Motley Moose – Archive

A statue that depicts the famous moment when Pee Wee Reese put his arm around Jackie Robinson to show his support during Robinson’s rookie year has been vandalized with hateful words and a swastika:

A swastika, along with the phrases “Heil Hitler,” “die n****r,” “f**k n****r,” and “f**k Jackie Robinson” were all scrawled on the statue, which depicts Hall of Famers Jackie Robinson and Pee Wee Reese in a famous pose from 1947, 1010 WINS reported.

Reese, a southerner, famously put his arm around Robinson in response to the many taunts and threats that Robinson received when he broke the color barrier in baseball.  It was Reese’s way of showing that Robinson was his teammate and he stood by him.  Back then baseball was a truly national institution and its breaking the color barrier was significant.  That the southerner captain of one of baseball’s best teams (the Brooklyn Dodgers won 6 of 10 National League pennants between 1947 and 1956) showed his support in such a manner meant a great deal.

Add yet another reason that Antonin Scalia has made himself an embarrassment to the office he holds, along with any other person that possesses one, small, iota of basic human decency.  Speaking before the Utah Bar Association, Scalia reportedly said:

Scalia opened his talk with a reference to the Holocaust, which happened to occur in a society that was, at the time, “the most advanced country in the world.” One of the many mistakes that Germany made in the 1930s was that judges began to interpret the law in ways that reflected “the spirit of the age.” When judges accept this sort of moral authority, as Scalia claims they’re doing now in the U.S., they get themselves and society into trouble.

How many more times will the greatest crime in Jewish history be used to score cheap political points?  Scalia is hardly the first person to so misappropriate the Holocaust to make such points and I doubt he will be the last.

While Scalia is known for vitriol directed against many groups he does not like, this case is particularly egregious.  It makes me wonder what evil he will not blame on those that he deems ‘activist judges.’  Of course, this is only made all the more egregious by his hypocrisy when it comes to ‘judicial activism.’  It seems that the only ‘judicial activism’ he dislikes are those cases of ‘judicial activism’ that affirm the rights of unpopular groups from tyranny of the majority.  He is also willing to use any evidence, no matter how offensive and wrong, to prove his ‘point.’

And I will never completely get it because I am a white, Conservative Jew.  Yes, I am a minority, but I am lucky enough that I can pretty much blend in whenever I want to.  Unless someone is particularly fanatical, lucky and has phenomenal Jewdar, they are not generally going to detect that I am Jewish.  I generally do not cover my head with a kippah in public except when I am going to, and coming home from, synagogue.  I eat vegetarian in non-kosher restaurants.  I am out and about on Saturdays.  I am proud of my Jewishness – it is part of the very core of my personal identity – but it is not something that is always readily discernible from purely visual observation.

Yes, I can see what happens and I can know what happens; I can learn about it, both from the history of our country and from the many different years and places of discrimination that Jews have been subjected to throughout our history.  Still, because I can easily blend in – because I possess white privilege – I will not really know it firsthand.  Because of this I will never have to worry about what President Obama spoke about this afternoon and what every African American goes through merely from living their everyday lives.

Tisha B’Av begins tonight at sundown.  It is the saddest day on the Jewish calendar and marks the traditional anniversary on which both the First and Second Temples in Jerusalem were destroyed.  Along with Yom Kippur, it is one of two 25-hour fasts on the calendar.  Three years ago, I fasted on Tisha B’Av for the first time and wrote a diary about it afterwards discussing my experience.  This year, I am fasting once again, with the fast having begun here in New York just before 8:30 p.m.

When I saw that Oregon became the latest state to call on Congress to pass a constitutional amendment to overturn Citizens United it caused me to begin thinking.  I know that in most civics classes we are taught how the Constitution is amended:  A proposed amendment must be passed by a two-thirds majority in each house and then ratified by three-quarters of state legislatures.  It seems straightforward and simple enough.  The truth, however, is that it is not.

There are two ways to amend the United States Constitution.  One is through the process mentioned above.  In fact, all 27 amendments to the Constitution have been proposed and ratified in this manor.  That said, there is another method, one which would allow proponents of a constitutional amendment to overturn Citizens United to bypass a congress highly unlikely to pass such an amendment.  Follow below the fold.

Let me start with a very simple statistic about the degree of support marriage equality enjoys within the Jewish American community:

Most Jewish communal leaders celebrated the landmark Supreme Court decision striking down the Defense of Marriage Act. The Jewish community, with 81% of support for gay marriage according to public opinion polls, is the constituency most supportive of marriage equality, second only to the LGBT community in its backing of the rights of gays and lesbians to marry.

By comparison, among the population as a whole, marriage equality is enjoys anywhere from plurality to a small majority in support.  Given this 81% figure, it should come as no surprise that much of institutional Judaism (to the extent it exists) in the United States has been supportive of the effort for equality.  Many such organizations filed amicus briefs in support of marriage equality before the DOMA and Prop 8 cases were heard and now that the cases have been decided have reiterated their support.

Those words (or some slight variation on them) are found in many constitutional amendments to formally enable the Congress to enact legislation to give those amendments meaning.  Among those amendments that possess these words are the Fourteenth, Fifteenth, Nineteenth and Twenty-Sixth, which form the basis of the constitutional guarantee of the right to vote.  It seems that Chief Justice Roberts and the four other justices that joined him in today’s tragic opinion ignored those very basic words.  Perhaps they need a basic refresher in the words of the Constitution.  I’ll start with the Fourteenth Amendment below the fold.

Let me start out with words advanced by both Justice Robert Jackson (chief American prosecutor at Nuremberg) and Justice Arthur Goldberg (U.N. Ambassador during the Johnson Administration after leaving the Court):  The Constitution is not a suicide pact.

The premise of that statement is quite simple.  Despite what we might like to think, there is no such thing as an absolute right.  Rights end when they bring harm upon, and conflict with the rights of, others.  For example, if your religion calls for you to go out and assault one person every day you will not be able to claim freedom of religion as a defense in the subsequent criminal trial.  Instead, you will be convicted and, depending upon the severity and frequency, be sentenced to a term of incarceration.

This same premise holds true when it comes to national security and the responsibility of our government to keep American citizens safe.  To start with, it must be asked what is the primary purpose behind the government action in question?  Is it a standard criminal investigation with the ultimate of bringing a prosecution?  Is it an attempt to collect intelligence to thwart a terrorist attack directed at United States citizens or at American soldiers?

The distinction between the two might not seem particularly important, but it actually is of the utmost importance.  The former instance is exactly what the Fourth Amendment was designed to for to limit government power.  Much of our Bill of Rights is inspired by (and lifted from) the English Bill of Rights, acceptance of which was a condition of William and Mary taking the throne.  Another was the old English maxim that demonstrated the power of government to squelch dissent:

The greater the truth, the greater the libel.

The latter, especially because it comes to matters of national security, affords the government some degree of greater deference, although not absolute deference.

I’m carrying petitions for a friend that is running for city council here in New York.  I’ve been going around with someone else and the two of us went into an apartment building tonight.  The building had already been done by another candidate’s petition carriers.  Since someone’s signature is only valid for the first candidate they sign for, we decided to leave the building and move on.  On our way out of the building there was someone standing in the hallway and we decided to approach him.

New York State has party registration and closed primaries.  In order to sign for a candidate to be on the primary ballot you must be a registered member of that party.  So we asked this guy if he was a registered Democrat.  He asked who the candidate we were carrying for was and we supplied the candidate’s name.  This guy then asked if our candidate was the “Cuban guy.”  We replied that no, he was not Cuban, but that he’s Jewish.  That’s when things took a turn for the worse.

This guy replied that “They [Jews] only take care of their own,” and that’s why he wouldn’t sign the petition to get him on the ballot.  Even after we explained to him that it was only to get him on the ballot, and there was no obligation to support him, he reiterated this position.  My fellow petitioner carrier answered back a bit and explained to this guy that he was dead wrong and that we care about everybody.  Before things could further escalate we left.  I admit that I just wanted to get the hell out of there.  We said our piece and it wasn’t worth getting hurt over in case this guy turned out to be particularly crazy.

Unfortunately, this guy’s thinking is reflective of the thinking of many.  There’s plenty of anti-Semitism out there, both here and abroad.  And if people want to know why we have so many community institutions and why there are stereotypes about us in certain jobs, then one only needs to look to history.  In the past, we weren’t considered citizens, but foreigners residing in the land.  Beyond that, there were restrictions on what type of professions Jews were allowed to work in, the most infamous of these being as moneylenders and bankers.  Even though those days are long past, the stereotypes remain.

And remember, this occurred in New York, the city with the country’s largest Jewish population and one of the largest, if not the largest, Jewish population of any city in the world.  This did not occur in some place where the government fans the flames of anti-Semitism or where there are few or no Jews.  This was in a city where we can feel relatively safe to be Jews.  It’s a stark reminder that there are plenty of anti-Semitic assholes out there (to say nothing of the many other assorted bigots).

Last week there was report after report about a supposed bombshell with respect to NSA surveillance and data collection operations against Americans on American soil.  There is a major problem with those reports:  It seems much of that early reporting was wrong.  Bob Cesca at The Daily Banter summarizes it thusly:

To summarize, yes, the NSA routinely requests information from the tech giants. But the NSA doesn’t have “direct access” to servers nor is it randomly collecting information about you personally. Yet rending of garments and general apoplexy has ruled the day, complete with predictable invective about the president being “worse than Bush” and that anyone who reported on the new information debunking the initial report was and is an Obamabot apologist.

That, of course, is not really the end, but only the beginning.