"The Faith of Fifty Million People"

The idea staggered me. I remembered, of course, that the World’s Series had been fixed in 1919, but if I had thought of it at all I would have thought of it as a thing that merely happened, the end of some inevitable chain. It never occurred to me that one man could start to play with the faith of fifty million people — with the single-mindedness of a burglar blowing a safe.

from The Great Gatsby - F. Scott Fitzgerald

The nice thing about writing a blog is that you have the freedom to write whatever you please because you don't have an editor looking over your shoulder. The bad part is you don't have an editor looking over your shoulder reigning in your compulsions and keeping you honest. I know my posts tend to come in on the long side and that's putting it mildly. Even so, I often have more material to cover than even I am willing to include in a single post. When that happens, I usually decide it's time for a break and continue with a part two, sometimes even a part three.

In my last post, the one about Shoeless Joe Jackson possibly getting into the Baseball Hall of Fame, I came to a natural end point and left it at that.

Yet, long as that post was, there was still more I wanted to cover on the subject, so I'll be doing that in this post.

There are a couple other reasons. First, it gives me the opportunity to cover one of my favorite subjects, baseball history. Some people assume that because I write about it so often, I must be a rabid baseball fan. The truth is I'm not. I would have a hard time coming up with a list of a dozen current Major League ball players off the top of my head, including those on my hometown teams. I leave that to my son. But I do love the history of the game which ties in, in some curious ways, to the history of this country, especially its urban history, which is what this blog is ostensibly about. At least that's what it says on the masthead.

Writing about baseball also helps me contemplate a topic that has little or nothing to do with the current state of the world, especially American politics, which I've written about ad nauseam for the past ten or so years.

After all, how many ways are there to spell shit show?

Ok now that's off my chest...

One of the things that keeps me interested in the story of the infamous 1919 Chicago White Sox, (eight members of whom including their star left fielder Joe Jackson, conspired to intentionally lose the World Series), is not so much the story itself, but the myths surrounding the story and how willing folks are to buy into them, and to what lengths they will go to defend them, over a century after the fact.

That's pretty much par for the course in the game as until fairly recently, baseball history was not considered a subject worthy of serious study. Its major chroniclers were sports writers, albeit some very good ones. The problem is, these writers may have been good story tellers, but they were lousy historians. Putting it another way, baseball traditionally had a lot of Homers, but few if any Thucydides. Consequently, much of baseball history is built upon a string of myths, (including its own creation myth) with a few facts thrown in for good measure. 

Here's a good article written by a real historian, in fact, the official historian of Major League Baseball, John Thorn. In his piece, Thorn cites an article from the Society of the Advancement of Baseball Research, which debunks many of the myths and misunderstandings surrounding the Black Sox Scandal.

However I do have a bone to pick, ok maybe just a nit, with an issue that Thorn brings up.

It's the idea that Babe Ruth "saved" baseball from the existential threat to the game brought on by the Black Sox Scandal. 

I bring that up because when I told my friend Rich about the last post I was about to write, he made the comment: "Babe Ruth saved baseball after the scandal didn't he?" Even though I've gone on record making that claim, I've had my doubts about the subject for a few years now with nothing to really back it up, so I just answered in the affirmative.

My current feeling is not to diminish Babe Ruth's impact on the game of baseball one bit. I agree with John Thorn and countless others that with his free swinging, all-or-nothing approach to hitting the baseball, there is no person who singlehandedly changed the modern game more than the Sultan of Swat. I commented in an earlier post about a list where Thorn ranked in order the 100 most important people in baseball history. As much of a cliché it may seem, you-know-who was number one. 

Jackie Robinson came in at number two. 

Many people would argue that it should be the other way around and I see their point. But my argument, take it or leave it, is that Jackie Robinson was the Neil Armstrong of baseball, that is to say his groundbreaking role as the first black player in modern Major League Baseball history, was the culmination of the efforts of many people, especially the scores of Negro League players who came before him and upon whose shoulders he stood. There is no doubt that he played the role into which he was cast brilliantly and for that he is well deserving of all the accolades. But if it hadn't been Jackie Robinson, like Neil Armstrong, the first man to walk on the moon, it would have been someone else. 

On the other hand, Babe Ruth changed baseball (some would argue not necessarily for the better*), all by himself.

But did his presence in the game on the heels of baseball's "original sin", its "loss of innocence" and all the other dubious, grandiloquent labels we've come to accept that describe the 1919 World Series Scandal, really save the game from ruin? 

I would argue no, for there is in fact little evidence that the scandal rocked the game to its core and that consequently, the game wasn't in any need of being saved.

Consider the quote at the top of this post from the novel The Great Gatsby. In it, Nick Carroway, the book's narrator is describing a lunchtime meeting where he joins Gatsby and one of his associates, Meyer Wolfsheim. Carroway describes his first impressions of Wolfsheim this way: 

A small, flat-nosed Jew raised his large head and regarded me with two fine growths of hair which luxuriated in either nostril. After a moment I discovered his tiny eyes in the half-darkness.

The trio lunch together and Fitzgerald, in Calloway's voice goes into detail contrasting the demeanor of  Wolfsheim with that of the two Gentiles, Gatsby and Carroway, in words that would never fly today, At one point Gatsby excuses himself leaving Carroway alone with Wolfsheim who directs Carroway's attention to his own cufflinks which turn out to be made of human molars. 

After lunch, Carroway asks Gatsby who this curious character Wolfsheim was, a dentist perhaps? 

"Meier Wolfsheim?" replies Gatsby. The narration continues:

"No, he’s a gambler.” Gatsby hesitated, then added coolly: “He’s the man who fixed the World’s Series back in 1919.”

Then comes the line quoted at the top of this post.

The character of Meyer Wolfsheim was a none too subtle reference to the real Arthur Rothstein, the New York gangster who played a role in the Black Sox Scandal.

If you can get past the anti-semetic subcontext, the line about playing with the faith of 50 million people is inspired. It was appropriated in addition to me, by Ken Burns as the title to his chapter on the decade of the nineteen teens in his Baseball TV series. 

The quote above is also inaccurate, as it is commonly accepted that no, the 1919 Series wasn't "fixed" by one man, rather that the players themselves came up with the idea.

But what really interests me about the quote is this line: "I remembered of course that the World Series had been fixed in 1919." As has been well noted, this year, 2025 marks the centennial of the publication of  The Great Gatsby. Which brings to mind that at the time of the book's release, the Black Sox Scandal had only been a few years old. The Great Gatsby actually is set in 1922, only one year after the trial and banishment of the eight players involved in the scandal. Yet Fitzgerald's use of the world "remembered" sounds as if Calloway was recalling an event that had happened in the distant past, perhaps a decade or even a generation before. If the event was grave enough to have challenged the faith of 50 million people (just less than one half the U.S. population at the time), AND had happened only one year before, one would think Fitzgerald might have used the term "I knew of course" rather than "I remembered..." 

One might argue that Fitzgerald was living in Paris at the time he was writing Gatsby so he would have been farther removed from the event than had he been stateside. But I have perhaps a more plausible explanation. 

Maybe the Black Sox Scandal wasn't as big a deal with baseball fans as we today assume it was. Could it be that Fitzgerald as well as Nelson Algren, James T. Farrell, Elliot Asinov and other writers who took it on as a subject, used the event as purely a literary device rather than an accurate depiction of history? After all, these authors were first and foremost great story tellers, not historians.

OK that's pure speculation, but there is some empirical evidence that backs up my claim that the 1919 Black Sox Scandal really didn't have an existential impact on the game, attendance at ballparks. 

The data comes from the site: BallparksofBaseball.com

Between 1910 and 1916, total yearly attendance for the 16 Major League teams, eight in each league, ranged between 4.5 and 6.5 million fans. On April 17, 1917, the United States entered World War I but despite that, MLB attendance remained within that range at 4.8 million that year. 

However, attendance took a drastic hit in 1918 as many players were either drafted and entered the service or as was the case of Joe Jackson and Lefty Williams, two of the banished 1919 White Sox players, chose to leave baseball to work for commercial enterprises with government contracts that were deemed "essential" to the war effort. There they spent most of their time playing exhibition baseball. With a good number of ball players off to war or somewhere else, attendance took a big hit, coming in at 2.8 million.

World War I ended in November of that year and MLB attendance bounded back in 1919, slightly topping the previous record of the decade at 6,532,439.

Word of the fixing of the Series didn't become public until just before the end of the 1920 season and that year saw a dramatic increase in attendance, up to 9,120,875. If you know your baseball history, you know that was the year that much to the chagrin of their fans, the Boston Red Sox sold Babe Ruth to the New York Yankees. Much of that jump in attendance is a result of New York City alone as attendance for Yankees home games more than doubled from 619,164 in 1919 to a staggering 1,289,422 in 1920. 

You may recall that Ruth started out as a pitcher. That all changed when he moved south to New York because, valuable as he was on the mound, his presence everyday in the lineup as a slugging outfielder was even more valuable. As an everyday presence in the lineup, Babe Ruth hit 54 home runs in 1920. He broke the previous record of 29, set by himself the previous year, on July 19, halfway into the season. By the way, the previous record of 27 homers in one year that Ruth broke in 1919, was set by Ned Williamson in 1884. 

Ruth's 54 home run record lasted all of one year. He hit 59 the following year and 60 in 1927, for arguably the best Major League team ever. 

That record stood until another Yankee, Roger Maris broke it in 1961. 

So yes indeed, Babe Ruth's becoming a Yankee had a profound impact on the popularity of baseball, becoming more profound every subsequent year in the decade of the twenties.

But it must be remembered that as a member of the American League, Babe Ruth only played against American League teams, half of the teams in Major League baseball. 

In 1920, the Yankees' National League stadium-mates the New York Giants** saw their 1920 attendance increase by over 200,000 from the previous year. More dramatic, over in Brooklyn, the National League Robins (today's LA Dodgers), attendance went from 360 thousand+ in 1919, to a little over 800 thousand in 1920. 

It wasn't just New York, attendance was up for every team in the majors in 1920, American and National League, except for Detroit for some reason, and for both Boston teams, the Red Sox, for obvious reasons, and their crosstown rivals the Braves. Maybe for them it was a matter of guilt by association. 

Of course Babe Ruth never played against National League teams during the regular season so it can safely be assumed that he had little impact on the attendance at National League parks, at least until later years when players all over the Majors adopted his style of hitting.

Anyway the 1919 Scandal surfaced and became public at the end of the 1920 season so one would expect that if it had a major impact on the game, it would have been reflected in the attendance at ballgames in 1921 and the subsequent years. Indeed, overall attendance did drop by about five percent in 1921. 

Much of that loss can be accounted for by the understandable drop in attendance of 35 percent for White Sox home games alone. Was it out of disgust with the scandal or simply the fact that the team, one of the best in baseball at the time, overnight lost three out of its four starting infielders, two of its three starting outfielders, and two of its starting pitchers?  The White Sox wouldn't become competitive again until the 1950s. And the Red Sox in 1921 continued to hemorrhage fans, about 30 percent of them from '20 to '21, clearly out of disgust with their owner Harry Frazee, who allegedly sold Babe Ruth to finance his theatrical ambitions.

As for the rest of the teams in baseball, 1921 was more or less break even, some teams gained fans, while others lost fans. The same was true in subsequent years but with overall attendance increasing gradually year by year.

Maybe you see something in those numbers that I don't, but to me they don't show any clear indication that baseball as a whole was in serious trouble after the Black Sox Scandal.

In fact, in the years after the 1919 affair, every team in baseball except the Red Sox, turned a profit. That includes the Chicago White Sox. 

Yes, much of that is due to Babe Ruth who for his part, invented and defined the role of baseball superstar, while the game he represented, gladly went along for the ride.

Because of that, the image of Ruth, the Redeemer in pinstripes, fits in nicely with the narrative of the betrayal of the faith of 50 million people brought on by baseball's "Original Sin".

But that's all likely as much a part of baseball mythology as is so much of the legacy of hands down the game's greatest player with one exception. Babe Ruth really was that. 

Yet the loss of innocence part is all hooey. Outside of a parent and child playing catch, baseball at its purest, there never has been anything remotely innocent about the game.

In fact, just like the kid outside the courthouse in Chicago during the trial of the Chicago eight allegedly saying to Shoeless Joe Jackson: "Say it ain't so Joe",***  one of the most important milestones every American youngster experiences, is having to learn that hard lesson. 

In that vein I'll close with a couple excerpts from one of my all-time favorite writings on baseball, the article Mike Royko wrote to honor Jackie Robinson, written on the day the great man died.

Royko was as good storyteller as there was, but this is as real as it gets:

All that Saturday, the wise men of the neighborhood, who sat in chairs on the sidewalk outside the tavern, had talked about what it would do to baseball.

I hung around and listened because baseball was about the most important thing in the world, and if anything was going to ruin it, I was worried.

Most of the things they said, I didn't understand, although it all sounded terrible. But could one man bring such ruin?

They said he could and would. And the next day he was going to be in Wrigley Field for the first time, on the same diamond as Hack, Nicholson, Cavarretta, Schmitz, Pafko, and all my other idols.

 I had to see Jackie Robinson, the man who was going to somehow wreck everything. So the next day, another kid and I started walking to the ballpark early.

...

I've forgotten most of the details of the game, other than that the Dodgers won and Robinson didn't get a hit or do anything special, although he was cheered on every swing and every routine play.
But two things happened I'll never forget. Robinson played first, and early in the game a Cub star hit a grounder and it was a close play.

Just before the Cub reached first, he swerved to his left. And as he got to the bag, he seemed to slam his foot down hard at Robinson's foot.

It was obvious to everyone that he was trying to run into him or spike him. Robinson took the throw and got clear at the last instant.

I was shocked. That Cub, a hometown boy, was my biggest hero. It was not only an unheroic stunt, but it seemed a rude thing to do in front of people who would cheer for a foul ball. I didn't understand why he had done it. It wasn't at all big league.

I didn't know that while the white fans were relatively polite, the Cubs and most other teams kept up a steady stream of racial abuse from the dugout. I thought that all they did down there was talk about how good Wheaties are.****

NOTES:

*They call it the "Deadball Era", when most of the drama of the game took place on the base paths rather than at home plate. It was the style of hitting and baserunning that created this, not the liveliness or lack thereof of the balls. Players could have hit home runs as Ty Cobb proved time and again, but they chose instead to make contact and keep the ball in play to get on base in any way they could, rather than swinging the bat as hard as possible trying to get the ball out of the park, thereby increasing the possibility of striking out, which Babe Ruth did a lot, for his time at least. But to the fans, the home run became the ultimate symbol of success in the game, and the hard-scrabble fight for every base type of play that Cobb and his contemporaries personified, went out of style. Some would say, to a certain degree anyway, it's coming back. I'm all for that. 

**For 10 years the Yankees shared the Polo Grounds with the National League Giants. The original Yankee Stadium, dubbed "The House that Ruth Built" opened in 1923.

***Yet another piece of dubious baseball lore.

****From Jackie's Debut a Unique Day, written by, Mike Royko and published in the Chicago Daily News, October 25, 1972. Do yourself a favor and read the whole piece because its real payoff, the second thing Royko mentions he'd never forget, comes at the very end. You can find it, along with a couple other articles by the great columnist here.

When Rights Collide

The recent spate of controversial decisions made by the U.S. Supreme Court has gotten me thinking about rights and the role of law in our life. 

As I've gotten older, I've become more libertarian in my views. The libertarianism I speak of is not the political movement (spelled with an upper case "L") which concerns itself mainly with laissez-faire capitalism, but rather the more general meaning of the word, stemming from its root, that is to say, liberty. In other words, I believe a society such as ours which claims to be "free", should allow its citizens to be well, free, so long as their freedom doesn't impinge on the rights of others.

Pay close attention to that last part.

I believe people should be free to live their lives as they choose with governmental interference kept to a minimum. 

I believe people should be free to love and to marry whomever they please, and to identify themselves however they see fit.

I believe that people should be free to obtain the health care they and their physician (not their state legislator, or governor) feel is necessary to keep themselves well. 

 

I believe that people should be free to practice whatever religion they chose, or none at all. 

I believe that educators, with the input of parents, should be free from the government deciding what they should teach or what books their students should be allowed to read.

I believe that people should be free to speak their minds, even if what they have to say is unpopular.

That last part, freedom of speech, is so important in our society, that it is guaranteed in the first section of the "Bill of Rights" of our constitution, along with the freedom of religion, freedom of the press, the right to peaceably assemble, and the right to petition the government for redress of grievances. As a side note, for those who believe that nowhere in the Constitution can the phrase: "separation of church and state" be found, they are correct. Instead, before any of those rights mentioned above, the very first clause of the First Amendment of our Constitution unequivocally declares that: "Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion", which means exactly the same thing. 

Anyway, two of those rights enumerated in the First Amendment, speech and religion, figure prominently in one of the Court's latest controversial rulings. The case is identified as 303 Creative LLC vs. Elenis and it could prove to be a landmark decision in the realm of public accommodation in the United States. 

The case involves a Colorado website designer who is looking to branch into creating sites revolving around weddings. The designer, Lori Smith, wanted to post a disclaimer on her own website saying that due to her Christian faith, she would not be accepting business from gay couples intending to get married. However, she learned that such a notice violated Colorado law stipulating that public businesses could not discriminate against people based upon their gender identity or sexual orientation, among many other things.

Smith decided to sue, claiming that the Colorado law violated her First Amendment right to freedom of speech.

When the Supreme Court ruled in Smith's favor a couple weeks ago, I have to say that I agreed with the decision to some extent. Let me explain:

First of all, the inevitable and reasonable question arises: do I believe it's OK to discriminate against people because of their gender identity or sexual orientation? To that I would answer no, I believe it is wrong. But I would add that it is imprudent to make laws against everything that we believe is wrong. It is wrong to be rude to people, but it is not against the law, nor should it be. It is wrong to lie, but unless a lie is told under oath, it is not against the law. It turns out many things are ethically wrong, but not illegal. 

Laws are created essentially to solve conflicts in society when people left to their own devises cannot solve them on their own. In a civilized world, (the jury is still out on that one concerning this world I'm afraid), people solve problems and conflicts all the time on their own without having to turn to the law, which I would argue is a good thing most of the time. However sometimes the solution is worse than the problem, which is where laws become necessary.

In Ms. Smith's case, it seemed perfectly reasonable to me to explain up front to potential clients that because of her beliefs, she wasn't comfortable promoting gay weddings, but would gladly provide the clients in good faith, a list of designers who would. I would argue this is indeed serving potential clients as finding someone to perform a service is more than half the battle.

Besides, if I were getting married, something I've already done twice and have no intention of doing again, the last thing I would want is to have someone working on the event who did not approve of my lifestyle or my marriage. 

That thought had been running through my head ever since another case went before the Supreme Court a few years ago. The case, Masterpiece Cakeshop v. Colorado Civil Rights Commission, involved a baker who refused to provide a wedding cake to a gay couple. Again, I believed that while I didn't agree with the baker's motivations or actions, I felt this case and others like it could have been resolved without involving the courts, especially in our day and age of the internet, where the couple could go online and fight the case in the court of public opinion, often with more effective results than in a court of law. (Please bear in mind that until recently I wasn't aware of the specifics of this case, see below).

However...

Let it be known that's what I believed two weeks ago but having given it a considerable amount of thought since then, have changed my mind and have done a complete 180.

The post you're reading was originally intended to be a half-baked defense of the Court's decision based upon my half-baked libertarianism. Given my previous ambivalence on the matter, I'm not entirely sure what inspired me to write the following two sentences, but I stand by them today and will until my dying day:

There are two essential ingredients for a democracy to work, the first is that the minority must accept the decisions of the majority. The second, at least as important as the first if not more, is that the majority must accept the rights of the minority. 

The problem with libertarianism's objection to legislation in all but the most serious of cases, is that it assumes people will do the right thing because it generally works in their own self-interest. You know the drill, "do unto others as you would have them do unto you", "what goes around comes around", "instant karma's gonna get you" and all that. Unfortunately, it doesn't take much living in the real world to realize that it doesn't always work out that way. 

That's why we need laws to protect the rights of minorities, in fact, those laws are the bedrock of our democracy. 

Many of the first ten amendments to the Constitution, especially the first one, indirectly address the rights of the minority. Ironically, The Bill of Rights was written at a time when owning people was still legal. On December 15, 1791 when the Bill of Rights was ratified, eighteen percent of the U.S. population was enslaved, including a little over two percent in the Northern States alone. The Bill of Rights, the cornerstone of safeguarding our liberty as American citizens, did nothing to change that.

It would take a Civil War seventy years later, to eradicate what has come to be known as "America's original sin" once and for all.

One of the most consequential amendments to the constitution, the Fourteenth, was adopted on July 9th, 1868, three years after Lee's surrender at Appomattox to Grant.

Here's the meat and potatoes of the Fourteenth Amendment, Section One:

All persons born or naturalized in the United States, and subject to the jurisdiction thereof, are citizens of the United States and of the State wherein they reside. No State shall make or enforce any law which shall abridge the privileges or immunities of citizens of the United States; nor shall any State deprive any person of life, liberty, or property, without due process of law; nor deny to any person within its jurisdiction the equal protection of the laws.

As clear as legal writing can be, the Fourteenth Amendment declared who will be granted the full rights of citizenship in this country, that no person, citizen or not, shall be punished without due process of the law, and that everyone residing in the United Sates, legally or not, is granted equal protection of the law.

But there was still a lot of work to do. The Thirteenth, Fourteenth and Fifteenth Amendments to the Constitution, known as the "Reconstruction Amendments", were written during the period around the end of the Civil War. In a nutshell, the thirteenth amendment officially abolished slavery, and the fifteenth prohibited the government from denying the right to vote on the basis of race. (Women would have to wait another 50 years for the adoption of the Nineteenth Amendment which granted universal suffrage in the United States.) 

Anyone with a sense of U.S. history knows that the post-Reconstruction was a particularly dreadful time for black people in this country, especially in the South. It is the time that gave birth to the KKK, Jim Crow segregation laws, public (and private) lynchings, and illegal disenfranchisement. With virtually no one willing or able to enforce them down south, it was as if the reconstruction amendments did not exist. 

Despite the non-violent movements that confronted the treatment of blacks in the U.S., led by estimable figures such as Frederick Douglass, Booker T. Washington, Ida B. Wells and W.E.B. Du Bois, it would remain that way, virtually unchanged for nearly three quarters of a century. 

I think it's fair to say that the modern American Civil Rights movement began in earnest at the end of the Second World War in 1945 when black members of the armed forces who served this country with distinction in Europe and the Pacific, returned home to their previous lives as second-class citizens. This grave injustice did not go unnoticed, even outside of the black community.

As I've written in this space before, one of the first great, symbolic victories in the modern American Civil Right Movement came on April 15, 1947, when Jackie Robinson entered the previously segregated baseball Major Leagues and played his first game with the Brooklyn Dodgers. Quoting myself:

Jackie Robinson (may have only been) a ballplayer and much of his legacy is wrapped around a game. But back in the day, baseball wasn't different from any other institution in the United States in regards to race, it was simply more public, and the integration of the game brought the issue of racial injustice in this country to the forefront. 

Soon to follow were the harrowing, trailblazing events and the people who inspired them that symbolize the American Civil Rights movement and would change this country forever. I won't go into detail here as I believe the mere mention of the following names and events should be sufficient to anyone with a modicum of understanding of American history:

• Emmett Till
• Thurgood Marshall
• Rosa Parks
• Medgar Evers
  
• The Lunch Counter Sit-Ins
• The Freedom Rides
• The Birmingham Campaign
• The March on Washington
• The Selma to Montgomery March
  
• Martin Luther King

to name just a few.

And yet, people were still unmoved by injustice, so it took laws to make real change. Again, I won't go into much detail here, for more information you can look up these groundbreaking SCOTUS decisions, executive orders, acts of Congress and amendments to the Constitution, all made possible by the Fourteenth Amendment:

• Executive Order 8802, which outlawed discrimination based on race, color, creed, and national origin in the federal government and defense industries.
• Executive Order 9981 which officially integrated the armed forces.
  
• Brown vs. Board of Education which declared state sanctioned segregation of schools unconstitutional.
  
• Bailey vs. Patterson which prohibited racial segregation of transportation facilities.
• The Twenty-fourth Amendment, which eliminated the poll tax as a requirement for voting.
  
• Loving vs. Virginia which affirmed the right to inter-racial marriage.
• The Civil Rights Acts of 1957, 1960, 1964 and 1968
• The Voting Rights Act of 1965
• The Equal Employment Opportunity Act of 1972

Most relevant to the topic of at hand is The Civil Rights Act of 1964 which among other things, prohibited discrimination in public accommodations, facilities, and schools.

From that point on, from a legal standpoint at least, black people no longer would be required to sit at the back of the bus, figuratively and literally.

But it didn't stop there. The Civil Rights Act of 1964 insured that those guaranties of the right to not be discriminated against would be extended to other groups who had a long history of being marginalized in American society. In addition to race, the categories that were deemed protected classes under the anti-discrimination statutes as spelled out in the Civil Rights Act of 1964 were age, national origin, religious beliefs, gender, disability, pregnancy and veteran status.

In addition to these categories, states were free to add their own protected classes of individuals, including sexual orientation and gender identity. Colorado did so on May 29, 2008, officially banning discrimination of the LBGTQ+ community in housing, public accommodation and advertising. In 2021 the state expanded these protections to employment.

 

As of this writing, about 20 states include sexual orientation and gender identity as protected classes.

In the Masterpiece wedding cake case, the couple who were refused a cake for their wedding, filed a complaint with the Colorado Civil Rights Commission against the baker for what was a clear violation of the state's public accommodation anti-discrimination law. The Commission ruled in favor of the couple and required the baker not only to provide cakes for gay weddings but also to:

change its company policies, provide 'comprehensive staff training' regarding public accommodations discrimination, and provide quarterly reports for the next two years regarding steps it has taken to come into compliance and whether it has turned away any prospective customers.

The baker responded by ceasing to bake wedding cakes entirely.* He also sued the CCRC on the grounds that the law violated his first amendment right to freely exercise his religion. That case made it to the Supreme Court. The case which seemingly pitted two fundamental rights against each other, stymied moderate members of the Court such as now retired Justice William Kennedy who while on the bench, was the court's staunchest defender of the First Amendment AND gay rights. 

So the Court punted. 

Their decision in that case was inconsequential, it rested on a technicality, namely that the CCRC erred in its ruling by using disparaging words about religion, which led Kennedy to write in his majority opinion: "religious hostility on the part of the State itself" violated the "State's obligation of religious neutrality." The court ruled 7-2 in favor of the baker, the dissenting votes coming from the Justices Sonia Sotomayor and the late Ruth Bader Ginsburg.

With Ginsburg and Kennedy gone, both replaced by far more ideologically conservative judges, the table was set for a different outcome with the 303 case. The plaintiff argued what separated her case from the one preceding it, is that in the role she hoped to play in her new business, she would be writing copy to accompany pictures posted on the wedding websites. As she objected to gay marriage, she claimed she would be forced to write something she didn't believe in, thereby violating her First Amendment right to freedom of speech.

Six justices made up exclusively by the ideologically conservative branch of the Court agreed with her. The remaining three dissented.

This ruling is consequential because in it, the Court is saying that it is indeed OK to discriminate in some cases. Defenders of the decision say the ruling is very narrow in that it only concerns cases where a business is required to provide language, a protected right, rather than say, just a cake. But wait a minute, can't a baker claim his or her cake is a work of art, therefore a form of personal expression which could also be considered protected by the First Amendment?. What about a wedding photographer or a musician?

We don't have to stop there, what about business owners who are morally opposed to mixed marriages? Or folks whose religion teaches them that blacks Jews and Catholics are devil worshipers? Believe me, those people are out there, not just a product of my imagination.

Which begs the question, what if the plaintiff in the 303 case had instead sued to refuse service to Catholic couples, how would the six conservative justices, five of whom are practicing Catholics, have voted?

I can't say for certain, but I have a sneaking suspicion that the outcome of this case would have been different, assuming the Court would have even bothered to hear the case at all.

Regardless, as a result of this ruling, messages like "Gays not served" and "Blacks, Jews and Catholics not welcome" are now AOK according to this court's ruling, at least in some cases. 

What's next?

We'll have to see as we can now expect a whole new slew of lawsuits coming before the court, claiming the plaintiff's First Amendment right to discriminate.

Yes I know, my argument here predicting all sorts of terrible things that might result from this decision, could fall into the category of a slippery slope logical fallacy. But here's the thing, if you want to change something big in the courts, you have to start small. I'm not questioning the motivations of the two plaintiffs in these cases. I have little doubt the baker and the web designer are sincere in looking after their own interests, protecting their faith and respective businesses. Challenging the law is their First Amendment right after all.

But sustaining a lawsuit all the way through to the Supreme Court takes tremendous resources which few individuals have. Typically, there is an interested third party, usually an organization with deep pockets and an agenda or axe to grind who takes up causes such as this to provide the funding and the legal expertise to make cases like these possible.

Sure enough, both plaintiffs were represented by a group called the Alliance Defending Freedom, a Christian advocacy group who in their mission statement declares itself to be:

the world’s largest legal organization committed to protecting religious freedom, free speech, marriage and family, parental rights, and the sanctity of life.

From their website:

ADF is working to secure Generational Wins in the five key areas.

Those five key areas are:

• "Guaranteeing the right to life from conception to natural death."
• "Restoring religious freedom as a fundamental right."
• Securing free speech for all."
• "Guaranteeing the fundamental rights of parents to direct the upbringing and education of their children."
• "Ensuring the law respects God’s created order for marriage, the family, and human sexuality."

From my experience, whenever a Christian organization claims it is working to "protect religious freedom", what they are really working for is the right to impose their religion on others.  

Rest assured that for the ADF, the First Amendment in these two cases is only a means to an end, they have much bigger fish to fry.

Here from their website is a detailed description of the group's efforts to help successfully overturn Roe v. Wade. Pay close attention to the small steps they took before the big leap.

Now that item number one of their "Generational Wins" to-do list is checked off, the two victories regarding denying public accommodations for LGBTQ+ people could be the first steps necessary for them to check off item number five, "respecting God’s created order for marriage".

In other words, getting the Supreme Court to overrule Obergefell v. Hodges, the landmark 2015 decision, ruling that the right to marry is guaranteed to same sex couples by the Due Process and Equal Protection Clauses of the Fourteenth Amendment.

Justice Clarence Thomas, who not surprisingly voted in the minority in Obergefell, has publicly invited like-minded parties to bring cases to the Court that challenge rulings he does not like involving not only the right to gay marriage, but sexual acts between consenting adults (Lawrence v. Texas) and contraception (Griswold v. Connecticut). In his concurring opinion to the case that overturned Roe, Thomas wrote:

In future cases, we should reconsider all of this court’s substantive due process precedents, including Griswold, Lawrence, and Obergefell.

This Court has a track record of taking away rights Americans have enjoyed by for decades by overruling precedent, and it is clear that Thomas intends to keep on doing it.

It would be interesting to hear Justice Thomas's views on yet another due process precedent, Loving v. Virginia, the overruling of which would invalidate his own marriage. 

There are more fundamental issues with this case than the dreadful consequences that may likely result from this decision. I understand how some people might resent the comparison of someone like Rosa Parks, who was arrested for not sitting in her proper place on a bus, to a couple who were denied a wedding cake. But grave injustices and not quite as grave injustices are both injustices. If we are going to have laws that prohibit businesses from discriminating against particular groups of people, something I believe the majority of Americans support, we can't cherry pick the offenses we feel are "worthy" from others we feel are not. If it is illegal to ban black people from being served at your place of business, it is illegal (in the states where they are a protected group), to ban LBGTQ people. Equal protection under the law means just that. It shouldn't be that hard to figure out.

In a perfect world, we wouldn't need laws, we'd all be able to figure out how to do the right thing on our own. As we saw above, the laws that protect against discrimination written over the last eighty years or so, have helped set us on the course of being a more free, equitable and just society, something we should all be on board with. We still have a lot of work to do to get to that place and it doesn't help that this Court is hellbent on setting us backward a half century or more. 

Funny, in the process of writing this post, I went from being OK with this decision to believing it is an unmitigated disaster.

Guess I should turn in my libertarian card. 

CODA

*Getting out of the wedding cake business entirely is a very reasonable solution to the problem for the baker who didn't want to bake cakes for gay weddings. Come to think of it, it's a good rebuttal to the argument that someone's First Amendment rights are violated when their work requires them to do or say something they do not agree with. They are free to pursue other work opportunities that do not conflict with their beliefs. 

A good example is a friend of mine who worked for a firm that considered doing business with a company that manufactured assault weapons. As he has a moral objection to these weapons, my friend was prepared to quit his job rather than contribute to something he felt was immoral. Sometimes there are difficult decisions to be made in life, especially if you have strong beliefs. Nowhere in the Constitution does it guarantee the right to a job that will never require you to do something you may not believe in. Personally, I see no First Amendment issue in these two cases at all. 

Copa Mundial MMXXII

Going through my previous posts on the game of soccer, most of them corresponding to the World Cup, I noticed a recurring theme. The theme is my assertion that despite all its problems and drawbacks, despite its lunacy, greed, violence and at times its sheer stupidity, the world of professional sports still has the ability to make the world a better place, when it wants to.

In this piece I mentioned how sports help connect us with our past and our departed loved ones.

In this piece I featured a beautiful story written by a Bosnian refugee living in Chicago, about soccer being a truly international language that brings people from all over the globe together who have nothing in common but their love of the game.

And in this piece, I used Jackie Robinson, Muhammad Ali, and the captain of the USA Women's 2019 World Cup Champion soccer team, Megan Rapinoe as examples of athletes who took advantage of their moment in the spotlight, to speak of injustice in our society. I don't believe it is at all an exaggeration to say that in their role as advocates for marginalized people, all three helped, and in Rapinoe's case, will continue to help the world change for the better.

That said, the vast majority of professional athletes are pointedly apolitical, which certainly makes their careers and lives as public figures much easier; just ask Colin Kaepernick. Two examples of local sprots heroes who stayed as far away from publicly speaking their minds as possible were Ernie Banks and Michael Jordan. That was their prerogative, and I don't believe any of us should judge these athletes harshly for that. They were after all paid to entertain us, not to tell us what to think.

Using Ernie Banks as an example, as the most beloved athlete to ever wear a Chicago uniform, Mr. Cub probably did more to bring Chicagoans of all races together, in very turbulent times I might add, just as he was, rather than had he been an outspoken advocate for civil rights or against the war in Vietnam or any other pressing issue of the late sixties.

Michael Jordan's stellar career took place in a much different era than Ernie Banks's. Where Banks had a great deal to lose had he gone out on a limb to speak his mind on the issues of his day, for Jordan, who practically owned this town during his tenure here, much less so. When he was asked to publicly support a senate candidate running in his home state of North Carolina against an openly racist Republican, Jordan, who famously moonlights as a promoter of athletic wear responded: "Republicans buy shoes too." 

Although it didn't seem to affect his playing career, Michael Jordan was excoriated for that remark. Years later he noted that the remark was said in a private conversation and in jest.

In the ESPN documentary about him called The Last Dance, Jordan addressed the comment as well as the issue of his being perceived as a role model by saying this:

...everybody has a preconceived idea for what I should do and what I shouldn't do.

The way I go about my life is I set examples. If it inspires you? Great, I will continue to do that. If it doesn't? Then maybe I'm not the person you should be following.

Makes sense to me. 

The funny thing is we are all perfectly OK with athletes and other celebrities making comments we agree with; we often encourage them to do so. But should a celebrity come out with a statement supporting an issue or a cause we don't like, look out. "Why doesn't that so and so just shut up and play (fill in the sport here)" we all say.

Nobody likes so called "cancel culture", especially when it's the other side doing the cancelling. But I'm afraid no matter which side of the fence we are on ideologically, we all cancel public figures in one way or other, whose public statements don't jibe with our own views. It's just human nature I guess. 

That's a pretty roundabout way to get to this year's World Cup, which is taking place at this writing. Specifically, this morning (Chicago time), two big upsets took place, Costa Rica beat Japan 1 - nil and highly rated Belgium just lost to Morocco 2-nil.

But by far the biggest story this year is the host country, Qatar, their human rights record, miserable, the manner in which the games were awarded to the country, corrupt, and the human toll it took to build the infrastructure for the event, unimaginable.

I won't go deeply into of any of these issues, you'll find plenty of details by just googling "Qatar World Cup Scandal".

Suffice it to say, there are many legitimate reasons to object to FIFA (the international governing body of soccer) choosing Qatar to host its games. Along with that come the inevitable cries to boycott the games. From a very unscientific survey, looking at the crowds in the stands, my guess is the boycott is not working. And from that statement of mine you can probably tell that I'm not boycotting them either.

Should I be?

I don't know. I do know that having a Muslim country in the Arabian Penninsula host a World Cup for the first time ever is a great source of pride for many people in that region. For much of my life, the hosts of the World Cup alternated between countries in Europe and the Americas. Only recently has that string been broken, with the selection of Japan and Korea in 2002, and South Africa in 2010. As soccer is truly THE international game, this only makes sense.

The drawback to diversifying the pool of host countries is that there inevitably will be countries whose cultures, values and ways of doing things, clash with the western values that like it or not, we espouse here in the Americas and in Western and Central Europe. A particularly salient value is acceptance of the LGTBQ community. We in the States and much of Europe are only now coming to terms with this issue, begrudgingly for the most part, still kicking and screaming at times.

But we are, granted slowly but surely, coming to terms with it.

This is NOT the case in many parts of the world where LGTBQ people are routinely persecuted as criminals.

I find that reprehensible. But I'm not sure how much my not watching this year's World Cup on TV would serve to change Qatar's policy on LGTBQ rights. Is that a copout? Perhaps.

There was a move afoot on the part of some players to wear rainbow-colored armbands in solidarity with the LGTBQ community of Qatar. That effort was squashed by FIFA who cowardly said the armbands would conflict with their strict dress code for players. Then they handed down a ruling that declared any player wearing such an armband would be met with a yellow card by the referee. Two such yellow cards for any infraction results in an automatic suspension for two games and a penalty to the team who would not be allowed to replace that player on the pitch. I did have a fantasy about all the players on all the teams sporting those armbands, Spartacus style, as they stepped onto the field. What would FIFA do, suspend every player in the World Cup? Then what? 

Not surprisingly my fantasy didn't take place; all the players acquiesced to FIFA's mandate. Had they not, would THAT have changed anything in Qatar in regard to LGTBQ rights? Probably not, but it would have sent a clear and positive message to LGTBQ people all over the world that they are valued human beings and their rights are worth fighting and sacrificing for. 

Alas it was only a dream about selflessness and courage which would have been the greatest act of civil disobedience international sports has seen since this:

American sprinters Tommy Smith, center, and John Carlos, right, raise their fists in protest on the podium as the band played The Star-Spangled Banner at their medal ceremony during the 1968 Olympic Games in Mexico City. On the left is Australian runner Peter Norman who wore an "Olympic Project for Human Rights" badge in solidarity with the two Americans. All three were ostracized for their efforts, Smith and Carlos were banned for life from the Olympic Games and despite qualifying many times over, Norman would never again compete for his country. 

The thing is, selflessness and courage are virtues we all respect, but can't expect. How many of us would have the guts to take an unpopular stand in public that could ruin our career and reputation, as it did for these three?

Simply put, that's why we tend not to punish people for not acting heroically. It would be blatant hypocrisy if we did.

That said, extreme, selfless courage on the part of some players did take place last week in Qatar. It may not have been an act of civil disobedience per se as it didn't break any official rules, perhaps an act of subversion would be a more apt description. 

Before their first match of the Cup, going against tradition, the 11 starters for the Iranian national team (pictured at the top of this post), with their arms around one another, refused to sing along as their country's national anthem played. The players did so in solidarity with the victims of their government's purge of protestors reacting to the death of Mahsa Amini, a 22 year old woman who died in police custody after she was arrested by the Morality Police (an ironic term if there ever was one), for not wearing her hijab correctly in public.

Apparently, Iran's morality police made their way to Qatar to have a few words with the team who seemed to grudgingly mumble the lyrics to their anthem in their following game against Wales. 

It will be interesting to see what they do tomorrow before their game against the U.S.A. If they win or tie that game, they get to move on to the elimination round while the U.S. team will head home after only being able to eek out ties against England and Wales. My guess is that all will be forgiven back home if the boys from Iran manage to knock the Great Satan United States out of the competition. After their win against Wales, Iran released several protestors who were in police custody.

Should they lose, it's anybody's guess what will happen to the team members in response to their affront to their authoritarian government. 

Given all that, it's a little hard to pick a team to root for, your home team, or a team representing a proud country with a tremendous history who happens to be under a despicable regime, whose players by taking a courageous, symbolic stand, may suffer grave consequences if they lose. 

And you thought sports didn't matter.

Opening Day

Sitting at the breakfast table this morning as has been my routine for nearly the past two months, I read an article in the New York Times about the latest goings on in Ukraine and Russia. While reading an account of a Russian citizen insisting his fellow countrymen are justly fighting American-backed Nazis in Ukraine and adding: "wouldn't it be simpler if Moscow just nuked the United States and got it all over with...", a voice came over the radio noting that today is Opening Day of the baseball season. 

Part of me thought, how completely frivolous to think of baseball at a time like this, while the other part of me thought, God how I need to hear that right now. 

On January 15, 1942, barely one month after the attack on Pearl Harbor and the United States' entry into World War II, President Franklin Delano Roosevelt wrote a letter to Kenesaw Mountain Landis, then Commissioner of Baseball. The president responded to Landis's letter of the day before, offering to suspend all baseball operations for the duration of the war. The following are excerpts from Roosevelt's letter to Landis:

I honestly feel that it would be best for the country to keep baseball going. There will be fewer people unemployed and everybody will work longer hours and harder than ever before.

And that means that they ought to have a chance for recreation and for taking their minds off their work even more than before.

Here is another way of looking at it - if 300 teams use 5,000 or 6,000 players, these players are a definite recreational asset to at least 20,000,000 of the fellow citizens - and that in my judgment is thoroughly worthwhile.

It is said that Roosevelt's "Green Light Letter to Baseball" written at the onset of one of the greatest crises in American history, perhaps more than anything else, solidified the game's status as "Our National Pastime". It could be argued that as the first major victory in the battle over civil rights in the United States, baseball's integration five years later with the signing of Jackie Robinson to the Brooklyn Dodgers, set the stage for the sweeping changes in this country that took place in the subsequent decades. 

An impromptu game of baseball in the States, a rarer and rarer sight these days. New York, 1986.

Perhaps baseball isn't so frivolous after all.

On the flip side, the dearth of U.S. born black players on major league rosters today, does not necessarily signal baseball's going into retrograde as a vehicle for equal rights, but rather its decline in popularity especially among, but not limited to the African American community.

Nonetheless, baseball is still referred to as "our National Pastime", I think more out of nostalgia than anything else. Judging by TV viewership, American football is by far the most popular sport in the United States. Perhaps more telling, while Little League Baseball still rules the roost as far as organized youth sports go in this country, as far as "pickup" games go, the games kids (i.e.: the future) play on their own, baseball doesn't hold a candle to touch football, basketball and even soccer in the parks and playgrounds across America. 

So the burghers of baseball have decided that something must be done to correct that. Some folks object, saying that baseball has not, should not now, nor should ever change. To that I offer another excerpt from Roosevelt's Green Light Letter:

Baseball provides a recreation which does not last over two hours... and which can be got for very little cost. 

HA!!!

The truth is, the cost of taking a family of four to a Major League Baseball game these days could run into the hundreds of dollars, prohibitive for many families including my own. And honestly when's the last time you've seen a two hour, nine inning MLB game? 

In your dreams perhaps. 

Unfortunately MLB doesn't seem too concerned over the ever increasing cost of their product, but they sure are worried about the length of their games.  

There are many reasons why baseball games played today are much longer than the ones played back in the day, but one reason is obvious just by watching an inning or two of a game played in the past. 

For example, this one perhaps one of the greatest games ever played, unless that is, if you're a Yankees fan. 

If you're used to watching baseball today, you might be a little jarred at seeing the rhythm of the 1960 game, namely the amount of time it takes between the time the pitcher receives the ball from the catcher and the next pitch. I'd say the average is roughly ten seconds in this game, fewer if there are no runners on base. 

Today between pitchers rubbing the ball while circling the mound, batters stepping out of the box, pitchers shaking off signs from the catcher, and numerous other delay tactics from both sides trying to throw off the opposition, thirty seconds is not an unusual amount of time for the pitcher to hold on to the ball between pitches. Those ten to twenty extra seconds between pitches add up when you consider that the average total number of pitches in a baseball game is close to 300.

A simple solution for this is a pitch clock. If a pitcher doesn't make a pitch within the allotted time, say 20 seconds, the batter is awarded a ball in the batting count. Likewise if the batter calls time with less than five seconds left on the clock, the pitcher is awarded a strike.

Kind of makes sense doesn't it? On the other hand, baseball is a game famously NOT ruled by the clock. As such, while pitch clocks may not present an existential threat to the game, they do threaten the clockless perfection, the rhythm, the groove, the mojo, the je nai se quoi, and most important, the what-have-you of the game. Worse yet, pitch clocks displease the baseball gods, I know that for a fact, maybe not as a mortal sin but definitely a venial one. 

Besides, there is evidence that pitch clocks don't shorten games that much if at all. 

Nevertheless, expect to see them in a couple years in the majors. 

This year we are about to see the introduction of another brilliant idea, communication devices between catchers and pitchers that will eliminate all those primitive finger signs catchers used to use to call pitches. The real purpose of the technology is to eliminate something that has gone on from time immemorial, the stealing of signs.*

The hope is this system is going to solve once and for all this age-old problem as it's inconceivable that anyone could possibly hack into it right? 

Right.

The other alleged reason for implementing these doohickies is to shorten games by eliminating the need for all the complex coded signs catchers need to flash in order for them not to be readable by the opposition.

We'll see how that all works out. How the baseball gods will react to this is anybody's guess, my feeling is they're probably already laughing their heads off.

What's really sending the gods off the deep end is the National League's decision to implement the designated hitter rule. The DH has been a regular feature in the American League since 1973. 

Next to whether or not Pete Rose should ever be inducted into the Hall of Fame, this is perhaps the most hotly debated topic in baseball. It seemed that the nearly fifty year history of one major league adopting the DH while the other did not, was a reasonable compromise. I have a good friend who gave up being an American League Chicago White Sox fan in 1973  in favor of the National League Chicago Cubs because of his abject hatred of the DH.

Now he's in a quandary over where to find "real baseball", as the DH will be in effect practically everywhere, even in high school ball.

The debate over the DH was illustrated perfectly this morning on the radio as the host suggested to his guest that the designated hitter is frowned upon by many managers who will mourn the loss of the classic conundrum of whether or not to pull a pitcher who is doing well in the crunch time of a game for a pinch hitter, something that he, the host will miss as well. To which the guest, a baseball writer for the Washington Post responded: "perhaps, but the pitchers will appreciate the fact that they will be able to remain where they belong, on the mound." 

To which I, not a fan of the DH myself, would reply: excuse me, but pitchers like everyone else on a baseball team, are baseball players first and foremost. Baseball is not a game of pure specialists like football, and asking a pitcher to hit is not like asking a field goal kicker to play nose tackle. Besides, most big league pitchers played outfield in high school and even college as the kids who were pitching to them back then, more than likely long ago burned their arms out trying to throw curve balls before their arms were developed enough for it. And being outfielders, today's big league pitchers were most likely once the best hitter on their team. 

God, if only these were the worst of our problems. The nice thing about sports is that we can argue endlessly over such trivial matters, yet remain friends at the end of the day. 

Alas, the same can't be said about practically anything else these days. I can't agree to disagree for example, with someone who believes that the January 6th, 2021 insurrection at the Capitol Building was valid political discourse. And not until hell freezes over if then, will I ever agree to disagree with someone who argues that we need to understand Russia's point of view regarding their invasion and rape, both figurative and literal, of Ukraine. 

But if you like the pitch clock, the catcher-pitcher thingy and heck, even the designated hitter, so be it, as long as we both agree to play ball.

After all, even during a time of war, life goes on.

* It's possible that one of the most famous moments in baseball, NY Giant Bobby Thomson's 1951 ninth inning come-from-behind, three run walk-off home run in a win-the-pennant-or-go-home playoff game off Brooklyn pitcher Ralph Branca, was the result of a sign stolen off Dodger catcher Rube Walker. In those days the Giants were allegedly using an elaborate sign stealing system (which was not illegal at the time), starting with a coach or team member sitting in the Giant clubhouse 600 feet away from home plate in the Giants' Polo Grounds center field clubhouse, using a telescope to read the catcher's signs, then relaying them via an electric switch that set off a buzzer in the phone in the Giants' dugout that the batter could hear, one buzz for fastball, two for an off-speed pitch. Or was it the other way around?

In either case, that home run was among other things dubbed: "The shot heard 'round the world." Indeed it was. The Korean War was going on at the time and U.S. troops who happened to be baseball fans tuned into the game from half way around the world. One particularly poignant story I read was about a letter received by Bobby Thomson in the 1990s. It was written by one of those veterans. Here's an excerpt:

I was in a bunker in the front line with my buddy listening to the radio. It was contrary to orders, but he was a Giants fanatic. He never made it home and I promised him if I ever got back I'd write and tell you about the happiest moment of his life. It's taken me this long to put my feelings into words. On behalf of my buddy, thanks, Bobby.

Gaslighting and Button Pushing, Spotting BS a mile away...

In my penultimate post I wrote about the kerfuffle over the ultra-right's latest bogyman, the teaching of "Critical Race Theory" (CRT) in our schools. Just as Donald Trump in 2016 used immigration (an issue older than this nation), as a lightning rod to instill fear and loathing among the potential voters who would become his base, today's Trumplicans have come up with another "new" threat which has also been around for quite some time. Much like the immigration "crisis" of 2016, they portray CRT as having the potential to destroy life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness as we know it. 

In other words as many have suggested, if you can't find a real issue to debate, make one up.

Once again, CRT is a school of thought based upon the principle that racism is endemic in our society. Here's a good explanation from this article in the site "Education Week":

The core idea is that race is a social construct, and that racism is not merely the product of individual bias or prejudice, but also something embedded in legal systems and policies.

One doesn't have to be in perfect lock-step with every idea coming out of the mouths of CRT proponents, I certainly am not. But unless you are ignorant of or in complete denial of our racist past including slavery, Jim Crow, forced segregation, as well as ongoing events such as racial profiling, the epidemic of police shooting unarmed black people, and states' disenfranchisement of minority voters under the deceitful pretext of eliminating virtually non-existent voter fraud,  (just to name a handful of injustices all of which at one time or other were deemed perfectly "legal"), it's hard to argue with that basic tenet of Critical Race Theory.

Yet the idea of teaching our children that this country's history and present are not entirely rosy is unacceptable for many, and yet another made-up crisis is hoisted upon us by the opinion shapers of the ultra-right.

I just came across an article written by David Limbaugh, yes indeedy the little brother of the late bombastic darling of the Trumplicans, Rush Limbaugh.

The Little Limbaugh's commentary is yet another diatribe from the ultra-right. It's filled with themes, images and words of doom, all designed to push the buttons and gaslight vulnerable white Americans into believing that everything they hold near and dear to their hearts is under attack from those disgraceful, godless, lefty, progressive Democrats.

I'm going to reproduce the Limbuagh piece in its entirety with my comments interspersed in red. 

The title of the article is: "Who Are the Real Bullies on Race?" 

PUSHED BUTTON NUMBER ONE: Race is a button for all Americans regardless of their ideology, and "racist" is still considered one of the most damning accusations of our day. A constant theme in the battle against CRT for example is that it is nothing more than reverse racism, and that white people are actually the victims of it. Obviously the "real bullies on race" according to Limbaugh, are the not the people for whom this article was intended.

At the top of the piece as published in the ultra-right webiste, GOPUSA, is this image of the American flag, along with the text that surrounds it. 

PUSHED BUTTON NUMBER TWO: Nothing arouses the sentiments (and other parts) of the ultra-right than the image of Old Glory flapping in the breeze. What it actually stands for is another thing.

PUSHED BUTTON NUMBER THREE: The mere mention of Black Lives Matter, a loose collection of folks dedicated to promoting the idea that black lives are just as important as other people's lives, sends shivers up and down the spines of the ultra--right-white, who see them unjustifiably as a terrorist organization bent on the destruction of truth, justice and the American way.

Put these two buttons together and you have for some, the image of black terrorists destroying everything god-fearing white Americans value by golly.

Wow, three buttons already pushed and the article hasn't even started yet! 

OK here's Limbaugh's piece. Remember, he's in black, I'm in red (until otherwise noted):

As absurd, extreme and reckless as the American left has been on race, and despite growing public disapproval of their antics, they are doubling down rather than pulling back.

GASLIGHTING EXAMPLE NUMBER ONE: Where exactly is the evidence that there is "growing public disapproval" of the American left's "antics" on the issue of race? I'll get to that in a minute.

On the Fourth of July, Utah’s Black Lives Matter chapter described the American flag as “a symbol of hatred.”

“When we Black Americans see this flag we know the person flying it is not safe to be around,” it declared. “When we see this flag we know the person flying it is a racist. When we see this flag we know that the person flying it lives in a different America than we do. When we see this flag, we question your intelligence. We know to avoid you. It is a symbol of hatred.”

OK here I have to push back on the comment that everyone who flies the American flag is a racist. That is an extreme opinion which I do not hold. Of course my opinion on this subject is understandable, I'm white not black.

The reality of the black experience in America is much different from the white experience. Not willing to accept that as Limbaugh clearly does not, is as good an argument for the teaching of CRT in our schools as any I can think of.

Here is what Jackie Robinson, today universally revered and referenced by both black and white Americans, quite unlike during his lifetime, had to say about the flag shortly before he died:

There I was, the black grandson of a slave, the son of a black sharecropper, part of a historic occasion, a symbolic hero to my people. The air was sparkling. The sunlight was warm. The band struck up the national anthem. The flag billowed in the wind. It should have been a glorious moment for me as the stirring words of the national anthem poured from the stands. Perhaps, it was, but then again, perhaps, the anthem could be called the theme song for a drama called The Noble Experiment. Today, as I look back on that opening game of my first World Series, I must tell you that it was Mr. Rickey’s drama and that I was only a principal actor. As I write this twenty years later, I cannot stand and sing the anthem. I cannot salute the flag; I know that I am a black man in a white world.

Lex Scott, the chapter’s founder, was hardly sorry when called out on the statement. “Ever since we put up the post, our page has been flooded with hatred from people who fly the flag,” said Scott. “And we want to thank those people for proving our point.” It seems that all flag-waving patriots are to be lumped in with the Ku Klux Klan, because according to Scott, the Klan “proudly” waves the flag at their rallies. I’m sure it would never occur to Scott that her categorical smear smacks of the same type of shameful mindset that drives racism.

GASLIGHTING EXAMPLE NUMBER TWO:  The KKK is the ultimate symbol of white supremacy and abject evil in the United States and the image of its hooded members waving the American flag certainly is a powerful symbol to all Americans, especially black Americans. Again as he does so often in this piece, Limbaugh demonstrates his refusal to show even the slightest bit of empathy for his fellow Americans who happen to be black. Rather he turns the tables and again claims white victimhood as here he compares BLM to the KKK.

Scott’s statements are not representative of the left, you say? Well, how often have you heard a progressive condemn or even mildly criticize Black Lives Matter? Have you ever heard one criticize its Marxist roots? Aren’t you more likely to see leftists defending the organization and imploring us to understand its genuine grievances?

PUSHED BUTTON NUMBER FOUR: Ah that old bugaboo, Marxism!!! I'm guessing from the way this paragraph was written, Limbaugh is saying the "genuine grievances" of the group he labels as "Black Lives Matter" are dishonest, suspect and devious, i.e.: they're not really interested in civil rights and justice for black people as they say but rather only in turning this country into a totalitarian Marxist/Communist state.

GASLIGHTING EXAMPLE NUMBER THREE: As for the left (or anyone for that matter) criticizing BLM, once again there is no one target group to criticize called Black Lives Matter, rather an amorphous collection of groups and individuals with different goals and agendas, all unified by the slogan, Black Lives Matter.  That slogan by the way is a favorite target of the ultra-right as they like to read into it as if it means the only lives that matter are black ones. 

That reading is willful ignorance, pure and simple as it has been stated time and again from people who embrace the slogan, that for centuries, and some would say even today, black lives quite literally have not mattered in this country. Refusal to accept this simple fact is yet another example for the need of an honest account of race to be a regular part of the curriculum in schools all over this country.

And yes, there is plenty to question and criticize members of the various BLM movements for such as the blanket statement that all people who fly the American flag are racists. I just did it above. 

It’s not just Black Lives Matter — not by a long shot. Pretty much the entire leftist freight train is steamrolling its way through our cultural, educational and media institutions — even our bar associations (Heavens to Betsy NO, NOT OUR BAR ASSOCIATIONS!!!) — not to stamp out actual racism but to ensure that it thrives, to force people to obsess on it as much as they do and to divide us as a people along racial lines.

 

GASLIGHTING EXAMPLE NUMBER FOUR: No it's not the Trumplicans actively fighting to preserve monuments to the Confederacy, bending over backwards to deny minorities the right to vote, and fighting tooth and nail to deny that racism has been part and parcel of life in this country for centuries who are dividing the country along racial lines. It is the people who seek to give our children an honest reckoning of this nation's difficult history and "obsess" about issues like justice for all who are doing the dividing. 

That is one hundred percent unadulterated bullshit.  

A friend’s son was given an assignment in a university writing class requiring him, essentially, to explain why white people are privileged and bad. You can nitpick over my words, but you’ve surely heard similar stories. "You can nitpick over my words"??? In other words what he just said was at best an exaggeration, or at worst, made up. But be careful that you don’t confirm that you’ve heard of such experiences lest you be accused of “white fragility,” you know, the unwillingness to condemn yourself as a racist for what others may or may not have done, and your audacity in disputing the narrative. Just imagine being wrongly accused of one of the most egregious sins imaginable and lifting one of your pinkies in self-defense. How dare you!

This is the only honest part of the whole piece. Yes, any person who has issues with learning the truth about the past, especially if it paints one's ancestors in a bad light, suffers from fragility, regardless of their race, creed or color.  Funny, and I thought it was the Trumplicans who love to criticize the other side for being "snowflakes". 

The truth is, we all have much to learn. Confronting, challenging and correcting centuries' worth of mistakes and shortcomings including one's own racism (yes I'm as guilty as much as anyone), is part of being human and hopefully making oneself a better person. Who would have a problem with that? Well obviously David Limbaugh does. 

Consider a less anecdotal example. American Federation of Teachers president Randi Weingarten asserted that many GOP legislators “are bullying teachers (on the subject of race) and trying to stop us from teaching students accurate history.” She shared her views during a livestreamed conference billed as “How to Be an Antiracist.” This teacher’s union has some 1.7 million members, incidentally.

Illustrating her formidable skill at projection, she allowed that these Republicans might just be trying to “raise the temperature on race relations because of the next election.” Even more delusionally, she claimed that “culture warriors are labeling any discussion of race, racism or discrimination as (critical race theory) to try to make it toxic” — as if conservatives launched the so-called culture wars, and as if we are the ones toxifying society through endless, fraudulent stereotypical racial smears.

GASLIGHTING EXAMPLE NUMBER FIVE: Interesting that the subject of projection comes up. If the Trumplicans are masters of anything, it's projection. Remember in one of the 2016 presidential debates when Hillary Clinton accused Donald Trump of being a puppet of Vladimir Putin? Trump might as well have said "I'm rubber and you're glue, what bounces off me sticks to you." What he actually said was "I'm not a puppet, you're a puppet." In fact virtually every charge he has ever leveled against someone during his public life was something he was clearly guilty of himself.  Here the Little Limbaugh as projector, is projecting projection. What do you call that. projection squared or cubed?

Apparently, Weingarten is outraged that 26 states — so far — have introduced bills or taken other action to limit or ban the teaching of critical race theory in public schools. She’s not alone. The National Education Association just passed a resolution to “fight back against anti-CRT rhetoric.” The stated intent of the broader resolution — New Business Item 39 — is to share and publicize research that “critiques empire, white supremacy, anti-Blackness, anti-Indigeneity, racism, patriarchy, cisheteropatriarchy, capitalism, ableism, anthropocentrism, and other forms of power and oppression at the intersections of our society.” Orwell was obviously a piker.

DISINGENUOUS LITERARY REFERENCE: Here Limbaugh is obviously referring to George Orwell's distopian novel Nineteen Eighty Four. 

Nineteen Eighty Four is famous in part for the terms the author coined for the novel, many of which have found their way into popular English lexicon. Terms such as "Unperson", "Thoughtpol" (short for Thought Police), "Newspeak", "Doublethink", "Memory Hole", and the most well known, "Big Brother", are all euphemisms describing chilling aspects of the totalitarian regime featured in the novel.

The impressive list of  "isms" and "archies" cited above by the NEA resolution does indeed contain a few doozies, (I had to look up cisheteropatriarchy), but they're all universally accepted terms describing various forms of power and discrimination, not words made up for effect or irony.

In a deeper sense, like comparisons to Hitler, claiming one's political adversary has totalitarian tendencies has become quite commonplace, sometimes to the point of irrelevance. To ultra-right pundits like the brothers Limbaugh, policies like universal healthcare, mask mandates during a pandemic, and specifically here, the idea that history be taught honestly from several points of view, not just the Eurocentric one, are all examples of progressive totalitarianism. 

To the other side, the exPOTUS's deference toward brutal dictators such as Erdogan, Putin and Kim Jung Un, his rejection of a free and by all accounts (except his) fair election which he lost decisively, and his executive order banning the teaching of Critical Race Theory in the schools, can be said to be examples of totalitarianism of a different sort.    

Perhaps the most significant comparison of the exPOTUS's regime to the one in Orwell's novel, is its insistence that the one and only arbiter of the truth is the leader himself. Anything that contradicted the exPOTUS was in his words "fake news", a term that might rival Orwell's were it not so artless and unoriginal.  

It was the exPOTUS's minion, Kellyanne Conway, who early in the administration came up with the most Orwellian of terms when she told an interviewer who confronted her about her boss's famous penchant for lying: "well there are facts, and then there are 'alternate facts.'"

The NEA also allocated $56,500 to “research organizations attacking educators doing anti-racist work.” And they want to talk to us about bullying?

These progressive educators don’t think it’s appropriate for parents to stand up against teaching ideas euphemistically dressed up as “accurate history” even though poll after poll shows that a strong majority of Americans have a negative view of critical race theory?

GASLIGHTING EXAMPLE NUMBER SIX: OK this brings us back to the issue brought up before that there is "growing public disapproval" of the teaching of Critical Race Theory in this country. It shouldn't come as any surprise that polls have more Americans not liking CRT, as the issue has been harped upon incessantly by the ultra-right media, which is the only source of news for the vast majority of Trumplicans. By contrast, reputable media outlets (1) have put the issue on the back burner at best which is why the subject is off the radar for most of those who are not part of the cult of Trump. 

On another matter, really the crux of the whole debate, is do parents have the right to question and criticize what is being taught to our children? OF COURSE WE DO!!! That is what school boards, local school councils, the PTA, parent/teacher conferences and a slew of other resources available to parents are for, certainly NOT the state or federal government. The most valuable resource of all is the dinner table where parents and children have the opportunity to share the events of the day, on a personal, a local, and a global level. There is no learning experience greater than that. Too many of us, ourselves included, take these opportunities for granted. But shame on us, government is certainly not the institution that should be responsible for determining what our children learn and do not learn at school. That my friends is about as conservative value there is, what ever happened to those values by the way?. 

And now for the piece de resistance:

I’m old enough — actually, my kids are old enough — to remember when our society overwhelmingly embraced Martin Luther King Jr.’s dream that all people be judged by the content of the character rather than the color of their skin. How far we’ve descended.

Don’t be bullied by those seeking to intimidate you with false charges of racism from standing up for your children, for accurate history and for promoting the laudatory goal of seeing and treating people of all races as individuals made in God’s image.

TILT!!!  

TILT!!!

TILT!!!

PUSHED BUTTON NUMBER FIVE, GASLIGHTING EXAMPLE NUMBER SEVEN:

You can set your watch knowing that a Trumpilican writing about the issue of race will inevitably toss in the Martin Luther King Card. It's their way of saying "hey I'm not a racist, I think that (the long dead) Martin Luther King was a swell guy." 

 

I wrote about that very subject in this space a few years ago in a post called "Dead Icons." 

End of article, I'm back in black now.

The hard reality is that Dr. King and Jackie Robinson whom I mentioned above, were both despised during their lives, not only by lots of white people, but also by a number of their own people. Were they alive today, you can rest assured that would be no different. 

The only difference between MLK and BLM is that Dr. King was the more radical of the two.

Every year on the day we Americans celebrate the birth of Martin Luther King, we are subjected to a feel good soundbite from his most famous speech where he dreams of the day when

...little black boys and black girls will be able to join hands with little white boys and white girls as sisters and brothers...

It's all very comforting and kumbaya, especially when we hear how things have changed since then and King's words are accompanied by images of little black and white boys and girls doing just that. Then we hear from folks who hated his guts when he was alive publicly extolling his virtues, a safe fifty three years after his death, bygones being bygones. 

But we seldom hear the meat and potatoes of that speech like when he said this:

One hundred years (after the Emancipation Proclamation), the colored American lives on a lonely island of poverty in the midst of a vast ocean of material prosperity. One hundred years later, the colored American is still languishing in the corners of American society and finds himself an exile in his own land.

Or this:

When the architects of our great republic wrote the magnificent words of the Constitution and the Declaration of Independence, they were signing a promissory note to which every American was to fall heir.

This note was a promise that all men, yes, black men as well as white men, would be guaranteed the inalienable rights of life liberty and the pursuit of happiness.

It is obvious today that America has defaulted on this promissory note insofar as her citizens of color are concerned. Instead of honoring this sacred obligation, America has given its colored people a bad check, a check that has come back marked “insufficient funds.”

Today as we see hate speech and crimes against minorities on the increase, as we see the growing gap of prosperity between the poor and the rich, as we see the Supreme Court approving states chipping away bit by bit, pieces of the Voting Rights Act whose passage was in part inspired by that very speech, we realize 58 years later, that things have not changed as much as we thought they had in that time.

After the success of his "I Have a Dream Speech" culminating the "March for Jobs and Freedom" in Washington DC in August of 1963, then FBI Director J..Edgar Hoover dubbed King, the "Most Dangerous Negro in America." Hoover persuaded then Attorney General Robert F. Kennedy to wire tap King in hopes of gathering evidence that the Civil Rights Leader had ties to the Communist Party. 

The government could not find any such evidence (they did find other stuff of a personal nature to use against him). and King himself had often unequivocally renounced Communism  as being anathema to Christianity, 

However  King repeatedly stated his goal was not only civil justice for his people but more importantly a ​“total, direct, and immediate abolition of poverty.” 

"In a sense..." he said in an interview with the New York Times in 1968, "...you could say we are engaged in the class struggle.” 

In 1966 he said the following to a meeting of the Southern Christian Leadership Council: 

Something is wrong with capitalism, there must be a better distribution of wealth in the country. ​Maybe,... America must move toward a democratic socialism.

After all King would often say: "What good is being able to sit at a lunch counter if you can't afford a hamburger?" 

Commenting on the disparity between rich and poor in this country which has only widened since his death, King said this: 

We ​compress our abundance into the overfed mouths of the middle and upper classes until they gag with superfluity.

The phony people who today profess their love for Dr. King, like to point out that he always advocated non-violence and would never have approved of the tactics of groups such as BLM, ANTIFA, and the diverse set of folks who took part in the urban riots that followed the killing of George Floyd and the shooting of Jason Blake last summer. 

However, frustrated that his campaign to end poverty in America was falling upon deaf ears even amongst those who supported his civil rights efforts, shortly before his death Martin Luther King admitted in words that are shockingly relevant today given the events of the past year: 

Urban riots must now be recognized as durable social phenomena... They may be deplored, but they are there and should be understood. Urban riots are a special form of violence. They are not insurrections. The rioters are not seeking to seize territory or to attain control of institutions. They are mainly intended to shock the white community. They are a distorted form of social protest. The looting which is their principal feature serves many functions. It enables the most enraged and deprived Negro to take hold of consumer goods with the ease the white man does by using his purse. Often the Negro does not even want what he takes; he wants the experience of taking.

One would think that to the mind of a Trumplican, these sound more like the words of Che Guevara than their newly anointed hero Martin Luther King.

 

But there you have it. King was every bit as much of a radical/socialist as anyone in BLM. So please Trumplicans, stop invoking his name to support your cause because he certainly wouldn't support it were he alive today. 

The ignorance that paints MLK in the words of writer Michael Harriot, " a meek, milquetoast orator who fits (the) narrative of the sweet, submissive hero begging for a seat at the table", rather than the "revolutionary willing to bleed and die for what he believed in" that he was, is yet further evidence of the need to educate our children properly.

 

My guess is that ultra-right wing writers like David Limbaugh are not ignorant of history. If my hunch is correct, by willfully promoting such ignorance among his readers, he and his ilk are doing this country a grave disservice.

In his address to Congress in support of the Voting Rights Bill of 1965, President Lyndon Johnson said the following:

This great, rich, restless country can offer opportunity and education and hope to all: black and white, North and South, sharecropper and city dweller. These are the enemies: poverty, ignorance, disease. They are the enemies and not our fellow man, not our neighbor. And these enemies too, poverty, disease and ignorance, we shall overcome.  

With their opposition to raising the minimum wage to the level of a living wage, their fight against universal healthcare, their downplaying of a global pandemic and saving lives through vaccination, the Trumplicans have declared their undivided support of poverty and disease.

I guess it shouldn't be a surprise that they're now throwing all their weight behind ignorance as well. (2)

 

Maybe LBJ was wrong and at least some of our fellow men and women are indeed the enemy. 

Footnotes:

(1) This comment begs the question, what is a reputable news source? In my opinion it has nothing to do with bias, there are reputable sources of all stripes, right, center and left. What separates reputable from disreputable journalism is the willingness, or not, to present both sides of a story, to get the facts right as best you can and most important, when you don't get them right, to correct it. Yes it's that simple.

(2) I'd like to thank my friend Stefan Kwiatkowski for helping me finish off this piece with the LBJ quote and those timely thoughts.