged down because of some disability, ah, community concerns – said it would be used as a sword instead of a shield. Um, I think it’s miscommunication. I think the disability community should be absolutely in favor of it and I wanted to hook up the Compassionate Choices people with folks, the right folks, in the disability community and I thought you would know the behind the scenes politics of who best to contact. . . . .

And here is my response:

[Name Redacted] –

Thanks for your voicemail.  I think I can say with a fair degree of confidence that there was no miscommunication on the disability rights side.  The position of CCDC, Not Dead Yet Colorado, and a long list of prominent disability rights groups opposing physician assisted suicide is well thought out and thoroughly researched.  I can’t possibly improve on the information on NDYCO’s website, so I’ll provide a link:  http://www.notdeadyetcolorado.org/.

To be clear, Colorado’s bill was not about refusing treatment:  anyone can do that at any time without the proposed legislation.  It is also not about choices:  we can all choose to buy a gun and shoot ourselves; to drive in front of a train; to stop eating and drinking; etc.  Instead, the discussion revolves around getting a doctor to assist you in killing yourself to avoid — tracking the title of the bill — an undignified death.  What is characterized as “lack of dignity,” however, are conditions that many people with disabilities live and thrive with every day:  the need for a vent; a feeding tube; colostomy; urostomy; assistance with activities of daily living.  Statistics from Oregon, for example, a state that has legalized assisted suicide, demonstrate that people do not chose assisted suicide to relieve intractable pain — the purpose for which it has been sold to the public — but rather to address perceived loss of autonomy, inability to engage in activities of daily living, and loss of dignity.

These perceptions and the urge to kill oneself over them result directly from a society that does not value people with disabilities — and such perceptions are (circularly) reinforced by bills like these and the rhetoric that surround them.  Assisted suicide is urged in an environment in which people with disabilities do not have universal access to attendant care in their homes and communities, to assistive technology and mobility devices, to accessible vehicles or modifications, or to home modifications — hell, to accessible homes to start with.  These are all things that people need to continue to live — with dignity — in the community.  In the absence of this sort of support, many disabilities fit the bill’s definition of “terminal,” making it the worst sort of health care rationing:  cheaper dead than disabled.

A bill proposing that it was “undignified” to live as an African-American, an LGBT* person, or — to take an historical example — as a Jew, thereby justifying easy access to death would be rejected with horror.  Yet good liberals appear completely at home with providing a cheap and easy path to death for people with disabilities.

Furthermore, the concerns of people with disabilities reflect a great deal of thought and considered analysis; it is patronizing to suggest that they result from miscommunications.  I can’t imagine any other group active in the civil rights dialog that would be the subject of a voicemail like this.  When LGBT* groups oppose civil rights rollbacks, are they perhaps just victims of a miscommunication, which can be corrected by identifying the “right” groups?  How about African-Americans calling for law enforcement reform?  Shall we identify the “right” groups to support our men and women in blue?

The debate over physician assisted suicide has been plagued by this sort of condescension, as liberal and radical disability rights groups are accused of being pawns of religious conservatives, as if incapable of independent thought.  This infantilizing of our movement underscores our fears that disability is so stigmatized that ostensible civil rights champions would rather be dead than disabled.

Ultimately, if the ACLU is devoted to nondiscriminatory civil liberties, it should support a universal right to assisted suicide.  Anyone, anytime, can request a lethal dose, not just those in circumstances defined in terms of a protected classification.  This I would support, though I believe other members of the disability rights community are more compassionate than I am.

I would be happy to put you in touch with any of the groups on this list to help with any miscommunications:

  • Access & Ability Colorado
  • ADAPT
  • ADAPT Colorado
  • Assn of Programs for Rural Independent Living
  • Autistic Self Advocacy Network
  • The Center for Rights of Parents with Disabilities
  • Colorado Cross-Disability Coalition
  • Disability Rights Center
  • Disability Rights Education and Defense Fund
  • Justice For All
  • National Council on Disability
  • National Council on Independent Living
  • National Spinal Cord Injury Association
  • Not Dead Yet USA
  • Not Dead Yet Colorado
  • Patients’ Rights Action Fund
  • TASH
  • The World Association of Persons with Disabilities
  • The World Institute on Disability

Sincerely,

Amy

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* Yes, I know, there is clear and convincing evidence that I was done with politeness, as a general matter, a long time ago.