Law School Discusses Medical Marijuana In Wake of Local Raids

Continued Enforcement Actions Highlight Need for Clarification of Law

by MARK GABRISH CONLAN

Copyright © 2009 by Mark Gabrish Conlan for Zenger’s Newsmagazine • All rights reserved

PHOTOS, top to bottom: Gerald Singleton, Dion Markgraaf, Alex Kreit

The forum on medical marijuana law at California Western School of Law September 17 occurred against the backdrop of a series of raids on medical marijuana dispensaries in San Diego one week earlier. On September 10, San Diego County district attorney Bonnie Dumanis hosted a press conference with San Diego police chief William Lansdowne, San Diego County sheriff William Gore, San Diego Drug Enforcement Administration (DEA) field division chief William Sherman, U.S. Attorney Karen Hewitt and other local and federal law enforcement personnel. The press conference announced that 14 search warrants were served on local dispensaries “as a result of a four-month investigation” that “effectively shut down the businesses which were operating under the guise of selling marijuana and marijuana-laced products for medicinal purposes.”

The raids only underscored that San Diego County is just about the worst place in California to be a medical user of marijuana. In 2003 the California state legislature passed a law requiring all 58 counties in the state to issue identification cards to legitimate medical users of marijuana — cards they could show to police and other law enforcement officers to stave off arrest. Instead of complying, San Diego and three other counties went through a five-year effort to try to have California’s landmark medical marijuana law, Proposition 215, declared unconstitutional on the ground that the continued prohibition of marijuana by the federal government trumps state law. Last year, Dumanis’s office and other law enforcement personnel launched what they first called “Operation Green Rx,” later renamed “Operation Endless Summer,” a police sting operation aimed at entrapping medical marijuana providers.

“What [Dumanis] actually did,” said Dion Markgraaf, a medical marijuana activist in San Diego County for over a decade and himself a victim of four criminal prosecutions for his efforts, “is assign a police officer to pose as a medical marijuana patient, lie to doctors to get medical recommendation letters, and target all the local sources. They all got huge bails and were prosecuted to the full extent of the law. Some are still being prosecuted.” According to Markgraaf, Dumanis’s office is coming down harder on medical marijuana providers than on ordinary drug dealers — despite Dumanis’s rhetoric that she supports medical marijuana and is only going after people abusing the law. “One guy in a head shop in Pacific Beach got two misdemeanor charges,” Markgraaf said. “The medical marijuana people are being hit with huge felony charges for the same amounts.”

According to Markgraaf, not only is the district attorney specifically targeting medical marijuana providers, the courts are also coming down hard on them and denying them due process of law. “One dispensary owner tried to act as his own lawyer, and was denied,” Markgraaf said. “He was arrested for ‘trespassing’ at his own court hearing. He was taken into custody without bail, ordered to have a sanity evaluation and will not have another court hearing until October 2. Another person was set up and didn’t have a preliminary hearing for six to eight months. They even tried to deny that he was a medical marijuana patient, and he lost his case because he couldn’t prove he was a patient. His bail was raised from $60,000 to $100,000, and the system wouldn’t accept a bail post for him from anyone — not a defense organization, not his family and not a professional bail bondsman. After five weeks in custody, he pleaded guilty — and then they let him out.”

Markgraaf was the only non-attorney on the panel at Cal Western September 17. The other speakers were Gerald Singleton, local defense attorney who specializes in medical marijuana cases and is representing many of the people arrested in Dumanis’s enforcement actions; and Alex Kreit, a professor at Thomas Jefferson School of Law. (The Cal Western and Jefferson chapters of the National Lawyers’ Guild co-sponsored the event.) Kreit was involved in a late phase of the long-standing litigation involving the Oakland Cannabis Buyers’ Cooperative (OCBC) and its ultimately unsuccessful attempt to block the federal government from prosecuting medical marijuana providers and users. His part of the program was a review of the long, depressing history of federal marijuana law and how the 1970 Controlled Substances Act has been upheld in the courts against every challenge based on medical necessity.

When the Controlled Substances Act was passed, it set up a series of so-called “schedules” depending on how “dangerous” a drug was considered to be and whether it had any legitimate medical use. Marijuana was placed in the most severe category, Schedule I, along with heroin and LSD. A Schedule I drug is one that has “high potential for abuse” and “no significant medical use.” Morphine and cocaine were put into Schedule II, acknowledging that they do have recognized medical uses. The Schedule I placement of marijuana, Kreit explained, was supposed to be “provisional” pending a review of marijuana laws by a government panel called the Schaefer Commission. But when the Schaefer Commission finally made its report and recommended that marijuana be decriminalized altogether, President Nixon ignored it. President Carter briefly attempted a rescheduling, but when one of his top advisors was caught in a drug raid, he quietly dropped the issue — and no president has taken it up since.

What made the summary declaration by the President and Congress that marijuana had no legitimate medical use utterly preposterous was that at the time the federal government was actually running an Investigational New Drug (IND) program to test marijuana’s effectiveness as medicine. “It was difficult to become one of those patients,” Kreit said. In fact, only nine people were ever actually enrolled in this program, but at least six of them remain alive and are still getting legal marijuana from the federal farm in Mississippi that supplies all the government’s research stash. But this quiet program came to a skidding halt in 1981, when a San Francisco doctor specializing in AIDS treatment tried to enroll 350 new patients — and the Reagan administration responded by shutting the program completely, leaving only the nine previous enrollees grandfathered in and therefore entitled to medical marijuana doses.

Another attempt to challenge the federal government’s denial of the medical benefits of marijuana came in the early 1970’s, when the National Organization to Reform Marijuana Laws (NORML) filed a petition to have the substance rescheduled to permit medical use. “After a protracted litigation process during which the DEA refused even to hold hearings on the petition,” Kreit said, “administrative law judge Francis Young recommended it be removed to Schedule II. His recommendation was refused by the DEA and so the petition died after 22 years pending. Afterwards there were no further attempts to contest the federal ban on medical marijuana until California voters passed the landmark medical marijuana initiative, Proposition 215, in November 1996.

“After Proposition 215, there were several cases, including the Oakland Cannabis Buyers’ Cooperative case,” Kreit explained. “OCBC claimed a medical necessity defense against a civil action by the federal government. They won in the 9th Circuit Court of Appeal, but the U.S. Supreme Court unanimously overturned that decision and said the Controlled Substances Act was intended to preclude a medical necessity defense. In a concurring opinion, however, Justice John Paul Stevens seemed to leave open the question of whether an individual patient could claim a medical necessity defense.”

Unfortunately, the door Justice Stevens had tried to prop open got slammed shut by a 6-3 Court majority in the Raich v. Ashcroft (later Raich v. Gonzalez, as the defendant — the U.S. Attorney General — changed) case. Medical marijuana patient Angel McClary Raich and her attorneys seized on a case called Lopez in which the conservative majority on the Supreme Court had tried to restrict the reach of the interstate commerce clause. The U.S. constitution gives the federal government power to regulate “commerce between the states,” and from the 1930’s to the 1990’s that was interpreted broadly to give the feds authority to do just about anything they wanted as long as they could make some tenuous claim that it was related to interstate commerce.

Seeking to expand the rights of gun owners, the conservative Supreme Court majority in the Lopez case “held it did not affect interstate commerce to prohibit guns near schools,” Kreit explained. “Medical marijuana activists asked why, if possessing a gun near a school zone does not affect interstate commerce, possessing or cultivating marijuana does?” Instead, Anthony Kennedy and Antonin Scalia switched sides and upheld the federal ban on medical marijuana, and while Kreit himself seemed confused by the reasoning they used, it seemed to boil down to “the ground that the CSA provides a total regulatory scheme, and if you can’t regulate simple possession, the whole scehem would fall apart.” The Supreme Court referred both Raich and OCBC back to the lower courts, where Raich tried to make an argument that she had a “fundamental right” to use marijuana if it helped her medically. But neither Raich’s new argument nor OCBC’s claims made it past the federal appeals courts.

The U.S. Supreme Court’s consistently negative rulings on medical marijuana have put patients into a Kafka-esque situation in which, if they’re arrested on federal drug charges and tried in federal courts, they’re not permitted to mention medical marijuana at all. They’re not allowed to discuss either their own illnesses or those of anyone to whom they may be providing marijuana. According to Kreit, the medical marijuana movement is lobbying Congress for something called the Truth in Trials Act, “which would allow evidence of medical use and compliance with state law [to be used as evidence] in federal trials.” Kreit also discussed another rescheduling petition that is making its way through the system, and said he’s hopeful it will be heard while Barack Obama is still president and his appointees hear it — especially since the scientific evidence for marijuana as medicine is far stronger now than it was in the 1970’s when NORML filed their petition.

About the only good thing that’s happened for medical marijuana users at the federal level took place in the late 1990’s, when President Clinton and his Office of Drug Control Policy chief, Barry McCaffrey, tried to shut down Proposition 215 by threatening to revoke the federal prescription license of any doctor who wrote a recommendation authorizing a patient to use marijuana. This would have nipped medical marijuana in the bud — pardon the pun — because 215 requires that you have a doctor’s recommendation before you can legally use marijuana for medical reasons. “The doctors fought this,” Kreit recalled, “and the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeal held with them that they had a constitutional right to discuss treatment options with their patients. This didn’t make it to the Supreme Court, but it shut down any rumblings of the federal government doing this again.”

More recently, last March Eric Holder, Obama’s appointee as attorney general, made a statement that the federal government would no longer prosecute medical marijuana users or providers in states where medical marijuana was legal — as long as the patients and providers were following their states’ laws. That’s been a loophole big enough to drive a semi-truck packed with “keys” through, since aggressive district attorneys like Dumanis and local DEA chiefs like Sherman can always claim that the people they’re arresting are not following the state law. “Like most San Diegans, I support legitimate and legal medical marijuana use,” Dumanis said at her press conference. “However, it appears these so-called ‘marijuana dispensaries’ are nothing more than for-profit storefront drug dealing operations run by drug dealers hiding behind the state’s medical marijuana law.”

Part of the problem is that the state has been ambiguous as to just what is and is not legal under Proposition 215 and the implementation law passed by the state legislature in 2003, the Medical Marijuana Program Act. That was the main subject of Gerald Singleton’s presentation. This law set limits on the amount of marijuana — both live plants and product — a patient may have at any one time, limits that medical marijuana advocates feel are too restrictive. It also set up the ID card system because, as Singleton explained, “they had a problem with law enforcement not following the law, either through misunderstanding or bad faith. The card has the person’s photo on it and a phone number that can be called 24 hours a day, seven days a week, to verify that person has a legitimate doctor’s recommendation to use marijuana.

“In other counties, people with cards and amounts within the legal limits are not being arrested,” Singleton said. “In San Diego, the County Board of Supervisors decided they had a lot of extra money with which to sue the federal government to throw out 215. Supervisor Bill Horn honestly said he didn’t care what the voters thought, he would never vote for marijuana in any way, shape or form. That’s at least more honest than Dumanis.”

Singleton, who’s representing many of the medical marijuana patients and providers arrested under Operation Green Rx, added more details to Markgraaf’s account of how the raids went down. “The police department, sheriff’s department and district attorney’s office rented a house on Pico Street on military property,” he explained. The use of military property was so that when the operation became public last March, Dumanis could claim she was protecting innocent young sailors from desperate, depraved drug dealers. According to Singleton, the undercover cop they assigned, Detective Henderson, “looked like Van Halen. He got a driver’s license and gave his address as 1313 Mockingbird Lane” — the fictitious address of the Munsters family in the hit 1960’s TV show.

Detective Henderson, using the alias “Jimmy Conlin,” “signed up to be in Joe Malone’s collective, and Malone checked out his recommendation with the doctor who issued it,” Singleton explained. “The authorities contend that Malone broke the law when he sold ‘Conlin’ half an ounce because he didn’t have a pre-existing relationship with the collective and therefore couldn’t ‘join’ it.” Dumanis’s office seems to be arguing that once someone exchanged marijuana for money, or vice versa, they have violated the state’s ban on “profiting” from medical marijuana. Her office’s press release explains her position.

“For-profit marijuana dispensaries are not legal according to state law and the State Attorney General’s published guidelines,” the release reads. “The Attorney General’s guidelines on medical marijuana allow non-profit collectives and cooperatives that cultivate marijuana to serve their legitimate patients if they follow rules, which include acquiring marijuana only from their members and reimbursing only reasonable costs like out-of-pocket expenses.”

Singleton challenges the D.A.’s belief that collectives — which are specifically authorized in the 2003 act — can only reimburse their members for out-of-pocket expenses. “They can pay their members a salary reasonable by the standards of other non-profits,” he argued. He also said that the Attorney General’s guidelines “say you can have dispensaries and can sell. You just can’t make profits.” Indeed, the guidelines say that people involved in dispensing medical marijuana through non-profit collectives or cooperatives must pay state sales taxes on the proceeds — clear evidence that the state government is aware that money is changing hands in the medical marijuana business, and it’s fine so long as the state gets its cut.

“The San Diego district attorney’s office admits they take a harder-line stance than anyone else in the state,” Singleton said. “We’ve asked them for guidelines, and they’ve said, ‘We don’t give advisory opinions. You have to hire your own lawyer.’ I said I had a client who hired me before they started operation and still got prosecuted. They said, ‘He should have hired a better lawyer.’ I don’t think Dumanis and the lawyers on her narcotics task force are enforcing this law in good faith. The law is certainly being abused, but so is the enforcement of it.”

Author Darrel Ray Lectures on “God Virus”

Says Religion Propagates Itself In Ways Similar to Infectious Disease

by MARK GABRISH CONLAN

Copyright © 2009 by Mark Gabrish Conlan for Zenger’s Newsmagazine • All rights reserved

It’s not every atheist author who begins a lecture to promote his book with a bit of a fire-breathing Fundamentalist Christian sermon on the nature and ubiquity of human sin and the need to appeal to the Holy Spirit to be cleansed of it. But that’s what Darrel W. Ray did at the San Diego Public Library September 19 in an appearance sponsored by the Humanist Association of San Diego (HASD) in connection with his book The God Virus: How Religion Infects Our Lives and Culture. He did it partly to demonstrate how utterly without logic your average sermon — especially an Evangelical one — is, but also as an ironic reflection of his own religious background.

“I was raised in Wichita, Kansas, and went to church three to five days a week — except during revivals, when it was seven days a week,” Ray recalled. “I thought that when I grew up, I’d go into the ministry. Then, when I went to college, I got bachelors’ degrees in anthropology and sociology and started to have my doubts. I got a masters’ in religion, and then I realized I couldn’t tell anyone else what to believe when I didn’t know what to believe myself.” After a lifetime of involvement in the church — including acting as a tenor soloist and music director for services — Ray ultimately became a psychotherapist specializing in using hypnosis to help his clients. He slowly started to realize that church services are carefully structured to achieve the same sort of hypnotic effect he was inducing in his patients.

Ray said he first thought of the metaphor of religion as infection when he read a 1991 essay by prominent atheist author Richard Dawkins called “Viruses of the Mind” (available at http://www.cscs.umich.edu/~crshalizi/Dawkins/viruses-of-the-mind.html). Dawkins’ piece compared biological viruses, computer viruses and what he called “mental viruses,” including but not limited to religion. What Ray believes sets his book apart from those by Dawkins, Daniel Dennett, Christopher Hitchens and Sam Harris is that he offers a step-by-step comparison between the way biological viruses infect a host’s body and use the host to replicate, and the way religious viruses do the same to the human mind. Also, he said, the other authors “don’t tell you how to interact with religious people in a way that respects them but doesn’t cave in to their beliefs.”

According to Ray, the last thing you should try to do when talking to a religious person is to use logic to pick apart the central tenets of their faith. “Logic has nothing to do with it,” he said. “You cannot win an argument with them. If you try to argue someone out of a religion, they become more staunch and dug in to their beliefs. As non-theists, we have to examine ourselves and understand how our behavior can make things worse. We also have to understand the channels of infection. If you understand how the virus works, you will understand that you can’t argue with a virus. The God-virus theory helps us understand religion in ways we never did before.”

Ray then mentioned several biological infections that actually destroy their hosts in the course of spreading themselves and ensuring their own survival. “There’s an infection called Toxoplasma gondil that infects rats’ brains and takes out the part of the brain that makes the rat afraid of cats,” he explained. “It’s still afraid of owls, dogs and its other native predators. T. gondil can live only in the guts of a cat. It’s excreted in cat feces, and rats step on it and become infected. There are hundreds of thousands of viruses that affect our behavior. When you get a cold, you sneeze a lot because the virus is irritating your mucous membranes to get you to sneeze and spread the virus. T. gondil says, ‘Go find a cat and kiss it, so I can spread.’ It doesn’t care that the rat will die. It only cares about its own survival.”

Acknowledging that some people have objected to his God-virus metaphor, pointing out that viruses are biological products of evolution while religions are human-made, Ray pointed out that infectious computer programs that use the Internet to spread from one computer to another are often called “viruses” even though they too are human-made. “God-viruses are ideas that have been put in our brain computers and want to spread to others,” Ray explained. “What matters is that viruses have a strategy for infecting. Some viruses use sexual transmission. Others use a sneeze. Humans have something similar that enters through the ears at an early age, germinates in the mind and comes out through the mouth to spread religion.”

And, Ray added, just as biological viruses make their hosts sick and sometimes kill them, God viruses make their hosts’ minds weaker and can kill them. “Religion has consequences on intelligence and personality,” Ray said. “Seventy years of research have shown a negative correlation between religiosity and intelligence. Religion suppresses curiosity, which is one of the key components of intelligence. Those infected with religion tend to avoid or deny scientific or natural explanations in favor of supernatural ones. They even deny the scientific explanations for their own behavior.”

Ray explained that just as biological viruses have two strategies for spreading themselves — horizontal (moving from one host to another) and vertical (passed down from parent to child), “religions have similar strategies. The younger a religion, the more emphasis it places on horizontal strategies. Mormons, Jehovah’s Witnesses and Scientologists go out and recruit. The Catholics have a vertical strategy: have as many kids as possible, and infect them all.” He noted that some religions don’t allow converts — horizontal recruits — at all. “The Amish make it very hard to convert, and the Druze in Syria closed their religion in the 1200’s,” he said.

Another similarity Ray noted between religion and infection is when you’re most vulnerable to being infected. Biological viruses, he argued, frequently infect children because their immune systems haven’t fully formed and given them the power to resist. Religious viruses do the same thing, he said. “You get religion when you’re young, when you have no rational immune system and can’t resist the things they’re going to tell you in Sunday school.” One difference Ray noted is that children frequently encounter a wide variety of biological infections — indeed, that’s usually a good thing, because the more germs they are exposed to, the more information they will give their budding immune systems so they can fight back as adults — while they’re usually exposed to just one religion. “Therein lies a hint on how to prevent children from being infected with the God viruses,” Ray said; “take them to a lot of churches, and let them hear the nonsense they all preach.”

As for adults, Ray argued, they’re most vulnerable to biological infections when they’re under stress — and the same is true for religion. “Of all the adults I know who ‘got religion,’ 80 to 90 percent of them got it when they were going through a major period of stress or a mid-life crisis,” he said. He added that, except in closed-in settings like prisons — where inmates are frequently exposed to fellow convicts with strong commitments to fundamentalist Christianity or Islam — late-in-life converts tend to adopt the religious beliefs with which they were raised as children. The one new factor that might change that, Ray added, is the Internet, “which exposes people to many new beliefs — but can also expose them to the craziness behind them.”

The most powerful parts of Ray’s presentation were his discussions of the ways religions literally hypnotize their followers into believing and obeying. “Almost every religion uses trance induction,” he pointed out. “They use stress and guilt. Guilt is a prime infector. Another reason people go to church is to meet their social needs; church offers them a community, but to stay in the community they have to believe. Sex is a great motivator; I think religion is a sexually transmitted diseases. Inspirational music is a key factor, and last but not least is childhood intimidation. When you put all these things together, what do you get?” At that point, on the computer slide show he was using to accompany his presentation, he flashed a photo of former vice-presidential candidate Sarah Palin — to the cheers of some audience members and the groans of others who called it a cheap shot.

Ray said that the use of trance induction and other forms of hypnotic suggestion by religion is the equivalent of the biological “key” by which a virus infects a host cell and reprograms that cell to replicate viruses instead of cells. “If I hypnotize you, you will then start acting on my commands,” he explained. “The hypnotic techniques used by preachers include the up-and-down curve of the voice and lots of silences that make people open to the suggestions they give them today.” He said the group prayers ministers frequently incorporate into sermons — “long, rhythmic prayers, almost interminable” — are a key infection technique, especially when they incorporated a repeated word that acts like the “trigger word” a hypnotist implants in the unconscious of his subject so he’ll still be vulnerable to the hypnotist’s commands even after the trance ends. Ray demonstrated with a sample prayer that repeated the word “just” and said he’d heard a prayer that used “just” 20 times as a trance induction technique.

“There are also trigger things, like incense in the Catholic church, which is paired with the hypnosis,” Ray added. “There are musical techniques. A rock band giving a concert does everything it can to program the emotional experience, so you have a great time and tell your friends about the emotional ‘high’ you got. Churches use music the same way. The music is put in very special places in the church service.” On page 150 of The God Virus, Ray lists the nine cues in one Fundamentalist service he attended, and designates the role of each one in inducing the trance: quiet entry music as you walk in (sense of peace); song about hope and triumph (sense of hope); song about sin (sense of guilt and unworthiness); song about salvation (guilt, ending with hope); rousing salvation song from the full choir (hope); sermon on marriage and relationships (guilt and self-doubt); song about commitment before the collection plates are passed (resolve to give money); and rousing song of joy and forgiveness to end the service (joy, hope and a good feeling to get you to come back next week).

To illustrate his point. Ray then showed a two-minute excerpt from a sermon by mega-church pastor John Piper from his Web site, www.desiringgod.org (a site name which itself made Ray’s point about how religion both makes people feel guilty about their sexual desires and offers them a way to sublimate and resolve that guilt) and quoted Bertrand Russell as saying, “So far as I can remember, there is not one word in the Gospels in praise of intelligence.” He asked his audience to watch Piper’s gestures and listen for the repeated words that would indicate the hypnotic “triggers” he was feeding his congregation. “There’s no eye contact with the audience,” he said of Piper after showing the tape. “The man himself is in a trance most of the time, and he’s putting other people in the trance. After reciting Scripture he’ll often give a long silence because it draws you in. He’s talking to God, and telling the peons, ‘Listen to me, I’m in direct touch with God.’”

After noting the anti-reason, anti-thought, anti-human character of Piper’s message — particularly his call to his congregants to make themselves “empty vessels” and allow God to fill them up again — Ray said, “A church, a mosque, a temple is an infection center where all channels are brought to bear on the people in the room. Everything in the service — and in the building itself — is designed to infect you. The sermons have double messages. It’s an emotional roller coaster, up and down, to make you feel worthless so you give money to the church and get other people to come.” He noted that the repeated instructions in the Roman Catholic service to change positions — the calls to stand, sit or kneel on cue — are themselves a technique of hypnotic induction.

Ray also said that the reason churches go out of their way to protect their ministers — whether it’s the Roman Catholic hierarchy covering up for pedophile priests or Ted Haggard’s mega-church allowing him to come back after “five Fundamentalist ministers prayed over him for six weeks and ‘cured’ him of homosexuality” — is that they are especially talented hypnotists and it takes a lot of time and money to train people good enough to replace them.

He quoted Pope Benedict XVI’s September 2007 statement that “Europe has become child-poor” and that this would lead to the breakdown of all morality in Europe as an example of the institutionalized hypocrisy he finds in religion. “What the Pope is really saying,” Ray explained, “is, ‘Make more Catholic children. We’re falling behind.’ Would the Pope be happy if more Muslim, Lutheran, Presbyterian or atheist children were born? Probably not. The ministers are really saying different things than what their words literally mean. ‘You need to get more of the Holy Spirit!’ means stop questioning.”

Acknowledging that a certain level of guilt is essential to a healthy personality — “If we didn’t have guilt, we’d all be psychopaths or mass murderers” — Ray nonetheless critiqued the church’s heavy reliance on guilt in general and sexual guilt in particular. “Religion likes to take advantage of our natural tendency towards guilt,” he explained. “It teaches us new things to be guilty of — things that are natural and normal — and then it offers us ‘salvation’ from the guilt it’s taught us. Religion gives us the disease and then offers us the ‘cure.’”

What’s worse is that, since the things religion teaches you to feel guilty about are normal, natural human behaviors, you’re likely to keep doing them even though the church officially tells you not to. Ray gave a humorous example from his own life, recalling that when he and his wife (now his ex-wife) were first dating, they would get together and pray to God to keep them chaste until they were married — and then they’d take their clothes off and “screw like bunny rabbits.” They did this again and again, week after week — and kept going to church afterwards to ask for “forgiveness” for their “sins.”

“Most God viruses are consumed with sex,” Ray argued. “’Just say no,’ abstinence, anti-abortion. The reason is sex is an incredibly effective way to infect people. If you can keep them feeling guilty about sex, you can infect them. If you open up to sex, you feel guilty. Most religions use masturbation as an early guilt pathway. Every primate, and almost every animal, masturbates. Albert Ellis said, ’97 percent of all men admit to masturbation, and the other 3 percent are lying.’ The virus creates a huge cognitive dissonance in the four of guilt. You have to learn the prohibitions.”

Ray said that each time the “sinner” comes back to church and asks for “forgiveness” for the same thing, the church ups the ante. “You have to do more — pray more, read the Bible more, say more Hail Marys,” he said. “Forgiveness does not generally change behavior, but it does make one more dependent on the imaginary God. It’s a good thing for a religion to get people to do the ‘bad’ things, so you feel guilty and come back to church. It’s a great cycle that says, ‘You’re never good enough. You’ve got to have Jesus.’ They even went so far as to invent ‘original sin’ — to say that you’re an ‘offense in the sight of God’ just because you exist.”

At this point Ray sang the song “Amazing Grace” a cappella in a strong, clear tenor voice that made his claim of once having been a church soloist totally believable. His point was to compare the soaring eloquence of the melody with the abject misery of the lyrics — “Amazing grace, how sweet the sound/That saved a wretch like me/I once was lost, but now I’m found/Was blind, but now I see.” The message of the song, he argued, is the same as the message of John Piper’s sermon: you are nothing, God is everything, you have to “empty yourself” and allow God to refill you — which in practice means believing everything the minister says and doing everything he tells you to do, or rather not doing everything he tells you not to do.

“The God virus will teach you that some things are bad to keep you feeling guilty,” Ray explained. “Almost all major God viruses are sex-negative. In Hawai’i the first thing the missionaries did to the natives was teach them to feel guilty about sex. Just as yeast bacteria change the pH balance in your body so it will be more friendly and allow them to grow and expand, so the God virus wants to create a negative pH towards sex so your brain will be more friendly to its growth and spread. Can you imagine the Pope waking up and saying, ‘We were wrong. Masturbation is O.K.’ That’s not going to happen. Sex-positive messages are impossible to maintain within the major religions, especially Christianity and Islam.”

Knowing all this, Ray said, will make it easier for you to handle conversations with religious people. “First, remember that they are infected — not you,” he explained. “”You can’t argue with the virus. Logic is not the answer. If you argue, you get them more defensive. You have to take into consideration that the God virus is affecting their behavior. You have to take a different tack. Recognize religious defensiveness.” He suggested that you first get them to talk about issues that don’t involve religion — their families, friends, jobs, hobbies — and then ask about their beliefs and watch as their body postures and vocal tones change. “That’s the God virus taking over, just like the demon took over the little girl in The Exorcist,” he said.

“Focus on the emotion, not the virus,” Ray advised. “When someone says, ‘God is helping me through the illness of my child,’ respond with, ‘I understand that you’re very concerned about your child.’ Recognize that they’re infected, and that arguing with them and condemning tem is as stupid as them arguing with and condemning you. If you take one thing away from today’s meeting, it should be this: Defensive people cannot learn because defensive people cannot listen. Your job as a freethinker is to influence people, not to change them. Look under the hood of religion and analyze it as a behavioral mechanism. Observe religion and understand what is going on with that person. I’m not interested in converting people to what I am — I just want them to keep their stuff out of my schools.”

Ray’s talk didn’t discuss a topic that frequently comes up in arguments between believers and freethinkers: the things religious people have done in the world, both for good and for ill, and their net effect on the welfare of humanity. He did address this on page 230 of his book, where he wrote, “Those who claim that religion has brought about great change [for good] often point to people like Martin Luther King, Jr. I would suggest that Dr. King was a pragmatist who used religion as his method of communication. His ethics were more informed by Mohandas Gandhi (a Hindu in India) than by Jesus. His reading of the Bible was extremely selective and in strong opposition to many other Christian experts. White supremacists have many more scriptures to quote than Dr. King. His genius was his ability to play the virus against itself. Through speeches and actions, he illuminated how religion maintained oppression. His followers were from many different churches, and a surprising number were non-religious or atheist.”

Finally, Ray ended his talk with a plug for a movement he’s building called “Recovery from Religion.” He asked his audience how many had grown up in believing families and had been exposed to the God virus from birth; about half of them raised their hands. He then discussed the problems many former believers face when they become atheists or agnostics, including being ostracized from their families and losing their entire support networks. (Ironically, he’d noted earlier in his talk that nonbelievers who “get religion” as adults frequently do the same things voluntarily, breaking up their existing friendships and sometimes their marriages as well.) This movement can be reached on the Web at www.endhereditaryreligion.com or www.recoveringreligionists.com, and Ray’s own Web site is www.godvirus.net

Fletcher Rallies Progressive Crowd to Fight the Right

Says Right-Wing Populists Will Win Unless Progressives Organize Now

by MARK GABRISH CONLAN

Copyright © 2009 by Mark Gabrish Conlan for Zenger’s Newsmagazine • All rights reserved

The leaflet advertising Bill Fletcher’s talk, “Corporate Capitalism: Our Challenges and Opportunities,” at the World Beat Center in Balboa Park September 13 promised a much more optimistic, upbeat speech than the one he actually gave. “For the first time in a generation, millions of Americans have lost faith in capitalism and are open to political alternatives,” said the leaflet produced by the talk’s presenters, the Freedom Road Socialist Organization and the San Diego Socialist Unity Network. But Fletcher, who lives in Washington, D.C., came to San Diego a day after hundreds of thousands of Right-wing activists had flooded the nation’s capital in a march aimed at confronting President Obama’s allegedly “socialist” policies — and he warned his San Diego audience that unless America’s Leftists mobilize quickly and effectively, the Right-wing populist ideology behind that march, the “teabag” protests and the disruptions of Congressional town-hall meetings will take control of American politics.

“No matter what we on the Left think of Obama, you have to put that aside and realize that to the Right-wing populists, Obama is the new socialist Satan,” Fletcher, veteran radical activist, author and former education director for the Service Employees’ International Union (SEIU) and the AFL-CIO, told an audience of about 60 veteran Left activists in San Diego. “The slogan, ‘No, keep the change,’ is appropriate. These folks are upset that there’s a Black president. They don’t want health care reform or changes in America’s foreign policy, and they’re scared to death of the demographic changes in the U.S.” (He meant the increase in the percentage of Americans who are people of color.) “They cling to the past and don’t want any change from what makes ‘us’ feel comfortable. There’s a deathly fear that things are slipping away from white people.”

Though Fletcher dates the existence of Right-wing populism as early as the presidency of Andrew Jackson in the 1830’s, he said its current popularity has its roots in the early 1970’s, when the real wages and living standards of working-class Americans started to decline. Ever since, he explained, “they’ve been trying to accommodate this but also to explain it.” Rather than believe there was something wrong with the society, the class structure or anything about the country and the capitalist system they’d been brought up to revere, Fletcher added, “People assumed the problem was them not working hard enough.” That meant they felt they had to deal with the situation as individuals — and many of them did so by taking on more and more consumer debt.

“When the housing bubble emerged, that was a vehicle for people to go into even deeper debt,” Fletcher said. “They were told home values would never come down, and they believed it. But they also had to rationalize it. Whites generally have been told that the ravages of capitalism aren’t supposed to hit them. There’s supposed to be a cushion, and from the mid-1970’s they felt the cushion starting to fade and they asked who was responsible.”

Right-wing populism provided them an answer, Fletcher said: their troubles were the fault of “others,” people who weren’t like them racially, economically or culturally. The basis of Right-wing populism, Fletcher explained, “is that there are the ‘good people,’ and there are the ‘other’ — and the ‘other’ is always a threat. Right-wing populism feeds on people’s fears, and if we on the Left don’t have real answers to offer people, Right-wing populism offers amazing answers. The Right, unlike the Left, is not constrained by the truth. It taps into deep-seated prejudices. Glenn Beck’s focus on Obama as a ‘racist’ who hates white people is absurd. But it doesn’t matter what the truth is; it’s focusing on the anxieties people have.”

Fletcher described the “funny predicament” America’s Left has been put into both by Obama’s election and the hysterical Right-wing reaction to it. “Obama is not only not a socialist, he’s not even a progressive,” Fletcher said. “He’s a liberal, and many of us have differences with him on foreign policy and on the economy — particularly the focus on the financial sector and not Main Street. But the Right has targeted Obama and moved to demonize him, and the rhetoric of Right-wing populism continues to escalate in ways we should notice.” Fletcher cited the example of one demonstrator at the big September 12 march in Washington, D.C. who told a reporter, “We came from Utah and Montana unarmed … this time.”

The very fact that some Right-wing protesters are being allowed into the president’s vicinity with loaded guns astonishes Fletcher, who can remember all too well that during the George W. Bush administration people were ushered out of his events, and sometimes even arrested, just for wearing anti-Bush or anti-war T-shirts. “If I had shown up at a Bush rally with an AR-15, I’d have been on my way to Guantánamo,” Fletcher said. “Yet we have these Right-wing nutcases running around Obama with guns, and no one seems to mind. I get e-mails from Right-wingers who say that they’re preparing for war.”

What is the Right fighting against? Not “socialism,” at least as any real socialist or progressive would define the term, Fletcher said. Not even “big government,” since “if the Right hated ‘big government’ they would have ousted Bush,” Fletcher commented ruefully. What they’re against, he explained, is “any attempt by government to address the social needs of the population. They’re not concerned about the growth of the military, prisons or the police. They’re against … the idea of government as a distributionist force.” Fletcher argued that, like Franklin Roosevelt, Obama understands that a capitalist democracy cannot survive if the gaps in wealth and income between the top and bottom of the population get too large — and that, like Roosevelt’s opponents, Obama’s don’t understand what a “destabilizing factor” a vast inequality of wealth and income can be to a capitalist republic.

Fletcher said that, while Obama is only “slightly to the Left of Bill Clinton” in terms of his actual policies, the Left must nonetheless “figure out how to respond” to the vicious Right-wing attacks on him. “We have three options,” he said. “One is to say nothing and let him be attacked. One is to criticize him ourselves because people think he is the enemy. Both these approaches are wrong. We need to build a progressive movement that deals with Obama from the Left and is independent. This approach is important if we want a movement that can contest for power. … Part of our task is to win the battle for democracy, to fight to improve people’s living standards, all as part of a project that recognizes that nothing will change fundamentally as long as capitalism exists.”

Recalling a prediction he made during the campaign that if Obama were elected “we would see a resurgence of Right-wing populism,” Fletcher said that the American Left must confront the resurgent Right while simultaneously making our own criticisms of Obama — not for taking his “distributionist tendencies” too far, which is what the Right attacks him for, but for not taking them far enough. “If we don’t respond to the slowness of the economic stimulus or the escalation in Afghanistan, the Right will,” Fletcher said. “Now is the time for those of us who favor single-payer health care to be visible, to be out there. The administration needs to understand that there are millions of people who support Medicare for all. We need to be at the health care town halls.”

Fletcher repeated over and over again that if we don’t act now to confront the threat of the Right, it will be too late. “The Right has a vast mass base, and we have to take it seriously, destabilize it and make it an historical relic. We cannot sit back and let Congress or the courts take care of it. If you don’t smash the Right, it grows. It has no sympathy for us. It takes no prisoners. It cuts our throats. Its objective is the complete annihilation of people like us. They are not playing a game; they’re playing for keeps. The question is, are we?”

In calling for an aggressive organizing strategy, Fletcher was withering in his scorn for the excuses fellow Leftists have come up with for not pursuing one. He recalled being on an interview show with one person who said his objective was not to contest for power, but simply to control the amount of damage the American empire does in the world. “This guy is saying we have no hope of really winning, short of the Big Revolution some far-off day in the future,” Fletcher said. He also attacked the people on the Left who think we should give Obama “more time” instead of taking him on directly, and was particularly scornful of people who think the Internet has eliminated the need for face-to-face organizing.

“We need to be building organizations and real-world projects,” Fletcher said. “The Right understands the tactics of the Left better than we do. During the Obama campaign people thought that all they had to do was send e-mails and Facebook posts. The Right understands that organizing has to be face-to-face, and electronics can only reinforce the basic contact between two people. The Right understands that people need to be mobilized into organizations. The Right knows that people need to be given projects to do. When Congressmembers get e-mails, they don’t pay much attention because they’re used to it. When people show up at their district offices, they take notice.”

Fletcher also ridiculed the fashionable notion that what the Left needs is better wording, pithier slogans, better “framing” — to use the term of art for honing one’s ability to communicate a message. According to Fletcher, we need to challenge the right not only on the basis of sloganeering, language or “framing,” but in terms of the basic narrative of U.S. history and culture. In particular, he said, we have to take on the Right’s beloved myth of “rugged individualism,” the idea that America is a country of people who made it on their own, with little or no help from government or each other.

“The problem is more complicated than language,” Fletcher explained. “We have never been in power. For 300 years this society has promoted a mythology it calls history, and the whole idea of ‘rugged individualism’ is very powerful. Part of our challenge is we have a counter-narrative, an alternative to the myth. We’re saying the myth is flawed and there’s actually a different history” — though Fletcher seemed to assume everyone in his Leftist audience knew what that “different history” was and therefore he didn’t feel he needed to explain it.

One tactic Fletcher said he uses when people start railing against “big government” to his face is to remind them of all the positive things government does that people tend to take for granted. “When they attack ‘big government,’ do they mean student loans?” he said. “Do they mean the Veterans’ Administration? Probably not. Is ‘big government’ the prison-industrial complex, or is it something else? People will use certain words as if there’s a common understanding of what they mean, and we need to confront them on that.”

“In the absence of us coming up with credible means of answering people’s basic questions about why their lives are going to hell and their kids will have a lower standard of living than they do, someone will,” Fletcher said. “If the Right-wing populists’ answers bond with people’s prejudices, there will be consequences. Passivity is criminal. We have a lot to do and we’d better do it.”

Many of the questions Fletcher got after his speech had to deal with the answers he wasn’t supplying. How do you get the fractious world of Left-wing grouplets to bond together and pursue a unified strategy capable of challenging the Right? How does the Left overcome the enormous financial advantages of the Right, and particularly the reach and power of Right-wing media propaganda outlets like talk radio and Fox News? Should we emulate the highly confrontational behavior of Right-wing activists in public meetings and elsewhere — and if so, how much?

Asked about the absence of a Left-wing political infrastructure today as compared to the one in the 1930’s, and also about the role of the labor movement, Fletcher noted that he’d co-written an entire book, Solidarity Divided, about how the labor movement has failed to connect the economic needs of working people with overall issues of social justice. (Fletcher’s last appearance in San Diego, on October 24, 2008, was specifically designed to promote Solidarity Divided. His co-author, UCLA professor Fernando Gapasin, had originally been scheduled to speak with Fletcher last October but had to cancel at the last minute because he was busy fighting an employer’s attempt to get their workers to vote to “decertify” — get rid of — their union.)

“My frustration is hearing people say we don’t have organizations,” Fletcher said. “Then what are we doing to form organizations? There need to be organizations; the question is what each of you are doing, and if you’re not doing anything, you’re part of the problem. I think we have got into a sense that relates to despair, and also we’re victims of the environment that’s created by electronic communities, which can conceal the fact that we’re getting our asses kicked, because on the Internet we can create our own communities. We’ve fallen into a certain kind of self-deluding environment.”

As for the labor movement, Fletcher recalled the anecdote with which he began Solidarity Divided: a meeting in Johannesburg, South Africa in June 2001 between representatives of SEIU and South Africa’s largest labor federation, the Congress of South African Trade Unions (COSATU). The SEIU people said that the job of a labor union is to represent its members. No, said the South African unionists; the role of a union is to represent the working class as a whole — even when that conflicts with the interests of a particular union or the workforce from which it draws its members.

Fletcher went on to say that labor leaders need to realize that, just as the radical populist Right is committed to the utter destruction of Leftists, progressives and liberals as political forces in the U.S., so the capitalist class is committed to the destruction of organized labor as an institution and the whole idea that workers have any rights beyond those the bosses give them. “The problem is that most of the union movement still believes there is a peace with capitalism, and they can regain what they had between the 1950’s and 1970’s,” he said. “What they don’t realize is that there’s a deep-seated hostility within the capitalist class to workers in general and organized labor in particular. As a result, we need a new kind of labor movement that represents the entire working class, not just its own members.”

As he had in his book, Fletcher also strongly advocated that labor unions work beyond their traditional role of organizing workers and representing them in collective bargaining. He supports the so-called “workers’ centers” a few unions tried to organize in individual cities over the last 20 years — indeed, in the book he says the unions should have been more committed to these instead of trying to do them on the cheap and abandoning them before they had a chance to grow — and he also backs the idea of a “social wage” union that organizes workers as workers, regardless of where they work or what they do on the job. “There needs to be a fusion of the social wage movement and organized labor,” Fletcher said. “The social wage movement has a lot of energy, but not much capital.”

At least two audience members used the world “fascism” to describe the possible future direction of the Right-wing populist movement in the U.S. One of them cited author Sara Robinson’s recent posts on the www.ourfuture.org blog to the effect that America is already on the path towards fascism and that the corporate ruling class is supporting and aligning itself with the radical populist Right, as it did in Italy in the 1920’s and Germany in the 1930’s. Fletcher drew back from the F-word, saying that fascism “was a social movement that developed at a particular time” and represents only one form of Right-wing populism.

Fletcher also questioned Robinson’s argument that the corporate and the populist Right are joining forces. “The Right is not monolithic,” he said. “We often think the ruling class treats these Right-wing thugs as instruments they can turn on and off at will. Fascism is a radical movement aimed at clearing out the brush of democracy so a new form of accumulation can emerge, often with a new ruling group. The fascist movements are now out of power, though some elements of the Republican Party are looking opportunistically at these movements. This section of the Right is prepared to engaged in armed as well as unarmed activities, and they don’t expect the Left to stand up to them.”

One point Fletcher made was that on at least one major issue — the government bailout of the financial system that began under the Bush administration and has continued under Obama — the corporate ruling class and the Right-wing populists are on totally opposite sides. For the corporate elite, this was a bottom-line pocketbook issue on which they were not prepared to compromise. For the Right-wing populists, a government bailout of the financial system was as beyond the political and ideological pale as government intervention in health care. Indeed, at some of the town-hall meetings this summer Republican Congressmembers who had voted for the financial bailout were getting the same vicious shout-down treatment as their Democratic colleagues pushing health insurance reform.

Answering an audience member who saw confronting the Right as futile “because there are so many of them, and they have guns,” Fletcher said, “When you see those people at the town halls yelling about ‘death panels’ and they go unanswered, public opinion is affected. When we don’t have the march for national health care as a response to the teabaggers, people will start to listen to the teabaggers even if they’re wrong. The flat tax is so appealing even my mother was trying to convince me that it made sense. There were a lot of things she wasn’t thinking of. None of us have the resources to build an alternative to Fox News. But we can find other means to communicate. We need to re-tool Pacifica Radio. We need to find new ways of using the Web. We have to take these guys on. I’m not talking about bringing weapons to events, but there are ways to confront the Right that are very empowering for us.”

Fletcher summed up his message in answer to a question from San Diego Democratic Socialists of America (DSA) chair Herb Shore on the clash between single-issue organizing and trying to build actual socialist organizations. Fletcher said bluntly that an exclusive focus on single-issue campaigns is defeatist. “We don’t think strategically,” he said. “We’re not willing to throw the dice in terms of what it would take us to grow, and how much we can do to promote visibility. We’re reactive; we respond to what the enemy does to us instead of pursuing our own ideas and goals. I’m tired of losing. I want to win. I feel we have to fight for power. I believe we have no choice. You can be the strongest boxer in the world, but if you remain on the defensive, you will lose. We’re very courageous and have great activists, but we’ve been fighting so many resistance battles, we’ve forgotten how to organize to win.”

Blase Bonpane Speaks on Honduras Coup

Details U.S.’s Long Line of Abuses Against Latin America

by MARK GABRISH CONLAN

Copyright © 2009 by Mark Gabrish Conlan for Zenger’s Newsmagazine • All rights reserved

Not everyone who’s invited to give a lecture begins it by singing a song. But that’s what Blase Bonpane did at the start of his talk on the recent military coup in Honduras and U.S. relations towards Latin America in general at the First Unitarian-Universalist Church in Hillcrest September 8. Bonpane, a former Maryknoll missionary and professor at the University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA) and California State University, Northridge, currently directs a grass-roots organization called the Office of the Americas — its name a pun on the notorious School of the Americas at Fort Benning, Georgia, at which the U.S. trains leaders of Latin American militaries in repression, torture and subverting democracy. (After a decades-long campaign by activists, including Bonpane, demanding the closure of the School of the Americas, the U.S. government changed its name to Western Hemisphere Institute for Security Cooperation.)

The song Bonpane sang was “Last Night I Had the Strangest Dream,” an old folk hymn in which the “strangest dream” is that the leaders of all the nations in the world gathered together and signed a treaty “to put the end to war.” He said he first heard the song in 1965, at a demonstration outside the White House calling for an end to the Viet Nam war — at a time when that was a highly radical and dangerous position. He’s been a peace activist ever since, specializing in Central and South America ever since the government of Guatemala expelled him in 1967 for attempting to organize the peasants to challenge the authority of big landowners and the country’s establishment in general.

Once the singing stopped, Bonpane reviewed the U.S. history of intervention in Honduras, and Latin America in general. “In 1903 the U.S. Marines invaded Honduras to protect business interests,” he noted. “In 19067 a Nicaraguan president named Zelaya [the same name as the Honduran president recently deposed by his country’s military] tried to bring in Japanese interests to put a canal across his country [to compete with the U.S.-owned Panama Canal] and we overthrew him and invaded Honduras to use it as a staging ground. In 1912 the U.S. invaded Honduras again and put a mercenary leader in charge of the Honduran military. In 1919 we intervened to affect the results of an election, and in 1924-25 we did it again.”

More recently, Bonpane said, the Reagan administration used Honduras as a training center and base camp for the Right-wing contra rebels against the Sandinista government of Nicaragua (as the Eisenhower and Kennedy administrations had trained the anti-Castro Bay of Pigs fighters in Honduras over 20 years before). The contras, Bonpane said, were ordered “not to attack the Nicaraguan military, but to attack schools and hospitals. In the 1980’s the U.S. spent $2 billion to support the contras, much of it from under-the-table arms sales to Iran, and moved 75,000 troops into Honduras. We are still there today. All Honduran military officers above the rank of captain are trained at the School of the Americas.”

Bonpane said he could identify with deposed Honduran president Miguel Zelaya because he too had an experience with the Honduran military that showed its unveiled contempt for the country’s civilian government. It happened in the mid-1980’s, when he was leading a march across Central America to protest U.S. support for the contras. “The Honduran foreign minister gave us permission to cross into Honduras,” Bonpane recalled. “But the military officers stopped us at the border, and when I told them the foreign minister had given us permission to cross and showed them the foreign minister’s letter, the officers said, ‘We don’t give a damn what the foreign minister says. We’re the military!’”

And, Bonpane added, we shouldn’t think that the U.S. president is any more secure in his office, or has any more real power over the U.S. military, than his counterparts in Latin America. He said that when John F. Kennedy became president and found out about the planning for the Bay of Pigs invasion of Cuba, “he was somewhat shocked … to get the information that things were being done that he didn’t know about. He said he was going to break the CIA into a thousand pieces — and he didn’t live very long after that.” More recently, he said that Venezuelan president Hugo Chávez — the leader the U.S. currently considers the fount of everything evil in Central and South America — met President Obama at the Organization of American States (OAS) summit in Trinidad-Tobago, “Chávez’s last question to Obama was, ‘Are you a prisoner?’”

Chávez ought to know. He himself was the victim of an attempted coup in 2002 by Venezuelan military officers, opposition politicians and corporate leaders anxious to get rid of him and restore Venezuela’s traditional elites to power. Like Zelaya, Chávez was forced to fly out of the country — only he returned two days later after his palace guard, backed by mass public demonstrations against the coup, pushed back the rest of the Venezuelan military and got him back in the country. The 2002 coup against Chávez was immediately supported by the U.S. — the Bush administration recognized the coup government, something no other country in the world did — and though Obama’s reaction to the Honduras coup has been more uncertain and vacillating, he’s sure that the coup couldn’t have happened without assurances of U.S. support.

Once upon a time, the U.S. could count on the OAS — which is headquartered in Washington, D.C. — to be its puppet. In 1962, at the insistence of the U.S., the OAS expelled Cuba from membership — a decision reversed only last June, on the motion of Honduran president Zelaya three months before he was thrown out of office. (Cuba chose not to rejoin.) When Zelaya was overthrown, Bonpane said, “The OAS made a unanimous motion to condemn the coup.” Then the vacillation began; instead of demanding that the Honduran military and the rump president they had installed, congressional leader Roberto Micheletti, give up power and allow Zelaya’s return immediately, the U.S. asked Costa Rican president Roberto Arias to “mediate” the situation. According to Bonpane, asking Arias to “mediate” the Honduran coup is like asking someone to “mediate” between the person whose car has just been stolen and the thief.

Bonpane pointed out that Obama was even reluctant to call the coup in Honduras a coup. The reason, he explained, is that U.S. law requires that U.S. financial aid be cut off immediately to any country where a coup has replaced a democratically elected government. “There were two military coups last year in countries receiving money from us; Madagascar and Mauritania,” Bonpane said. “In both cases, the U.S. cut off the money within days.” In Honduras, by contrast, the U.S. pulled its $32 million per year in aid only after the International Monetary Fund (IMF) had authorized over $160 million in immediate credits for Honduras — and that, too, he argued, is something that, given the IMF’s dependence on U.S. administration and funding, also couldn’t have happened without the U.S. government’s O.K.

According to Bonpane, the U.S.’s consistent unwillingness to support Latin American democracies against military coups stems from two factors: this country’s belief that it is above international law, and the extent to which the military has taken over. “We’ve gone from a president we thought was stupid to one we thought was smart — and the same policies continue,” he said. He also noted that the open repression being practiced by the military in Colombia against not only guerrilla groups and drug cartels but union leaders and nonviolent activists, called “Plan Colombia” and imposed and financed by the U.S., is being upheld as a model for what the U.S. military should be doing to “win” the war in Afghanistan.

“I think there’s a certain psychosis when you’re dealing with power,” Bonpane said. “Power doesn’t use logic; it believes in its own divine right. Imperialism says we do what we want. Every country in Latin America where we slaughtered people has chosen the other way” — a reference to the electoral victories of Leftist parties in Nicaragua, El Salvador and Guatemala. He added that Zelaya was overthrown by his military just when he was about to seek an increase in the Honduran minimum wage.

“The U.S. policy on Latin America has been the same since the Monroe Doctrine,” Bonpane said. “But there is a change now on Honduras. Many delegations are going to Honduras, and what we at the Office of Americas have done is try to turn things over. We started the delegations in the 1980’s, and Noam Chomsky said it was an innovation: we invited people to see a war in progress. It had an impact. It didn’t keep 400,000 Nicaraguans from being slaughtered, but the Sandinistas are back in power today.” Bonpane also ridiculed the notion that the coup in Honduras has been “bloodless.” “People are getting killed,” he said. “It is a dictatorship. Zelaya has to be let back in to serve the last two months of his term, but the coup has to be denounced and the Honduran people are entitled to have a new election in November without the military in control.”

According to Bonpane, the reason the coup against Zelaya took place now, with only a few months left to go in his term, was that he had taken Honduras into the Bolivarian Alternative for the Americas (ALBA), a multi-country organization formed by Hugo Chávez and his government in Venezuela and including the Leftist governments in Bolivia and Ecuador as well as Cuba. “The amazing thing about ALBA is that there is no one ideology,” Bonpane said. “They all have a different perspective, but they are all people-focused. In Latin America you usually had oligarchies. That changed due to direct action by the people. When Bechtel went into Bolivia at the invitation of the former government and tried to privatize Bolivia’s water, they threw Bechtel out and said water is a human right.”

What most frightens America about ALBA, Bonpane argued, is that it not only gives Latin American countries an option to avoid allying themselves with the U.S. and letting the U.S. train their militaries, it also plans to start its own multi-country regional bank and give its member countries access to credit that isn’t controlled by the U.S. and American-based multinational banks. This would break the hold the U.S. has had over Latin American economies through the IMF and the World Bank, and allow Latin America a greater share of the income from its natural resources like oil and copper — which Leftist governments like Chávez’s in Venezuela and Evo Morales’s in Bolivia can then use to help lift ordinary people out of poverty.

But what impresses Bonpane about the grass-roots movements that have helped put the ALBA presidents in power is not only their successes in Latin America but the example they provide for U.S. activists. “I was in Riobamba, Ecuador not long ago, and the Qichua people were meeting there and took over,” he said. “The archbishop got up to speak, and within one minute an indigenous speaker got up and turned him out. They have thrown out three presidents in 10 years. They’re giving us an example of participatory and economic democracy.”

Indeed, Bonpane argued that participatory democracy is the wave of the future — and the representative republic we’re used to merely a veiled way to keep an oligarchy in power. “Representative democracy was designed by people who could read to keep power over people who couldn’t,” he said. “In Los Angeles today, there are a handful of billionaires and a lot of people working three jobs to make ends meet. Honduras wouldn’t have had a coup if the leaders of corporations like United Fruit hadn’t approved. They have influence 500 times that of ordinary people, and now the U.S. Supreme Court is about to give corporations even more freedom of speech and more freedom to control political candidates. We have to watch to make sure they don’t turn over the whole government to the corporate sector.”

Bonpane also spoke about a subject all too many American progressives ignore: the sweeping influence of Right-wing talk radio and the way it’s become an instrument not only to fight any remotely progressive policies but to mobilize millions of Americans to defend the corporations’ interest against their own. “The Rush Limbaughs don’t say one word without the approval of their sponsors,” Bonpane said. “Until we understand that, we won’t realize that the racist cruelty of talk radio is the voice of the corporate world, and they’ve brought that into a sadomasochistic world view that poses as religion.”

Bonpane’s criticism seems to echo a recent essay by Henry A. Giroux at http://www.truthout.org/090209R?n. Called “Living in a Culture of Cruelty: Democracy as Spectacle,” Giroux’s article argues that not only political talk radio but entertainment media as well have come together to sell the American people a “tough” world view that supports “overt racism, hostility towards immigrants and utter disdain, coupled with the threat of mob violence, toward any political figure supportive of the social contract and the welfare state.”

“A mean-spirited society doesn’t have a future,” Bonpane said, citing some of the same statistics Giroux did in his article — including the fact that the U.S., with six percent of the world’s population, has 25 percent of the world’s prisoners, and at least half of our prison population is there for nonviolent drug offenses. He noted that Colombia, hailed in the U.S. media as the Latin American country that has been spared the Leftist trend of the rest of the region, has become a mirror image of our bitterness and hatred — and now we’re trying to market “Plan Colombia” as a way to suppress insurgencies in the rest of the world and “win” the war in Afghanistan. Bonpane also said the assurances of Obama’s generals that with additional troops they can “win” the Afghan war are all too chillingly parallel to the assurances that America’s commander in Viet Nam, William Westmoreland, gave President Johnson that with more troops he could “win” that war as well.

R.I.P. Ted Kennedy: The Senate’s Last Liberal

by MARK GABRISH CONLAN

Copyright © 2009 by Mark Gabrish Conlan for Zenger’s Newsmagazine • All rights reserved

Ted Kennedy’s brothers went out in flames: Joseph P. Kennedy, Jr. literally when an explosive-laden plane he was flying in World War II blew up in mid-air; President John F. Kennedy and Senator Robert Kennedy shot by assassins (almost certainly more than one in each case!). Ted himself lingered on, winning the Senate seat from Massachusetts John had formerly held in 1962 and staying in it for 47 years — longer than any of his brothers actually lived. He came into power as the young, irresponsible kid riding in on his brother John’s coattails — “And Teddy Makes Three,” read the headline on the Life magazine cover — and stayed there long enough to become an Elder Statesman, a sort of Strom Thurmond on the other ideological side, a living storehouse of institutional memory and essentially the Senate’s last liberal in an era in which the Right-wing propaganda machine has dumped the term “liberal” on the same scrap heap of opprobrium to which they previously consigned “communist” and “socialist.”

The obituaries predictably hailed Ted Kennedy for his ability to compromise; both his willingness and his skill at reaching out to Republicans and finding some degree of common ground in passing bills on immigration, health care, education, civil rights and other issues. What the obit writers only grudgingly hinted at — with their comments about how politics in general and the U.S. Senate in particular have become more “polarized” since Teddy’s heyday in the 1970’s and 1980’s — is that Teddy’s successes were possible only in a different political climate with a very different balance between the major parties and different expectations not only from the American people but from the corporate ruling class on what they wanted and needed from government.

In a peculiar fashion, Ted Kennedy’s death bookends Michael Jackson’s two months earlier. In the early 1980’s Jackson’s album Thriller became the last music phenomenon that crossed genre walls and sold to just about everyone who knew and cared about popular music. Since then the walls have grown higher; today top-selling albums, movies and other mass entertainments are keyed so specifically to market niches that they can make lots of money selling to specific market niches even if everybody else can’t stand them. In a way, Kennedy’s style of politics is as much a throwback as Michael Jackson’s music — to a time in which both major U.S. political parties were united by a conception of government as a force for the public good.

For some time I’ve been playing with a particular bit of analysis about the connection between media technologies and not only popular culture but politics as well. In the first half of the 20th centuries, the new media technologies were mass in nature. Large-circulation newspapers and magazines, phonograph records, motion pictures, radio and television offered identical messages simultaneously to millions of people. As a result, I would argue, people thought of themselves in mass terms, and the major political movements of the first half of the 20th century — fascism on the Right, socialism and communism on the Left — were therefore collectivist.

Things changed, I would argue in this analysis, with the introduction of the transistor radio in 1959. Throughout the second half of the 20th century and into the 21st, the new media technologies have increasingly been individual in scale. Transistor radios, Walkmans, cable TV, specialty publications and now the Internet have increasingly salami-sliced the mass audience. “Narrowcasting” has replaced broadcasting. Like the music scene in the post-transistor, post-Walkman, iPod world, politics too has become a “narrowcasting” activity. Campaigns aim not at maximizing the total number of people who vote but at changing the balance of an election through encouraging their supporters to turn out while not only ignoring opponents but actively discouraging them to vote at all. And instead of the collectivist political movements that ruled the extreme Right and Left in the first half of the 20th century, the major movements in the second half of the 20th, and now in the 21st, century have been individualistic: libertarianism on the Right and anarchism on the Left.

The new “narrowcasting” politics aims, like the “narrowcasting” culture, not at persuading the “masses” — the very word seems horrendously out of date — but at tailoring the message to reach individuals on a one-to-one level. “Narrowcasting” gives an audience the power to freeze out any competing messages, so nothing that might challenge their preconceptions has a chance to get through. With vastly more access to money, air time and other resources — not surprisingly, since capitalists will always far more lavishly support those who support them than those who challenge their legitimacy — the Right has had far more success in the era of narrowcast politics than the Left. They have built up a huge network of talk radio, cable TV, specialty publications and other media that endlessly repeat the message not only that America should be a Right-wing country but that anyone who disagrees is part of some grand conspiracy to destroy this nation and everything good, true and beautiful it stands for. What’s more, they’re able to use their own media to tell their followers over and over again that theirs are the only sources to be trusted; the rest of the corporate media are “liberal,” “Left-wing,” “drive-by,” “state-controlled” and so on.

The narrowcasting of politics in a narrowcast media age has been accompanied by a slow and steady rise of influence in what used to be called the extreme Right in the U.S. In the 1930’s these people were a group of anti-New Deal, anti-Semitic kvetches who weren’t taken seriously by that many people, especially when the U.S. government went after them during World War II for their openly expressed Axis sympathies. But they recovered and expanded after the war, when the Soviet Union became America’s new enemy and they could claim to have been right all along that communism, not fascism, was the true demon that would destroy the U.S if we did not maintain our vigilance. The extreme Right in the U.S. suffered another blow when its first national spokesperson in elective office, Senator Joe McCarthy, was disgraced and censured by his fellow Senators in 1954 — but it recovered strongly enough to win one of its own, Barry Goldwater, the Republican Presidential nomination in 1964.

Goldwater’s landslide defeat in that election, which seemingly put an end to the extreme Right, was in fact just another temporary setback from which they recovered. Four years later, Richard Nixon won the presidency by cutting a deal with Strom Thurmond that turned the Republicans from the “party of Lincoln” into the party of dead-end opposition to civil rights. Between them, Nixon and George Wallace, whose independent third-party candidacy in 1968 was what motivated Nixon to cut his deal with Thurmond in the first place, won 57 percent of the vote in the 1968 presidential election to Hubert Humphrey’s 43 percent, signaling the ascent of an enduring Right-wing majority in U.S. politics. From 1968 to 2008, the Republicans have won seven out of 11 presidential elections — and the ones they lost look more and more like flukes, opportunities created by political scandals or economic collapses which the Democrats were able to seize on to gain power but not to do anything that would change America’s increasingly Right-wing orientation.

As a result, we have moved from a country in which both major parties accepted the idea of government as a force for the public good — no matter how much they may have disagreed on who “the public” was or what “good” meant or what policies the government should pursue on its behalf — to one in which one major party rejects the idea of democratic governance at all. It’s not just in the U.S. that the Right has turned from “conservatism” — a word which has the same root as “conservation” and implies that there are traditions and social obligations which should not be thrown away lightly — to radical individualism. It was not an American but Margaret Thatcher, whose tenure as prime minister of Britain mostly overlapped the U.S. presidency of Ronald Reagan, who succinctly summed up the basic philosophy of the new Right when she said, “There is no such thing as ‘society.’ There are only individuals.”

Ted Kennedy did more than outlive his brothers physically; he also outlived the historical moment for their kind of politics. The idea of reaching across the aisle to see if you could find common cause with someone in the other party and give them something of what they wanted from government in exchange for something you wanted from government made sense when there were people on the other side of the aisle who actually wanted things from government besides national defense and security. Today’s Right wants nothing from government but a strong military budget, giant giveaways of tax dollars to the rich — both in tax cuts skewed towards wealthy individuals and in sweetheart contracts for giant corporations — and a strong role in policing individual and public morality, a sop to the social Right that sits oddly next to an agenda for total lassiez-faire and a worship of “The Market” in economic policy.

The essence of Kennedy-style politics — what John, Robert and Ted all believed in and pushed for, within the limits imposed on them by a capitalist economic structure and the politics it generates — was that we’re all in this together. A society doesn’t survive and hang together totally from the welfare of its most affluent members; rather, those who have grown up with wealth and privilege (including the Kennedys themselves) have an obligation to those who have not to ensure the health, safety, security and well-being of all. It’s a notion with a long and honorable (and surprisingly bipartisan!) tradition in our politics — from the early Democrats of Thomas Jefferson (despite the asterisks he and his fellow Virginia aristocrats put on it that it didn’t cover Indians and Blacks) to the early Republicans of Abraham Lincoln to the progressive policies of both the Republican and the Democratic Roosevelts — but, despite Barack Obama’s evocations of it in his successful Presidential campaign, it’s looking decidedly out of date in this age of narrowcasting and the enshrinement of the belief that “there is no such thing as ‘society’; there are only individuals.”

I suspect the reason Ted Kennedy endorsed Barack Obama for President early on — when the rest of the Democratic establishment was coming out en masse for Hillary Clinton — was that Obama’s 2008 campaign reminded him of John Kennedy’s in 1960. In both cases you had a young, relatively inexperienced U.S. Senator coming out of almost nowhere and galvanizing voters, especially youthful voters, with vague promises of “change.” The similarities don’t end there, either; like Obama, JFK governed a lot more moderately than he’d promised in the campaign, left key officials from the previous administration and figures from the other major party in positions of power, got the country involved in major wars in Third World countries and found their legislative programs mired in Congress after Right-wingers mobilized to block them. (Ironically, JFK’s murder saved his legacy; within two years Lyndon Johnson, a far better politician in terms of working with — or pressuring — Congress, had passed most of the big bills, including the Civil Rights Act, that had been stuck in the process when Kennedy was killed.)

But in many ways Obama’s problems run far deeper than Kennedy’s. Kennedy took office at a time when the U.S. was still basically a liberal country, and when the eastern business establishment still ran the Republican party and differentiated itself from the Right-wing crazies organizing what became the 1964 Goldwater campaign. Today the eastern business establishment has been exiled by the Republican party — it depends mostly on money from the South and Sun Belt — and has adopted the Democratic party instead. In Kennedy’s time Nelson Rockefeller was the personification of both the eastern corporate establishment and of moderate Republicanism — and incidentally the rich person the radical Right loved to hate, the one they considered a “class traitor” the way they’d thought of Franklin Roosevelt before him and think of George Soros now. Today the most prominent Rockefeller in U.S. politics is a Democrat.

Obama is president of a profoundly Right-wing country. Even though polls still show striking levels of support for “liberal” policy ideas — in the current health debate, not only the so-called “public option” but even a single-payer plan that would do away with private health insurance altogether enjoy surprisingly high poll ratings — it is the Right that is mobilized and energized in the current debate. It is the Right that has the combination of corporate, political and media infrastructures to control the terms of political debate in this country and continually force liberals and progressives to play catch-up. It’s an indication of how totally the time for Ted Kennedy’s style of deal-making had passed that in 2001, when he cut his last big bipartisan deal — getting Democrats to vote for George W. Bush’s “No Child Left Behind” Act, which imposed strict new standards on public schools and allowed the government to make sweeping declarations that schools whose students hadn’t pushed up their test scores by certain percentages had “failed,” in exchange for major increases in federal funding to give schools a fighting chance to meet the new standards — he got rolled. The standards happened, the funding didn’t, and the outcome revealed the real purpose of “No Child Left Behind” — to discredit public education as an institution and prepare the way for vouchers and ultimately the total privatization of the education system.

I’m not saying that a progressive revival in the U.S. is impossible, but it will have to take a much different form than looking nostalgically back to the time of the Kennedys — or the Roosevelts — and hoping that a mass constituency can be built for liberal (let alone radical!) social change without a coherent strategy to take on the massive power of the radical Right. The mainstream media — the center-Right corporate media of the major networks and newspapers, as opposed to the radical-Right media of talk radio and Fox News — are reporting Ted Kennedy’s death as the loss of a great statesman. To the Left, it should be the loss of something else: of the illusion that electing a great politician — a Roosevelt, a Kennedy, a Clinton, an Obama — will automatically solve all our problems.

In addition to its far greater financial and media resources, the Right has another great advantage over the Left: they are much better at holding their politicians accountable and threatening to withdraw their support if the politicians compromise the principles on which they got elected. The Right-wing crowds mobilized to attend town-hall meetings with their Congressmembers didn’t just go after Democrats; they also yelled and swore at Republicans who voted for the bailout of the financial industry and otherwise went against the lassiez-faire “line” of the new Right. Instead of asking why Obama has betrayed virtually every promise he made to the Left in the campaign, we should be asking ourselves what we are prepared to do to confront him and end this bizarre double standard by which Right-wing U.S. politicians are praised as being “principled” when they refuse to compromise — while liberal and progressive ones are called “unrealistic” and “irresponsible” when they actually stand up for what they said they believed in when they ran for office in the first place.

Queer Democrats Honor Women’s Equality Day

Question Proposal to Impose Term Limits on County Supervisors

by MARK GABRISH CONLAN

Copyright © 2009 by Mark Gabrish Conlan for Zenger’s Newsmagazine • All rights reserved

PHOTOS, top to bottom: Assemblymember Lori Saldaña presents the San Diego Democratic Club with a proclamation honoring Women’s Equality Day at the club’s August 27 meeting. L to R: former club president Gloria Johnson, current club president Larry Baza, club women’s caucus chair Kate Lyon, Assemblymember Saldaña, California NOW president Patty Bellasalma and Congressional candidate Francine Busby.

The Women’s Equality panel: Patty Bellasalma, Francine Busby, Lori Saldaña.

San Diego Democratic Club women’s caucus chair Kate Lyon.

Union representative Jacob Regalado promoting term limits for the San Diego County Board of Supervisors.

Assembly candidate Crystal Crawford.

Former San Diego Democratic Club president Gloria Johnson paid tribute to the memory of Senator Edward Kennedy by carrying her 1980 Kennedy for President hat and banner, which she wore on the floor of that year’s Democratic convention as an openly Lesbian delegate.

The predominantly Queer San Diego Democratic Club gave over most of its August 27 meeting to a presentation honoring Women’s Equality Day — the August 26 anniversary of the passage of the 19th Amendment to the U.S. Constitution, which gave women the right to vote nationwide. Hosted by Kate Lyon, the chair of the club’s women’s caucus, the panel also featured Patty Bellasalma, president of the California NOW (National Organization for Women); Francine Busby, North County Congressional candidate; and Lori Saldaña, California State Assemblymember and longtime environmental activist.

Lyon began the presentation with a brief history of American feminism. “In July 1848, Elizabeth Cady Stanton and Lucretia Mott led the convention in Seneca Falls, New York that articulated the rights of women,” she explained. “At the time, women had virtually no rights at all. They became legally dead when they married. They had no right to property, voting or education, and their husbands had the legal right to beat or rape them. The organized movement for women’s suffrage started a century and a half ago with a small group of people. Challenging the status quo, women protested in public — and were ridiculed and arrested for demanding basic rights.”

According to Lyon, like the Queer activists of our own time, the pioneering feminists were accused of making demands that would destroy the family and all traditional morality. “The efforts of women to win the right not to be beaten by their husbands have been accused of ‘demeaning motherhood,’” she said. “But they are working for all women. The early women’s rights activists worked hard to bring us choices. On Women’s Equality Day we look at how far we’ve come, but the U.S. is near the bottom worldwide on child support for working women — and our right to abortion is under constant attack, including terrorist attacks on clinics and the murder of doctors. We must renew our efforts for all women.”

Bellasalma, a former private-practice attorney who won a major case on race-based employment discrimination against the city of Los Angeles and worked on the unsuccessful campaign against Proposition 209, which banned affirmative action in California state employment and college admissions, began her talk with the “two priorities” of California NOW and the state’s women’s movement in general. One is winning marriage equality for same-sex couples. As she explained, the women’s movement has a broader concern with the California Supreme Court decision upholding Proposition 8, last year’s initiative banning legal recognition of same-sex marriages in California. Her group wants an initiative that doesn’t just repeal Proposition 8, but “protects the equal protection clause of California’s constitution from modification by simple majorities.”

The other major priority, she ruefully acknowledged, is “the perpetual: reproductive rights.” Bellasalma mentioned that the Orange County Board of Supervisors — which, like San Diego County’s, consists of five white Republicans — has implemented the gag rule countywide.” What they’ve done is forbidden any hospital, clinic or other medical facility that receives state or county money from mentioning abortion or birth control to their patients — meaning that any health provider that wants to talk about, let alone actually offer, such services has to do so through a separate organization in a separate building. The fight against the local gag rule will be “long and hard,” Bellasalma said. “We’ll be doing everything we can to get our state legislature to fix it.”

Bellasalma predicted that Orange County’s unilateral imposition of a local gag rule “is coming to a county and city near you,” and tied it in with the current effort in Congress to ban all taxpayer funding for women’s reproductive services as part of the health insurance “reform” — which could leave many women with less access to birth control or abortion than they have now. She said women are already being discriminated against in health coverage. “Women pay 40 percent more than men for individual health insurance,” she said, “and on top of that we’re charged extra for pregnancy and maternity services because for some reason we can’t share pregnancy and maternity with men — but we can share costs for Viagra and Cialis with men.”

Weighing in on the continuing controversy over whether the Queer community and its allies should try to repeal Proposition 8 in 2010 or 2012, Bellasalma was unequivocal: “2010 is out of the question if you want to win,” she said. “It’s already a year too late to have an organization on the ground.” She argued that because the California Supreme Court decision upholding Proposition 8 threatens all traditionally oppressed groups — since it means that all rights guaranteed by the equal protection provisions of the state constitution are fair game whenever a sufficiently willful and effective group puts an initiative on the ballot to take them away — there’s an opportunity to reach out to communities of color and others who disproportionately supported Proposition 8 but whose rights are threatened by the court opinion upholding it. “We can create a coalition that will last for decades — if we get it right,” she said.

Busby, who filled in at the last minute for Alex Rooker, female vice-chair of the California Democratic Party — who canceled due to the recent death of her mother — read a report from the party’s women’s caucus president, Karen Weinstein. Much of it addressed the problem of electing women to public office — which, as both Busby and Saldaña explained, often means persuading them to overcome their reluctance to run in the first place. “Women have a higher proportion of representatives in the congress of Rwanda than anywhere else, including the U.S.,” Busby said. “Many countries have quotas within their political parties guaranteeing that a certain percentage of their candidates will be women.”

According to Busby, only 17 percent of the U.S. Congress is female — mainly, she explained, because Congress has no term limits and therefore there’s little turnover that would create open seats in which women could win. She noted the grim irony that the U.S.-mandated constitution for Iraq requires that 25 percent of its legislature be women — something that would never be tolerated in this country. Asked by an audience member how to get more women, especially young women, interested in politics, Busby said, “You have to make it real for them. When I first ran for Congress, I was just an ordinary person, no different from you. People need role models. If they don’t see people they know [running for office], they won’t do it. Also, women don’t run if they’re not asked. We need to plant the seed that says we deserve to be there.”

“Men don’t even think about that,” Bellasalma said. “Competency is not part of the list of things they consider before they go after a job. There’s a certain kind of innate self-confidence that comes from being raised male, which we have to inculcate in our daughters. We have to find other ways of networking and mentoring.”

“Campaigning is about feeling confident and strong, and asking for money,” added Saldaña, the only person on the panel who has actually won elective office. “A lot of women aren’t raised to be comfortable about doing those things.” Mentioning former eBay CEO Meg Whitman and former Hewlett-Packard CEO Carly Fiorina — who are seeking the 2010 Republican nominations for Governor of California and U.S. Senate, respectively — Saldaña said they are “very confident, did well in business and have a lot of money. My Republican women colleagues in the state legislature, with only one exception — Connie Conway — got there by being rich, and they don’t have any problems exerting the power that comes with personal wealth.”

Saldaña also discussed her work with the women’s caucus in the California legislature — “the largest caucus and also the only bipartisan one,” she explained. Among the issues they’ve dealt with are the rights of women in the U.S. military. “At least 50 percent of women in the U.S. military are harassed,” she said, adding that the “don’t ask, don’t tell” policy that prohibits Queer people from serving openly in the military gives male harassers a powerful tool to blackmail women into having sex with them. “If a woman in the military doesn’t have sex with a man, he can threaten to report her as a Lesbian and get her kicked out,” she explained. “In countries where Gay and Lesbian people are able to serve openly, a much lower percentage of military women are harassed.”

After the discussion on women’s equality and in particular on getting more women to run for office, the club put its money — and its volunteer time — where its panelists’ mouths had been by endorsing a Democratic woman against a Republican man in a state legislative race. Del Mar City Councilmember Crystal Crawford got the club’s full support for her race against Republican incumbent Martin Garrick by an overwhelming margin — 26 in favor to one opposed and three abstentions — despite concerns from club legislative advocate Matt Corrales about her use of the words “choice” and “preference” to describe sexual orientation, even though she said that Queer people “deserve to be treated with full equality.”

Supervisors’ Term Limits Controversial

The club also considered an initiative sponsored by the San Diego local of the Service Employees’ International Union (SEIU) to impose term limits on the San Diego County Board of Supervisors — but they delayed a decision on that measure for one month after several members were uncomfortable with endorsing a term limit when the club has always opposed them for other offices. According to SEIU spokesperson Jacob Regalado, who came to present the case for the initiative, the composition of the Board of Supervisors has remained the same since 1998, and no Democrat has served on the board since Leon Williams retired in 1994. What’s more, he added, the overall low profile of the office and the $1.5 million slush fund in taxpayers’ money controlled by each Supervisor has made it nearly impossible to defeat any of them at the polls.

“We have a Board of Supervisors that doesn’t reflect our community or our county,” Regalado explained. “We continually have to file lawsuits against them. We have the smallest food stamp program in the state. The San Diego Supervisors are the fourth highest-paid of all Supervisors in California, and their chief administrator, Walt Becker, is the second highest-paid in the country. Meanwhile, the wages of our members are near the bottom of the state and national averages.” Regalado also said that, unlike the San Diego City Council or (after last year’s election) the California state legislature, the Supervisors have final control over the design of their own districts — another weapon they’ve wielded effectively to deny challengers the ability to turn them out of office.

But while most of the club members agreed with Regalado’s critique of the Board of Supervisors, many weren’t convinced that term limits were the right solution. “We haven’t had any good people running against these horrible people,” said club activist and city workers’ union leader Michelle Krug. “This year, we have a chance to put good people in two of those districts, and I don’t want to handcuff them by subjecting them to a term limit.”

Club member Harold Wayne, who’s an announced candidate for the District 6 seat on the San Diego City Council to replace Donna Frye — who’s being forced out by term limits — asked why SEIU hadn’t done an initiative to take away the Supervisors’ power to draw their own districts rather than one for term limits. Regalado replied that this would require an amendment to the county charter, “and that would be a long process” — but Wayne noted that imposing term limits would also require amending the charter. Regalado also questioned whether “you could actually draw progressive districts” in the County of San Diego.

Lori Saldaña, who was there to speak as part of the women’s equality panel but is also planning a run against Supervisor Ron Roberts now that she’s being forced out of the state legislature due to term limits, urged the club to delay the decision. “I would recommend that a more thorough discussion take place,” she said. Both Saldaña and longtime club activist Elaine Graybill said that term limits had reduced the effectiveness of the California state legislature, and they wanted the club to deliberate longer before committing to support a term-limits initiative for the Board of Supervisors.

Club fundraiser and San Diego Pride at Work chapter co-chair Carlos Marquez called the comparison between the Board of Supervisors and the state legislature “apples and oranges,” mainly because the legislature is a larger body and its members don’t have the individual control over large chunks of tax money the way the Supervisors do. He also said that SEIU had already started gathering signatures for the initiative and wanted the club on board immediately to contribute both money and volunteers.

“Be careful, be very careful,” said veteran women’s and progressive activist Benita Berkson. “This is not typically a liberal cause. If you put effort into this, you could be sorry with what you come up with. You could wind up with no power and no continuity on the Board of Supervisors. I strongly recommend this issue be tabled for another time.”

Youth activist Jonathan Goetz supported the initiative. “I don’t care for term limits, but we have a county board of five white Republicans who don’t believe in social services, who think social services are morally wrong, and their job is to run social services,” he said. “I want to get rid of every single one of them.”

But, as Regalado had explained during his presentation, even passing the term-limits initiative wouldn’t necessarily get rid of them immediately. The current Supervisors would have the right to serve up to two more terms beyond the 20-plus years they’ve already been in the office. What’s more, there’s nothing in the initiative that would prevent the Supervisors from making so-called “legacy appointments” — resigning a year or so before their terms were up and appointing a new Supervisor who could then run as an incumbent. The Supervisors recently did this when county sheriff Bill Kolender decided to retire, and instead of serving out his term Kolender resigned a year early so his deputy, William Gore, could be appointed in his stead and run as an incumbent in 2010.

Eventually former club presidents Jeri Dilno and Gloria Johnson made a motion to table the decision on whether to endorse term limits for the San Diego County Board of Supervisors until the club’s September 23 meeting. The motion to table passed, 24 to 16 — and one of the members who voted against delaying the decision said he did so because “I want to vote it down tonight.”