civic engagement – Lisa Shaffer Words

July 1 2023

What Really Matters

lisashaffer Blog affirmative action, book ban, civic engagement, diversity, government, politics, supreme court, voting

If it wasn’t clear before last week, it should be glaringly obvious now that voting matters. Voting determines who makes decisions, including decisions about who sits on the Supreme Court. And who sits on the Supreme Court matters enormously!

Regarding affirmative action in higher education, the court’s majority seem to believe that there is no longer racial discrimination, and that the impacts of historic race-based restrictions don’t need to be examined. it seems only fair that if race cannot explicitly be considered, then legacy considerations should be disallowed as well. Legacy means that you get preference if others in your family attended that school before you. I was glad to hear in an interview with the president of my alma mater, the University of Michigan, that UofM does not give preference for legacy applicants. Given historical racial discrimination, legacy preference has the effect of perpetuating inequality and discrimination. Obviously no Black applicants had great grandfathers who attended Harvard and passed along their alumni status.

Another recent ruling held that a wedding website designer could refuse to accept a client planning a same-sex wedding on the basis that if conflicts with the website designer’s religious beliefs. Talk about slippery slopes – if my religion teaches that God intended everyone to be right-handed, and anyone who is left-handed has been tainted by the Devil, could I refuse to hire or serve anyone who was left-handed? Or deny medical care to left-handed people if I was a doctor?

In fact, if this website designer specialized in messaging that reflected her conservative evangelical “Christian” views, she would be an unlikely choice for a same-sex couple seeking a wedding website. And in fact, the case was basically made up. The plaintiff had not started her website business nor turned down any same-sex clients. Nobody was trying to force her to offer messages she disagreed with. All she would have been required to do, before this ruling, was to offer whatever business she was in to anyone who chose to hire her. So if she only offered websites strewn with messages about love between a man and a woman, and only had designs that showed heterosexual couples, no existing law would have required her to change her artistic offerings. Clearly the Supreme Court majority was just looking for an excuse to undo existing precedent about nondiscrimination in public accommodations. So sad, so unnecessary.

I am glad to see challenges to abortion restrictions based on Jewish teachings, and I was amused when parents in Utah objected to the Bible being in school libraries because it contained lewd and violent content that violated restrictions intended to ban books with more progressive content. [That decision was quickly reversed after parent protests … hypocrisy is alive and thriving …]

But all of this is a huge waste of time and money, to say nothing of the suffering of people who just want to live their lives, get an education, plan a wedding, and read books of their choice. We don’t live in a zero-sum game, despite many folks acting like we do. Helping those in need does not diminish the rest of us – it makes all of us better. Making books available that represent the diversity of our society helps everyone feel seen and respected. Parents still get to choose what books their young children check out, and they can choose whether or not to bring their children to a drag show.

There is much evidence that a diverse workplace, a diverse classroom, a diverse community is more resilient, more creative, and more productive than a homogenous group. What are we afraid of?

So I return to my main message, my perpetual message: we get the kind of government and the kind of society that we choose, either by our action or our inaction. If you think these issues are important, please get involved. Find out who’s on your local school board and work to elect those who support your values. Get involved in local, state, and national campaigns. Contact current elected officials, and work to get good people into office. We can change course. We can make reforms to the Supreme Court like term limits, and we can do better if we work together.

May 16 2023

What about life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness?

lisashaffer Blog bill of rights, civic engagement, freedom, kindness, libertarian, sheila kennedy, social capital

I am upset by the continuing and seemingly intensified efforts to silence and suppress people who don’t fit radical conservative politicians’ image of society. Our society is not promoting life, given the prevalence of guns and gun violence, now the number one cause of death for children. Our society is not promoting liberty, with small groups of radical activists banning books, censoring and distorting history, and denying women bodily autonomy. And our society is definitely not making it easy to pursue happiness, given all the above.

In their new book, “From Prosperity to Partner: Women’s Progress and Political Resistance,” authors Sheila Kennedy and Morton Marcus provide some important historical perspective.

“A fair reading [of the Bill of Rights] and its history discloses an underlying commitment to what has been called the libertarian principle: citizens — including female citizens — have the right to direct their own lives and pursue their own life goals free of government interference until and unless they harm the person or property or another, and so long as they are willing to grant an equal liberty to others.”

Why is that so hard to understand and follow? It’s so sad that fear has been intentionally promoted to the point that the mere existence of someone different is perceived as causing harm. Lies and distortions have created a false narrative and fear-based picture of society to encourage hatred and violence.

What can we do about it? We desperately need to find ways to rebuild social connections, to strengthen trust in public institutions, and to invest in social capital. We need to show, not just tell, that we share common interests, and that we can do more when we work together. We need to learn how to listen better and talk about our values and ideas without immediately demonizing (or threatening) those who disagree.

At the very least, if we demonstrate kindness and compassion in our daily interactions, perhaps we can defuse just a bit of the negativity around us.