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Senate Bill 1965 was born on February 1, 2010 in the Oklahoma State Senate to Senator Harry Coates.  It passed from this life around April 4, 2010 in the House Judiciary Committee with numerous family members by its side.

The Oklahoma State Senate in session. (Photo by Becky J. McCray/Flickr, used under Creative Commons 2.0)

Senate Bill “SB” 1965 entered the world as an Open Meetings and Records Act, filled with hope for providing transparency in government and the freeing of information.  Showing great potential, “SB” was quickly enrolled in the Senate Education Committee where it excelled in athletics, maturing into an “An Act relating to schools; creating the Task Force on the Oklahoma Secondary School Activities Association.”  With a bright future before it, SB 1965 graduated, eagerly looking forward to life after education.

However, this new life proved difficult for SB 1965.  Shortly after graduation, it entered into a period of turmoil where it questioned its identity and future.  “SB” was taken in by Senator Steve Russell, a quixotic former military commander who longed to joust the menacing windmills of Federal hate crimes legislation.  With his own child, Senate Bill 2165, dying an agonizing death in the Senate Judiciary Committee, Russell convinced SB 1965 to give up its promising athletic career and join his dubious quest to protect freedom of religion and speech for privileged, straight, peoples.  Looking more and more like Russell’s now deceased bill, SB 1965 emerged from its midlife crisis set on perpetuating injustice in Oklahoma.*

Yet it was in this new chapter of life in the Oklahoma House of Representatives that Senate Bill 1965 finally found redemption.  Coming under the tutelage of Representative Mike Shelton, SB 1965 acknowledged its misspent youth and retired to the obscurity of the Judiciary Committee, where it remained until death on or about the 4^th of April.  Senate Bill 1965 was preceded in death by his adoptive brother, Senate Bill 2165.  It is survived by a host of other Senate Bills that legitimately serve the good of the people of Oklahoma.

No memorial services are planned.  In lieu of flowers, donations may be made to The Equality Network.

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* The original bill was modified on the Senate Floor by a substitute bill offered by Senator Russell and voted do pass by a count of 39 ayes and 6 nos.  I stand in admiration of the courage of six senators who voted against this unjust bill: Tom Adelson, Johnnie Crutchfield, Richard Lerblance, Andrew Rice, John Sparks, and Jim Wilson.

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Related Posts:

• SB 1965: Destroying Dialogue, Destroying Lives  |  Xenia Institute
• Hate Crimes in Oklahoma: Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell  |  Xenia Institute

Oklahoma currently has tough, good laws that include hate crimes laws. Any murder or brutal assault is hateful. That is the problem with singling out something more with this federal law.  I believe this legislation far exceeds the powers of government over states as outlined in the 10th Amendment of the U.S. Constitution.  I am also very concerned that this loosely defined and ill-conceived legislation could be used to target people’s belief, freedom to associate in groups, right to assemble on issues, as well as target people’s right to free speech.

The Oklahoma State Capitol building. (Photo by Daniel Mayer, used under Creative Commons 3.0)

What Russell fails to mention is that Oklahoma’s current statute does not include a victim’s actual or perceived gender, sexual orientation, or gender identity as motivations for a hate crime.  In his rush to defend the privileges of the empowered, Senator Russell runs roughshod over the basic human rights of members of the LGBTQIA community.  As a commenter on my previous post pointed out, the failure to prosecute the perpetrators of hate crimes creates an environment of fear that robs all potential victims of an ideologically motivated crime of their very human dignity.  The Leadership Conference provides another devastating example of the non-prosecution of hate crimes in their publication, Confronting the New Face of Hate: Hate Crimes in America 2009:

In Greenville, South Carolina on May 21, 2007, Sean Kennedy, a gay man, died of injuries sustained after he was attacked outside a bar. While making derogatory comments regarding Kennedy’s sexual orientation, the assailant fatally beat and punched him until he fell, hitting his head on the pavement. The killer was originally charged with murder, but his charge was reduced to involuntary manslaughter. He was sentenced to five years in prison, which was suspended to three years with credit for the seven months he had already served. He was also ordered to attend both anger management and drug/alcohol management classes. No hate crime was charged as South Carolina is one of only five states (along with Arkansas, Georgia, Wyoming, and Indiana) that do not have a penalty-enhancement hate crime law.

To defend the rights of so-called straight people when the lives of LGBTQIA people are at stake is a slap at true justice.  Yet the manner in which Russell proposes to deny human dignity as he defends the privilege of empowered people adds further insult to injury.  While he quibbles over freedom of speech and expression, victims of hate crimes are left to wonder if those oft quoted words; “life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness,” hold any meaning for them at all.  If we are to take that declaration seriously and acknowledge that all humans are created equally, then these tactics of shutting people out of the discussion about their own sexuality and/or identity are no longer acceptable nor morally defensible.  SB 1965 is just another method by which freedom of speech is used to avoid the relationality of dialogue and uphold the privileges of the oppressors while destroying the lives of the oppressed.

So it’s time for Oklahomans who are in favor of dignity and dialogue, relationship and justice, to stand together and oppose this bill.  Through some legislative trickery (which I hope to blog more about later), this proposed legislation moved very rapidly through the Senate and has already made its way into the House.  After being second read, SB 1965 was referred to the House Judiciary Committee, where it must pass a committee vote before it can be debated before the entire House of Representatives.  The Equality Network has already established a website where you can email the membership of the Judiciary committee and urge them to vote against SB 1965.  However, with the next scheduled meeting of the Judiciary committee on Monday, March 29 and no posted  agenda for which bills will be considered,* now is the time to make the most of your voice and snail mail an old fashioned letter to the members of this committee.  Repeated activist workshops have stressed the value of sending actual letters, and I would encourage you to join me in doing so.  I’m including a link to a copy of my letter to Representative McCullough to offer you some thoughts as to how you might address the subject in your own correspondence and a listing (below) of the representatives on the Judiciary committee along with their mailing addresses and phone numbers.  You might also find helpful talking points and examples at the aforementioned email link from The Equality Network as well as at an email advocacy website set up by Human Rights Campaign that may offer insights into composing your own letter or email.

If you don’t write a letter, send an email.  If you don’t send an email, consider making a phone call.  Legislation like Senate Bill 1965 is destroying dialogue and it will destroy lives.  It’s time for those of us who support community, restorative justice, and true equality to be in one voice in opposing hurtful and hate-filled legislation like SB 1965.  When we fail to stand in opposition to injustice and in solidarity with its victims, our inaction becomes our indictment.  I hope that you’ll join me in speaking against this bill that is bad for all people, and bad for Oklahoma.

* At the time of writing this post, no committee agenda had been set for the upcoming meeting of the House Judiciary Committee.

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Cross posted at the Xenia Institute.

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The following table includes all of the members of the House Judiciary Committee.  For your information, their party affiliation has been included in parenthesis following their names, but this is not actually part of their mailing addresses.  I’m also linking each representative to her/his page at the House website.

Bayh has always been shall we say a frustrating sort. Never a profile in courage.

This marks perhaps the kindest response from the liberal blogosphere to Evan Bayh’s decision to leave the Senate.  Michael Tomasky’s thoughts from across the pond (The Guardian is published in the United Kingdom) at least gives Bayh the benefit of the doubt as to his future.  Perhaps because there is talk that his hasty exit might open the way to a Republican takeover of his seat on November, the conservative blogs have been somewhat kinder.  John Stossel offers a positive view of the move based on Bayh’s remarks that he could create more jobs in private industry.  This drew a strong response from Matthew Yglesias:

The popularity of this sort of rhetoric among small-government types mostly illustrates how small-brained they are. It should be both obvious and uncontroversial to observe that the policy environment shaped by congress has an impact on the welfare of the American people that far exceeds that of most businesses. This is equally true whether or not you’re skeptical of the value of activist government.

James Fallows follows a similar argument in questioning the timing and suddenness of Bayh’s exit:

If he really cared about his Indiana constituents and their problems through that time, great! But if so, how can he walk away with this kind of careless disregard about whether, in the style of his departure, he is smashing up things that had said were important to him. If, on the other hand, these issues and people never really mattered that much, and public life had been a kind of popularity contest — well, that may be true of a lot of politicians, but they don’t like to reveal it quite this bluntly.

However, even the tone of these arguments seems civil compared to some of the other tongue lashings that have been handed out at Evan Bayh’s expense:

The Pernicious Influence Of Lefty Blogs  |  Ta-Nehisi Coates

To double down, it’s not so much that he’s “centrist,” or “moderate,” it’s that his centrism has no real policy core. I don’t know how you support the Bush tax-cuts and style yourself a deficit hawk. Policy-wise, there’s nothing “leftist” about being against the Iraq War. But politically-speaking, the anti-war folks were caricatured as a bunch of hippies who don’t understand national security.

…

But so often with “centrist” Dems, I feel like I’m just watching people take positions so that they can claim to be moderate/independent because it sounds good.

The Emptiness of Evan Bayh  |  Ross Douthat

America needs politicians who stake out interesting, politically-courageous positions on important policy questions. What it doesn’t need is politicians who occupy the safest possible ground on the great issues of the day, shift slightly left or slightly right depending on the state of public opinion, and then get congratulated by the press for being so independent-minded.

Evan Bayh  |  Matthew Yglesias

Simply put: He’s an immoral person who conducts his affairs in public life with a callous disregard for the impact of his decisions on human welfare. He’s sad he’s not going to be president? He doesn’t like liberal activists? He finds senate life annoying? Well, boo-hoo. We all shed a tear.

Bayh Low  |  Jonathon Chait

This was just a completely unremarkable man who, had he not been the handsome son of a famous politician, would never in a million years have been a Senator.

If you’ve been a regular reader of my work, you know that I’m typically not this heavy on the quotations, and if you’re one to follow the links, then you might notice that I’ve been very particular in my editing of the quotes that I have shared.  All of this is to highlight the point: dialogue on the political landscape has all but come to a standstill.

With the TEA Party movement apparently gaining momentum (or at least media coverage), this isn’t a particularly astute observation.  Yet I think that Bayh’s retirement has opened the door to understanding that this isn’t just a right-wing phenomenon.  The critiques leveled at Bayh’s centrism, whether warranted or not, still indicate a “do-nothingness” on the part of political moderates who have passed over opportunities to try and foster compromise and move government forward.  (Anyone remember Henry Clay from their U.S. history courses?)  The venom spewed in Bayh’s direction, again, whether warranted or not, has exposed the frustration on the left and its willingness to resort to verbal broadsides as well.  Frankly, we’re all failing to rise to the occasion when it comes addressing the issues we face.

I doubt that I can sum it up any better than Daniel Schorr’s commentary for All Things Considered:

That [Bayh’s decision] will have electoral consequences goes without saying. But the sullen mood of America goes beyond shifting party loyalties. Many Americans seem close to rejecting the whole machinery of government that Evan Bayh found wanting. What happens when the people turn their back on their government is a phenomenon that this democracy has yet to experience.

I can only pray that we find a way to reclaim our role as citizens who share this economic and political space that we call the United States of America.

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Cross posted at the Xenia Institute.

One speaker, for example, was Larry Lewis, interim pastor of the Centralia [First] Baptist Church. Suggesting he spoke for “Centralia’s faith community,” he said the ordinances violated the separation of church and state and would, among other things, give the city’s stamp of approval to those lifestyles. “This would be divisive when this community needs healing.”

This prompted me to look into the proposed ordinances for myself, and I was disappointed but not surprised to discover that the language of the bills included very specific exemptions for churches and other religious institutions and organizations.  (I write more about this at my own blog.)  The claim that the bills violated the separation clause was nothing more than political grandstanding designed to provide a supposedly “legal” cover for the public moralizing of an exclusivist religious perspective.  In actuality, this no-holds-barred attempt by so-called Christian interests to codify their own morality proved to be the greater threat to the separation clause.  In instances such as this, the dual meaning of “separation of church and state” is too often forgotten.  The first amendment not only protects religious institutions from encroachment by the state, but protects the state, and by extension its citizens, from the encroachment of religion.

I discovered that I wasn’t alone in this new year’s concern.  As I wrote about the moral tyranny of religion in local politics, Americans United for the Separation of Church and State wondered about similar issues at the national level.  They recently posted a report offering a look at President Obama’s record on this issue after one year.  Their findings aren’t nearly as gleeful as those on the Religious Right might have you believe:

There’s no denying that when Obama took office, many who stand guard on the church-state wall breathed a sigh of relief. The previous eight years had been difficult ones, and there was a sense that things had to get better because they really couldn’t get any worse.

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But that doesn’t mean everything Obama has done has pleased advocates of church-state separation. Indeed, the Obama record on church and state is mixed. One year later, it’s a good time to step back and assess his record so far.

Lifting up Obama’s decision to open federal funding for stem cell research and inclusion of minority and non-religious voices in his speeches and public functions as highlights, this report goes on to address areas of concern.  Noting the President’s rather ambiguous record regarding appointments to federal judgeships, including the appointment of Justice Sotomayor to the Supreme Court, the report goes on to raise real questions with regard to the administration’s positions concerning faith-based initiatives, school voucher programs, and church/state cases being pursued by the Department of Justice.  While I don’t necessarily share these concerns to the same extent that Americans United might, I do think they make legitimate points about Obama’s record on the separation between religion and politics.

Yet, as important as these collisions between religion and politics are, I’m left with a troubling question: If we are to honor the non/religious pluralism of our contemporary society, how do we effectively work to promote the common good?  And perhaps even more importantly, how do we even determine a common good?  While it should be apparent that I support the liberal (lowercase “L”) ideal of tolerance, I’m not blind to its problems.  Ethicist and scholar David Hollenbach perhaps describes them best:

In public life, all encompassing understandings of the common good must be subordinated to the importance of tolerance.  A live-and-let-live ethos thus leads to what John Dewey once called an “eclipse of the public.”  The good that can be achieved in the shared domain of public life is hidden from view as protection of individual, private well-being becomes the center of normative concern.

(David Hollenbach, The Common God and Christian Ethics, 10)

In an age of religious and nonreligious sectarianism, competing political visions, and outright discord and distrust, how do we seek out a vision for the shared good?  The health care debate that spanned the entirety of 2009 really exemplifies the difficulties we face.  The cries of nationalized health care and “death panels” drowned out the voices of reason for a rational public discussion.  And to make matters worse, this non-debate effectively silenced discussions on other important issues such as the ongoing wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, apprehension, detainment and trial of suspected terrorists, and the plight of the poor, which extends to far more basic concerns than health care.

It is my hope for 2010 that we as a nation will work to find some means for engaging in national discussions that don’t automatically degenerate into shouting matches and propaganda wars.  Yet looking back at 2009, I’m left to wonder if we can actually summon the ethical wherewithal to make that hope a reality.

Cross posted at the Xenia Institute.

Cynthia L. Hale, senior pastor of Ray of Hope Christian Church (Disciples of Christ) in Decatur Ga., has been appointed to the President’s Commission on White House Fellowships. Hale will serve on the commission along with such prominent citizens as former Sen. Thomas Daschle, special correspondent for NBC News Tom Brokaw, former NATO commander Gen. Wesley Clark, and renowned artist Maya Lin.

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