Arizona, Ever Weirder I

Apparently, there has been a plague of wardrobe malfunctions and R-rated talk in Arizona public schools and colleges.  So Republican state legislators are coming to the rescue.  As Inside Higher Education recently reported, the Arizona state legislature is currently considering a measure that would place all public classrooms under FCC guidelines for obscenity, indecency, and profanity.

GOP Senator Lori Klein sponsored what has been nicknamed the "G-Rated" bill.  Klein made a little media splash last summer by insisting on bringing her "cute" little loaded pistol into the Arizona Senate chamber a couple of days after the mass shooting in Tucson.  She later aimed the .380 Ruger at a reporter's chest to demonstrate its laser pointer.  On a different note, as state chair of the  Herman Cain for President committee, she dismissed the allegations of sexual harassment that would end up derailing his campaign, explaining that in politics, "we want a virgin to do a hooker's job."  This sounds like a legislator who really knows all about obscenity, indecency, and profanity.

The bill, SB 1467, establishes penalties for speech or conduct that violates FCC guidelines--a short suspension for first-time offenders, a longer suspension for a repeat offender, and termination for those evidently habitual offenders.  I can't find any explanation for why Klein would introduce such legislation, but it jives with previous Arizona Republican efforts to make the state a haven for white conservative Americans by banning ethnic studies programs or rooting out teachers who don't speak proper American (see Bad Combo of Fear and Desperation in Arizona for more on these measures).

The bill, as others have already pointed out, is unconstitutional, along with being just plain ridiculous (see Lukianoff's take here, or Safier's here).  Let's see, how would my courses fare according to the FCC guidelines on obscenity?

"An average person, applying contemporary community standards, must find that the material, as a whole, appeals to the prurient interest."  We'll just skip for now the issue of how one might determine "community standards," and assume that the films in my Latin American Cinema class that included nudity and graphic sexual scenes would have offended a swath of people in the Grand Rapids area.  Under this law I would have been an habitual offender, and therefore terminated.  I guess I could have selected movies using some sort of Leave it to Beaver standard, but then I wouldn't have performed my job of introducing students to a representative sample of current Latin American cinema.

"The material must depict or describe, in a patently offensive way, sexual conduct specifically defined by applicable law."  I think my courses pass muster on this one, unless someone were to take issue with the human rights reports I occasionally use that reference or describe rape.

"The material, taken as a whole, must lack serious literary, artistic, political or scientific value."  I might be in trouble on this count, but it depends on who gets to decide what material has value.  We're already seeing school boards banning classic works that board members happen to find distasteful, or that don't conform to their hagiographic approach to history.  And this gets us into the issue of operationalizing and enforcing the law.  Would I have to pass my syllabi through some community board for approval?  Would there be a hotline students could call if they were upset with the language of a lecture, the content of a poem, or if a movie got them all hot and sweaty?

Equally troubling, the language is so broad that the teachers could be in violation of FCC guidelines outside of the classroom: "If a person who provides classroom instruction in a public school engages in speech or conduct that would violate the standards. . ."  The law doesn't confine the censorship to only the classroom, it leaves it wide open.

I suppose that language could easily be fixed, but the premise remains flawed, and hypocritical.  For a party that's always calling for limited government, Arizona Republicans sure seem to want a great deal of government control over what constitutes knowledge, and how that knowledge gets taught and learned.

Anniversary of an Infarction

Blog Song for the Moment

"Condition of the Heart," Prince, Around the World in a Day, 1985

January 16th, 2006, Martin Luther King Day.  One of the worst years of my life had just ended--a year of a series of family and financial crises, capped by the termination of my visiting appointment at Wabash College.  Wabash did the right thing, I knew even then.  While I learned a great deal about teaching (and being a full-time academic) from my fellow faculty and many fine students, I'd become increasingly unhappy working with the cultists of all-male education, and their unspoken rule: If you can't praise the Wabash mission to the high hills, then keep your trap shut.  Still, I felt burned.  The college had used my work with students to raise money from alums, and I had done a lot of other service.  It was my bad though, not Wabash's, that I'd done so much service instead of doing what I should have done--research, writing, and finding another job.  Fortunately, a good friend from grad school days plucked me up and eased me into a visiting position at Albion College.

So on that day I was house-sitting for an Albion professor on sabbatical, in a place just a few blocks from the Albion campus.  Around two or three am, I woke up from a terrible dream.  My bedroom was upstairs, and I was there in the dream, but the room was now huge.  I lay on my bed in the middle of it, and I could see a dark doorway between my feet.  I heard a steady rhythm of booms downstairs, as if someone were pounding away on a timpani in the basement.  Then I noticed my chest was opened, as if it were a cardboard box, and when I looked over the one flap underneath my chin, I saw two arms trying to line my empty chest cavity with a white kitchen garbage bag.  They were making a hash of it, and I was irritated, and that drum downstairs kept banging away, and I hissed "Here, let me do it," and I grabbed the bag.  Then I woke up.

It seems so obvious now that some sort of myocardial event had just occurred, but I don't know if I had just experienced an infarction, or if it was yet to come (I love that word, infarction; the OED defines it as the "action of stuffing up or condition of being stuffed up," but for me it's a rude-sounding word that would likely make my grandkids giggle, a healthy giggle over a life-changing, or life-ending, event). I wandered around the house for a few hours, discombobulated.  I couldn't focus on anything, couldn't shake the dream from my head, nor the vague sense of dread--as if I were playing the Sesame Street game of "One of these things/is not like the other," and my life depended on it, yet unable to find the damn thing that didn't belong.

I ended up sitting on the back porch in the hushed, early morning dark, with a cup of coffee and a cigarette (I know, I know).  Finally, I decided to go to my office.  Work might erase the dream and the dread.  I remember bitter cold on that walk, though according to the Farmer's Almanac, even with wind chill, the temperature would have been the high teens or low twenties, which hardly qualifies as bitter to me.  About halfway there I suddenly felt as if I were walking in icy quicksand.  I felt no pain, no shortness of breath.  I just couldn't get my body to move.  I thought about sitting down on the curb, just rest a bit, but by then I must have been suspecting something was really wrong, I was beginning to get an idea of which thing that was not like the other.  I talked my body into moving again, and slowly crossed the short distance to my building, made it to my office, got online, and checked a website that gave a list of symptoms for heart attacks.

I knew I was at risk.  My two grandfathers had died in their 40s of heart disease.  Both my parents had high blood pressure, and so did I.  I smoked, and recently experienced a great deal of stress.  But I dithered.  I didn't want all the fuss of going to the hospital--I didn't want to appear a hypochondriac.  It may have been around eight am when I called a friend, and described what had happened.  He said get myself to an emergency room, call 911.  But this friend, god love him, tends to be an alarmist at times, and his anxiousness on my behalf only seemed to make me sink further into lassitude.  I didn't want the drama; I'd had enough of it already.

But after mulling it over a while longer, I thought, "Crap, let's just get this out of the way." I shuffled back to my house, got in the jeep, and drove to the emergency room in nearby Jackson.  Here my memory gets even more sketchy.  After describing my moment of quicksand to a nurse, there was a flurry of questions, blood drawn, an EKG, and then suddenly I was on a gurney getting shoved into an ambulance.  I woke up the next morning not knowing why I was in the hospital, or how I had gotten there.  Apparently the anesthesia they gave me had amnestic side effects, and I must have been on some sort of narcotic because when a doctor came in and told me that he had cleaned out the 99% blockage and placed a stent in my left descending artery--the widowmaker--I thought, "Well, how very interesting."  A bit later, or maybe it was before, a nurse checked the dressing over the plug in my groin, sealing the entrance point for the catheter.  If it opened, I might bleed to death in a couple of minutes.  As she checked me she asked me to warn her if I was going to cough or sneeze, and told me not to laugh, which, of course, I started to do.  I cannot remember what started me off, perhaps the bit of repartee we fell into while discussing my condition?  Or was it the absurdity of this rather attractive woman with her hands near my privates in a most unerotic tableaux?  Or it was the drugs still at work?  Whichever, her stern order to stop laughing worked.

Curiously, I did not know until my discharge that I had suffered a myocardial infarction, and it wasn't until a follow-up appointment with the cardiologist that I found out that the heart attack had left no permanent damage.  So I was fortunate (or blessed, depending on your views of providence) on a number of counts--1) walking into frigid air makes the heart work ever so much harder, and I made it to and from my office, and to the hospital, after two myocardial episodes; 2) that I even survived the heart attack(s?); and 3) no permanent damage.  We can add another.  According to my most recent stress test, my heart is in excellent condition.

I still often think of that dream, especially around MLK day.  I've done a little poking around in healthcare and medical journals, but can't seem to locate any studies the association between heart attacks and dream states and dread.  I don't think the dream caused the heart attack, of course, or that it predicted one, though it may have been my body, working through my subconscious, trying to tell me "Hey, Andy, we've got a problem."

An initial foray via Google brought me this tidbit from an Australian online health magazine:

Thomas Luscher told the annual meeting of the European Society of Cardiology in Vienna that, although heart attacks occurred throughout the day, their incidence increased after midnight, and peaked between 3am and 5am.
"What's interesting is that this is when dreams become more frequent and vivid," said Dr Luscher, a cardiologist at the Zurich University Hospital.
"Maybe there's a link which should be investigated."

'Well, how very interesting,' but if important, why only one guy in Austria raising this issue and whose words get picked up by some Ezine for senior citizens in Australia?  

A longer search with academic search engines did not give me much more.  There's lots of stuff on connections between mental and emotional states and heart conditions--there's a US News and World Report article that sums this research up nicely, saying, for example, "It's long been known that acute emotional states--like rage, fear, or panic--can trigger cardiac events that literally 'scare you to death.'"  But this is still treating the mind and emotions as causal factors of a physical trauma.  I'm more interested in what the mind and heart are doing in response to such a trauma.

I'm sure there must be more work out there that my inexpert searches did not locate. If any of the two or three of you that happen to read this blog know of some leads, I'd welcome them.

And a belated happy Martin Luther King Day to you all.  My drama isn't comparable to the national trauma he lived, faced, and which killed him.

Peter Gabriel: Still Holding the Line

I first listened to Peter Gabriel my senior year in high school, thanks to my neighbor and fellow West Albanian, Pat Hawke, who was always giving me the heads up on new music.  He lent me Peter Gabriel, and I gave it a listen, but except for "Solsbury Hill" and "Here Comes the Flood," the album didn't really grab me. Gabriel's music wasn't very accessible to ears used to Supertramp, Kansas, and Fleetwood Mac. So I kind of forgot about Gabriel.  I ended up missing a lot of music coming out in the late seventies and throughout the eighties, partly because of my Christian fundy stage (1978-1981), and partly because I was off in Guatemala for Peace Corps (1984-88).  In between, I think I wasn't listening to much besides Bruce Cockburn. Anyway, it must have been 1989, we were living in the Lower East side then, and Margo and I went to see Say Anything, and there's that great scene with Lloyd Dobler (John Cusack) holding up a boom box blaring Gabriel's "In Your Eyes," trying woo back Diane Court (Ione Skye). That song did immediately grab me, and I remember later asking some friends if they knew who did that song.  They looked at me like I was an idiot and said it was Peter Gabriel.

So that got me into a Peter Gabriel kick, and though I haven't become an aficionado, I've gotten a lot of intellectual and aesthetic pleasure from his music over the past twenty years.  Recently, Gabriel released New Blood, a collection of covers of his 80s hits reinterpreted with classic orchestration.  I think the results are pretty uneven.  The orchestral intro to "In Your Eyes" sounded to me like a soundtrack to some bad Merchant Ivory knockoff, and the orchestration on "Red Rain," "Mercy Street," and "Solsbury Hill" seems just too delicate to fully deliver those powerful songs.

But I liked what Gabriel did with "San Jacinto," which is somewhere in my top 100 songs of all time.  According to an interview Gabriel did for the New Blood production,  the lyrics recall a conversation he had with an Apache man about the rite-of-passage he underwent to become a warrior.  This rite is juxtaposed with a commentary on the commodification and consumption of the Native North American culture that Gabriel witnessed in San Jacinto (in California, near Palm Springs).  Reminds me of my one visit to Kaneeta way back in 1979, which now lures people with this catchy slogan: "Escape to where the fun shines!"

Peter Gabriel, San Jacinto, IV (1982)

Listen to the original version and you will hear the four stanzas unfold in distinct ways, though a repeated melody of synthesized chimes connects the first three (lyrics below).  Gabriel starts off soft, his usually gravely voice smoothed.  Then there is the transition with female vocals saying something that I've never been able to figure out, but, anyway, the song continues to build, adding instrumentation and volume, until Gabriel shouts, as if from a mountaintop, "I hold the line!"  Heavy bass and dark horns make it all sound so dire, and he falters for a bit--"think I'm losing it"--before sweeping on to his declaration.  But holding the line is not about resistance, it's about survival.  And the last stanza is sung in a tone that suggests weariness more than confidence.

And I suppose that is what initially drew me to the song.  I didn't (and don't, or can't, really) identify with Gabriel's narrative posture as a Native North American, but musically the song seemed so close to how I've felt at times, of near losing it, of persevering without a great deal of confidence.

* * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * *
San Jacinto lyrics
Thick cloud - steam rising - hissing stone on sweat lodge fire
Around me - buffalo robe - sage in bundle - rub on skin
Outside - cold air - stand, wait for rising sun
Red paint - eagle feathers - coyote calling - it has begun
Something moving in - I taste it in my mouth and in my heart
It feels like dying - slow - letting go of life

Medicine man lead me up through town - Indian ground - so far down
Cut up land - each house - a pool - kids wearing water wings - drink in cool
Follow dry river bed - watch Scout and Guides make pow-wow signs
Past Geronimo's disco - Sit 'n' Bull steakhouse - white men dream
A rattle in the old man's sack - look at mountain top - keep climbing up
Way above us the desert snow - white wind blow

I hold the line - the line of strength that pulls me through the fear
San Jacinto - I hold the line
San Jacinto - the poison bite and darkness take my sight - I hold the line
And the tears roll down my swollen cheek - think I'm losing it - getting weaker
I hold the line - I hold the line
San Jacinto - yellow eagle flies down from the sun - from the sun

We will walk - on the land
We will breathe - of the air
We will drink - from the stream
We will live - hold the line
* * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * *
The new version keeps the compositional design of the original, but the orchestral instruments make the tone lighter, replacing somberness with a meditative spirit.  Gabriel has thirty more years on him, and perhaps he's too old, too wise, to wallow in direness.  The musical transition from the third to the fourth stanza is almost upbeat, but it soon returns to melancholy. In the last passage, as the flutes die out and the strings move into a minor key, we hear in the background labored breaths, and it feels to me as if now the issue is not just weariness, but loneliness.

However one interprets these musical texts, they are both beautifully rendered, and if you're a Peter Gabriel fan, New Blood deserves a listen, though it may not get your admiration.

Peter Gabriel, San Jacinto, New Blood (2011)

Stress and Snails

I have been incredibly stressed these past few months for a variety of the usual reasons--conflict at work, worries about family, aging, blah, blah, blah. . .


I had a routine stress test with my cardiologist last August, and she said, looking at the pictures of my heart at work, that she wouldn't have known from the evidence that I had suffered a heart attack.  Good news, she said, but added that I had to learn how to manage stress better--though I'd said little about that to her.  I guess she reads minds as well as hearts.


So I've been doing a few things to try to reduce stress.  Conveniently, reconstructive knee surgery in late July means I've been going to rehab twice a week, where the PTs work me over pretty well--the exercise has felt good.  And I try to get in for a massage session once a week.  My wife tells me that recent reports show that massage lowers blood pressure, and that, combined with increased exercise and quitting smoking (umm, well until last week), must explain the lowest blood pressure reading I've had in a long time at my recent doctor's visit, 118/60 (by the way, my family doctor, John Duhn, is the greatest; he listens well, explains well, and is fellow fan of universal, single payer healthcare).


Another thing I've started just recently is to sit down with a book of poetry while I eat breakfast.  I read this one a couple of days ago, in a collection that might make the more sophisticated poetry readers cringe, Garrison Keillor's Good Poems for Hard Times.  It's called "For a Five-Year-Old," by Fleur Adock, a New Zealander who ended up in England.  Turns out she was born the same year as my father, 1934.  Knowing that makes me read it as both the child and the parent.

A snail is climbing up the window-sill
into your room, after a night of rain.
You call me in to see, and I explain
that it would be unkind to leave it there:
it might crawl to the floor, we must take care
that no one squashes it. You understand,
and carry it outside, with careful hand,
to eat a daffodil. 

I see, then, that a kind of faith prevails:
your gentleness is moulded still by words
from me, who have trapped mice and shot wild birds,
from me, who drowned your kittens, who betrayed
your closest relatives, and who purveyed
the harshest kind of truth to many another.
But that is how things are: I am your mother,
and we are kind to snails.

I had those snail moments, too, as a child: We are not the kind that hits others.  We are people for whom silliness is a virtue.  We are not to cheat at games, or throw tantrums when we lose.  We believe music to be beautiful and essential, along with wandering through forests, climbing mountains, and sleeping by rivers.  We absolutely do not, whether angry or not, call our best friend, a Japanese-American, a nip.


As a parent and grandparent, and watching my daughter raise two of her own, I am fully aware of the baggage we bring to raising children, and the detritus of daily life that swirls around our answers to a child's question, worry, or upset.  Lord knows I have had, and have, my inconsistencies--the little rages hovering around my moments of gentleness--and that I have betrayed and displayed my harsh edge, yet "that is how things are."  Or as Bruce Cockburn sings, "that's the burden of the angel-beast."


I treasure those childhood lessons, and that gives me hope that some of that treasure has been passed on despite myself.

WWJD? Bully a gay kid?

The anti-bullying law now under consideration in the Michigan statehouse includes language that "prohibits the law from being used to take action against people for a statement based on a sincerely held religious belief or moral conviction."  Apparently, for some Michigan Republicans, God doesn't seem to mind bullies who pick on homosexuals.


Tea Party activist Rich Swier doesn't even think physical and emotional abuse of homosexual youth is bullying.  "It is peer pressure and is healthy."

It's all so bizarre.  Think about it.  If religious belief or moral conviction transform an abusive act into acceptable behavior, do agnostic and atheist kids get to shove fervent evangelical heads into toilets?  Does it free Green activists to shout belittling jibes at littering louses?  Do Jehovah Witnesses, when no one's looking, get to smash the sack lunches of good Christians who dutifully say the Pledge of Allegiance?


And as for Swier, who apparently also has it in for Muslims, what twisted prism is he looking through that transforms a sick bully into picture of health?


Thankfully, the Republican Speaker of the House opposes this clause, and hopefully will get it stricken from the text.



[Source: Buckfire and Buckfire.com]

A modest proposal for reducing unemployment

Obama's fiscal infusion approach to reducing unemployment is simply too little, too late.  I have a better idea.  Reduce unemployment by reducing the number of job seekers--present and future--through what we can call "enhanced natural attrition."  There are already some proposals out there that can we can use to accomplish this.





1) Enhanced natural attrition through liberating the environment for entrepreneurs.  Governor Rick Perry is a big advocate of this, arguing that onerous federal environmental regulations raise the cost of production to such a point that employers can't increase production and hire more workers.  He's right, but what we also get from ending those oppressive protections of the environment is the side benefit of increased externalities--companies pass on the cost of production (the cost of say, air or water pollution) to the public space, where workers live.  Studies show that typically it's the poor and marginalized workers who end up living in the more toxic spaces, so we can enhance the natural attrition of this population by increasing the toxicity of places where they live.  With shorter life spans and greater infant mortality rates, we reduce the number of present and future job seekers, with the added benefit of reducing applicants for this or that social and welfare service.  And our brave, risk-taking entreprenuers, with lower costs of production, will make more money so they can once again own that second, third, or fourth home, thus boosting the real estate and home construction sectors.  Just one of many possible multiplier effects!


2) Enhanced natural attrition through more efficient healthcare delivery.  Some of you liberal naysayers out there will likely point out that increased toxicity will lead to greater public healthcare costs.  I'm a step ahead of you.  It won't if we, as Michelle Bachman so wisely advocates, dump Obamacare.  We need to liberate health care insurance companies, drug companies, and all for-profit entrepreneurs in healthcare provision from onerous rules that make them offer services to populations that can't afford them.  We can enhance the natural attrition of this population of job-seekers that can't take care of themselves, thereby reducing the number of job-seekers, and those who probably can't even work anyway.  What a plus!




3) Enhanced natural attrition through improving national security.  The neocons, like those at The Project for a New American Century, had it right.  We are a benevolent hegemon, and need to stop apologizing for unilateral intervention where needed to protect the picket lines of empire, and nip evil regimes in the bud before they flower into real threats.  We've done Afghanistan and Iraq; it's time for Iran (and damn, we missed our chance in Libya, though Syria's still a possibility).  We can enhance the natural attrition of working class folks who happen to be in the armed forces through expanding the scope of armed action in the Near East.  What liberals might sneeringly dismiss as a quagmire is really a wonderful opportunity to reduce the number of job-seekers (and future ones they might produce), and, get this, with all the privatization of security-related operations, we simultaneously create more jobs.  It's perfect!


Write your Congressperson today!  Let's abandon the fantasy of increasing the number of jobs available and instead demand enhanced natural attrition of job-seekers!

Perry's Pre-Presidental Prayer Rally

Picture from NPR

Texas Governor Rick Perry's decision to attend "The Response," a prayer rally held yesterday at Reliant Stadium in Houston, has provoked another round of debate over the role of Christian evangelicals in politics. Perry and rally organizers maintain the event's "entirely religious."

I know there are people, critics, that say this is just some political event," Perry said. "Well it's not that. This event is not about supporting some organization...It's going to be very simple...It's just a time to call out to [God] and that's it and lift Jesus’ name up on high."

Event organizers on the call stressed that the event is designed to be entirely religious. They said attendees will be encouraged not to wear political shirts or bring political signs to the event.

"This is not an issue of who's going to be our president...It absolutely has nothing to do with that at all. it's about making Jesus king...," said Jim Garlow, a California Pastor.

But the absence of campaign material or speech hardly renders the rally apolitical. Governor Perry is using his political position and stature to encourage attendance to a large public event, in the context of his possible run for the GOP presidential nomination. Also, the full title of the rally has obvious if vague political ramifications--"A call to prayer for a nation in crisis--as does Perry's video invitation to attend the rally:

. . .As an elected leader, I'm all too aware of government's limitations when it comes to fixin' things that are spiritual in nature. That's where prayer comes in, and we need it more than ever. With the economy in trouble, communities in crisis, people adrift in a sea of moral relativism, we need God's help. . .

To assert that government cannot do anything about certain economic, social, and moral problems is a political claim, as is the diagnosis of those problems--that their source is spiritual. Moreover, as NPR reports, the homophobic American Family Association (AFA) is paying for the event, and is bringing in some evangelical heavyweights with big political chops--James Dobson (founder of Focus on the Family), Richard Land (principal lobbyist for the Southern Baptist Convention), and Tony Perkins (president of the Family Research Council). The AFA has also invited a small cast of luminaries of the fringe Christian right:

--John Hagee, a San Antonio evangelist whose endorsement was rejected by John McCain in 2008 because of Hagee's anti-Catholic statements.

--Mike Bickle, a founder of the International House of Prayer in Kansas City, Mo., who has called Oprah Winfrey a "pastor of the harlot of Babylon.

--Alice Patterson, founder of Justice at the Gate, in San Antonio, who has written that there is a "demonic structure behind the Democratic Party."

--And then there's John Benefiel, head of the Oklahoma-based Heartland Apostolic Prayer Network, who once said this about the Statue of Liberty: "You know where we got it from? French Freemasons. Listen, folks, that is an idol, a demonic idol right there in the middle of New York Harbor.

So arguing that the event is all religion and zero politics is, at best, disingenuous, and predictably, critics of the religious right are all over this--the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU), Americans United for the Separation of Church and State (AUSCS), Right Wing Watch, and the Southern Poverty Law Center, among others, or watch Stephen Colbert's send-up here.

Colbert wryly notes that the prayer rally "doesn't cross the line between church and state; it erases it," echoing the ACLU's worry that taxpayer money might be contributing to the event and, or the AUSCS's argument that Governor Perry is using his office to promote a particular religion. Really, though, the criticism is about the policies and people Perry associates with by sponsoring the rally, such as the Right Wing Watch's reference to prayer rally speakers as Perry's "extremist allies. . .who are dedicated to bringing far-right religious views, including degrading views of gays and lesbians and non-Christians, into American politics."

Is this prayer rally really a big deal? I doubt the ACLU's Freedom of Information request for rally records will reveal use of taxpayer funds, and it really amounts to a kind of nuisance suit. Whether Perry is throwing his governorship behind a particular religion is a stronger point. He did make his invitation as "an elected leader," and did invite all other 49 state governors. And if you check out what The Response states as its core beliefs, this event promotes a standard orthodox evangelical Christian position. That is, it's sectarian.

But does Perry's sponsorship of and participation in the prayer rally mean that he put the weight of the government of Texas behind a particular religion? Did he violate the Establishment clause of the First Amendment, or the "Freedom of Worship" section of the Texas Bill of Rights?

Supreme Court "incorporation" decisions since the 1947 Emerson v Board of Education case have made state and local governments subject to First Amendment religion clauses, though disagreement remains over whether the Establishment clause means no government involvement with religion (an ironclad wall between church and state), or whether it means government can be involved in some way as long as it does not promote a particular religion (a porous wall). In practice, clearly the latter interpretation has held sway, with government activities beginning with prayers and monies going to Congressional and military chaplains. Perry didn't do all that much different than from our presidents have done since Eisenhower--preside over an annual prayer breakfast, except, granted, The Response was hardly ecumenical in comparison.

Texas language is a little more explicit:

No human authority ought, in an case whatever, to control or interfere with the rights of conscience in matters of religion, and no preference shall ever be given by law to any religious society or mode of worship.

So the question goes back to whether Perry's action constituted a Texas government preference for a particular "religious society or mode of worship." I'm no constitutional expert, and am even less familiar with Texas constitutional issues, but it seems to me that Perry violated the spirit of law, but not the letter. He sponsored and participated in The Response as an individual, not as the state of Texas. Still, he didn't seem to make an effort to make it clear he was going as an individual, and not as a governor with presidential ambitions. And inviting all other governors to attend a public event associated with religious leaders that have an obvious political agenda makes his "what's-the-big-deal" position rather dubious. Perry's either obtuse, or just simply dishonest (thank goodness obtuseness and dishonesty aren't unconstitutional, or a lot of us would be in trouble).

Still, I think the critics were too strident. They only strengthen the seeming new norm of vindictive politics--we win the argument by either shouting louder, or telling opponents to shut up, that they do not get to assemble, speak, or practice their religion if it contradicts our policy positions. The critics also confirm what some Christian fundamentalists have complained about--that they are victims of marginalization.

So, critics should have simply reported on Perry's pre-presidenital-bid prayer gig, and not said 'you can't do that.' The reporting's enough. He has clearly shown his cards: he's siding with the militantly anti-gay crowd; he doesn't get the pluralism of the US religious landscape, evidently thinking our crisis is the result of not enough Americans sharing his particular fundamentalist faith; and he apparently thinks public piety will make up for economic and social policies that have left so many lives in disarray.

Shamelessly paraphrasing Proverbs 29: 18, his campaign will perish not for a lack of a vision, but because of it.