A Citizen's Guide to Indiana

I had been blissfully unaware of Jerry Falwell’s view on race and civil rights until a friend flagged this article by Max Blumenthal. Falwell was more of a piece of work than I had realized.

Decades before the forces that now make up the Christian right declared their culture war, Falwell was a rabid segregationist who railed against the civil rights movement from the pulpit of the abandoned backwater bottling plant he converted into Thomas Road Baptist Church.

. . .

Falwell launched on the warpath against civil rights four years after the Supreme Court’s Brown v. Board of Education decision to desegregate public schools with a sermon titled “Segregation or Integration: Which?”

“If Chief Justice Warren and his associates had known God’s word and had desired to do the Lord’s will, I am quite confident that the 1954 decision would never have been made,” Falwell boomed from above his congregation in Lynchburg. “The facilities should be separate. When God has drawn a line of distinction, we should not attempt to cross that line.”

Falwell’s jeremiad continued: “The true Negro does not want integration…. He realizes his potential is far better among his own race.” Falwell went on to announce that integration “will destroy our race eventually. In one northern city,” he warned, “a pastor friend of mine tells me that a couple of opposite race live next door to his church as man and wife.”

His anti-abortion crusade came a little late in the game — in the early days, that was mainly the domain of Catholics. Anti-Vatican II Catholic, Paul Weyrich says that, initially, his attempt to enlist Falwell and other Southern evangelical leaders in a fight against “social ills” such as abortion, school prayer, and feminism fell on deaf ears.

“I was trying to get those people interested in those issues and I utterly failed,” Weyrich recalled in an interview in the early 1990s. “What changed their mind was Jimmy Carter’s intervention against the Christian schools, trying to deny them tax-exempt status on the basis of so-called de facto segregation.”
. . .
In 1979, at Weyrich’s behest, Falwell founded a group that he called the Moral Majority. Along with a vanguard of evangelical icons including D. James Kennedy, Pat Robertson and Tim LaHaye, Falwell’s organization hoisted the banner of the “pro-family” movement, declaring war on abortion and homosexuality. But were it not for the federal government’s attempts to enable little black boys and black girls to go to school with little white boys and white girls, the Christian right’s culture war would likely never have come into being. “The Religious New Right did not start because of a concern about abortion,” former Falwell ally Ed Dobson told author Randall Balmer in 1990. “I sat in the non-smoke-filled back room with the Moral Majority, and I frankly do not remember abortion ever being mentioned as a reason why we ought to do something.”

Did Falwell remain a racist? I have no idea. For all I know, it’s altogether possible that some of his best friends were black.

The Fort Wayne Journal Gazette has an article entitled Libertarians to gather for convention. The Indiana Libertarian Convention will host Libertarians from several states Saturday. Mitch Harper will be the keynote speaker.

[Christine] Smith, 40, of Golden, Colo., [a Libertarian presidential candidate] said she thinks many people would identify themselves as Libertarians if they knew the party’s stances.

I used to think that, but now I’m not so sure. I think I am more sympathetic to the Libertarian Party than the average citizen, but I don’t consider myself a Libertarian. More of a small “l” libertarian, and I’m not at all a purist. First, maybe it’s the ballot access and debate access — decidedly skewed against the Libertarians, holding them back. But, I think maybe there is a structural impediment to any third party that flows from the winner-takes-all electoral college system we have in place for electing the President. Parliamentary systems seem to have greater room for third parties. For whatever reason, our democracy never has. Even when we had third parties, they were usually just replacing one of the two main parties. Republicans replaced the Whigs, for example. Maybe it would be helpful just to think of our parties as Party “A” and Party “B”. One of the parties probably represents your views better than the other. The best you can do is to influence the closest party to reflect as many of your views as possible and, hopefully, have as much influence as possible on the government.

Also, like I said, I’m not a purist as far as libertarian idealogy. I think that would put me on the fringes of Libertarian thinking. I tend to think there is a much greater need to act as a community than the typical Libertarian probably does. We’re social animals. Networked activity is a strategy that has given humans a leg up over other animals and has helped us achieve a pretty remarkable standard of living. I tend to agree with Hobbes that pure individualism amounts to a state of war: “every man against every man.”

It is a state where:

men live without other security than what their own strength and their own invention shall furnish them withal. In such condition there is no place for industry, because the fruit thereof is uncertain: and consequently no culture of the earth; no navigation, nor use of the commodities that may be imported by sea; no commodious building; no instruments of moving and removing such things as require much force; no knowledge of the face of the earth; no account of time; no arts; no letters; no society; and which is worst of all, continual fear, and danger of violent death; and the life of man, solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short.

I don’t go so far as Hobbes as to think we need a “Leviathan” with absolute power to preserve a state of peace. There are checks on government power that are necessary and proper to preserve liberties. But, those checks aren’t absolute or unlimited. I’m sort of building a strawman here because, I expect that most Libertarians would agree that individual liberties aren’t absolute or unlimited. And, while I suspect that my view of individual liberties are more absolute and less limited than the view of the average citizen, I also suspect that I don’t go so far as most Libertarians.

An article in Science Daily entitled US Continues To Lag On Health Care, According To New International Comparison:

The U.S. health care system ranks last compared with five other nations [Australia, Canada, Germany, New Zealand, and the U.K.] on measures of quality, access, efficiency, equity, and outcomes, in the third edition of a Commonwealth Fund report analyzing international health policy surveys. While the U.S. did well on some preventive care measures, the nation ranked at the bottom on measures of safe care and coordinated care.

Another new Commonwealth Fund report comparing health spending data in industrialized nations published today reveals that despite spending more than twice as much per capita on health care as other nations ($6,102 vs. $2,571 for the median of Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development [OECD] countries in 2004) the U.S. spends far less on health information technology–just 43 cents per capita, compared with about $192 per capita in the U.K.
. . .

* On measures of quality, the U.S. overall ranked 5th out of 6 countries. The U.S. ranked fifth in coordinated care, and last in patients reporting that they have a regular doctor (84% vs. 92%-97% in other countries).
* On access measures the U.S. ranked last overall, including last on timeliness of care: 61% of U.S. patients said it was somewhat or very difficult to get care on nights or weekends, compared with 25%-59% in other countries.
* On efficiency, the U.S. ranked last overall, including last on percent of patients who have visited the emergency room for conditions that could have been treated by a regular doctor if one had been available (26% vs. 6%-21% in other countries). The U.S. ranked fifth of six countries on primary care practices having “high clinical information functions,” defined as practices having at least 7 of 14 office practice information functions, including electronic records, electronic prescribing, computerized safety alerts, and patient reminders systems and registries (19% compared with 8%-87% in other countries).

Like I’ve said before, we’re already paying for universal health care, we’re just not getting it.

Today there is a story in the Journal and Courier reporting that “Cities Ranked & Rated” by Bert Sperling and Peter Sander has put Lafayette as #25 on the list of best places to live. They ranked “more than 400 metropolitan areas in the United States and Canada.” Gainesville, FL is #1, Bellingham, WA is #2. Bloomington is down from #29 in 2004 to #86 this year. Carmel is #19 up from #79.

I don’t know about these rankings, necessarily, but I’ll just add my two cents that Lafayette is a very nice town.