ANOTHER BITE OUT OF THE ELEPHANT: Thoughts on the Mayoral Election in Houston.

And so it began yesterday.

First the tweets, then the e-mails, then the breathless coverage on the Internet and in the mainstream media.

An out lesbian had been elected Mayor of Houston.

That’s right; at the same time the local parliament in Uganda was debating making being gay a capital crime, Houston voters were electing Annise Parker -whom they had previously elected six consecutive times to public office- be their next chief executive.

Predictably, some in the opposition went bonkers.

Yet, Ms. Parker’s election reflects something almost extraordinary, particularly in so conservative a state as Texas.

The election itself was somewhat out of the ordinary, pitting an African American former City Attorney, Gene Locke, against an out lesbian. Not long ago, a mayoral election in almost any large Southern city (except perhaps Atlanta or Miami) would usually have involved a choice between white, well-heeled, straight, men. To that extent, Houston’s mayoral election -like the historic 2008 Presidential election- represents yet another example of the crumbling of barriers that had kept women and minorities from participating fully in the political life of the commonwealth.

Yet if we are rapidly moving toward a politics in which gender, race, and denominational religious affiliation are no longer seen as disqualifying, our progress is still incomplete. Too often, every step forward generates its own retrograde backlash, just as every threatened deviation from formerly accepted orthodoxies (or orthopraxy), calls forth what President Lyndon Johnson used to call “frontlash:” pre-emptive efforts to preserve a threatened status quo, particularly when it comes to maintaining the political dominance of heretofore privileged groups or preventing former “have-nots” from accessing the levers of political power.

Thus, while race, gender, and religion are increasingly seen as irrelevant to a candidate’s qualifications for office, there remains a stubborn insistence in some quarters that an LGBT person (or an atheist for that matter) should not hold public office. Such views certainly surfaced in Houston during the campaign as anti-GLBT activists and social conservatives sought to play the “queer card,” portraying Mayor-elect Parker’s sexual orientation as per se disqualifying.

Yet, as Ms. Parker herself noted, Houston voters had previously elected her to office six consecutive times, even knowing of her sexuality, which she never concealed.

Still, that opponents should have sought to play the “queer card” in the Houston mayoral campaign is still disappointing, but not surprising. Every effort by formerly marginalized or excluded groups to secure an authentic place at the table has been resisted, sometimes savagely, by those who already have their place there, and are disinclined to share make room for others who may not look, live, love, work, worship, or vote the same way. For political “have-nots,” achieving a place at the table is often a difficult, incremental process. To mix metaphors, it is like eating the elephant, one bite at a time.

Now to some, the election of an out lesbian as Mayor of Houston -or the designation of an out gay man to be the next speaker of the California Assembly (succeeding, by the way, the first African-American woman to hold that post)- is not, or should not be, news. To these people, sexuality, like race, gender, or religion, should not be an issue; none of these matters should be a factor in determining who is best qualified.

Yet, our society is still a long way from seeing things that way. Almost perversely, the election of America’s first African-American President has stirred up racial tensions and the election of an out lesbian in Houston will no doubt stir up similar tensions.

Here in the Desert, with its large and largely integrated gay and lesbian community, we have been fortunate in recent years to avoid some of the uglier manifestations of political homophobia; out LGBT people are regularly elected to serve on local city councils, and in large measure, our local politics and elections have been largely free of efforts to play the sexuality card. Ironically, many of the same people who oppose marriage equality and thus voted for Proposition 8 had no difficulty voting for an openly gay candidate in the very same election.

Nonetheless, social and political activists of every stripe often try to nationalize local issues and developments. Culture warriors, angered by what happened in Houston, may well transfer that anger to our Pleasant Desert, as they nationalized the Proposition 8 campaign last year. If that happens, the challenge won’t just be for incumbent LGBT officeholders and GLBT candidates to take lessons from Annise Parker’s successful campaign, but also for the residents of this Valley to send a resounding “NO” to outside culture warriors who may try to divide us against one another in the service of a divisive agenda most of us rejected when we came here to live, work, and play.

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Paul S. Marchand is an attorney who lives and works (but rarely plays) in Cathedral City, where he serves in the City Council. The views expressed herein are his own, and not necessarily those of the City of Cathedral City or its Redevelopment Agency.

Commemorating our Veterans: Reflections on the Day

Ninety years ago, President Woodrow Wilson proclaimed the first commemoration of Armistice Day, to mark the anniversary of the cessation of hostilities in what had been called the War to End All Wars.

Ninety years later, the hope that the Great War (World War I) would truly be the War to End All Wars has gone unfulfilled. The last of our Great War veterans has passed into eternity, but our wars continue.

And so we continue to remember our veterans, both living and dead, as a number of us gathered to do this Veterans Day morning at Desert Memorial Park in Cathedral City. A number of elected officials, including Cathedral City Councilmembers Chuck Vasquez and I, Desert Hot Springs Mayor Yvonne Parks, and Palm Springs Councilmember Lee Weigel -who has two family members at rest at the cemetery- were present, along with members of the Cathedral City Police and Fire Departments, a detail from the Palm Springs High School Air Force Junior ROTC, and -most importantly- a number of veterans from all of our armed services.

The audience was not as large as in years past, and some expressed disappointment at the turnout, but what we lost in numbers, we gained in a kind of intimacy.

Instead of being a crowd, we were a group of discrete individuals. It was possible to identify the World War II veterans, the Korea veterans, the Vietnam veterans, the Gulf War veterans, and veterans of the current operations in Iraq and Afghanistan.

Moreover, in so relatively intimate a group as gathered this morning, one gains an enhanced sense of the meaning and importance of Veterans Day, for in the assemblage, not an individual could be found who was not a veteran, or a family member, friend, or co-worker of a veteran.

And in the end, that is, for me, a large part of what Veterans Day is about. I am the child, grandchild, and other relative of veterans. I am the neighbor of veterans, I am the co-worker of veterans. And those veterans are of every sort and condition. They descend from every tongue and nation; they are of every conceivable faith and confession; they are of every political persuasion; they are of every gender and sexual orientation; every one of them has defended our nation.

And as always, the challenge for our civil society is to make sure that those who have served are duly remembered for their service, that they are not forgotten when their service is done. In remembering our veterans, we must go beyond mere words to face a face a challenge no less important today than when President Abraham Lincoln identified it in his Second Inaugural Address: “to care for him who shall have borne the battle and for his widow and his orphan.”

In the intimate gathering this morning at Desert Memorial Park, Lincoln’s challenge to America gained a new measure of import as we continue to ask the men and women of our armed forces to be ready to go into harm’s way on our behalf.

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Paul S. Marchand is an attorney who lives and works in Cathedral City, CA, where he serves as a member of the City Council. The views expressed herein are his own.

"I will Survive" meets "I've Noticed the Dead Were Hardly More than Boys:" Pride and Healing Field

Today I took part in two very different, but still community-affirming, events.

This morning, I had the honor to represent Cathedral City in the 23d annual Greater Palm Springs Pride Parade. Immediately after that, I participated in Cathedral City’s Healing Field commemoration.

Each event reflects a part of our American experience; we celebrated lives being lived with pride and lives lost in the service of the nation we call our own.

Pride represents a time for the Desert’s sizeable LGBTQ community to come together, reaffirming solidarity and staking a claim -as yet unfulfilled- to a seat at the front of the American bus.

Healing Field is a time for us to remember those who have fallen in the military operations in Iraq and in Afghanistan.

In a sense, both events are linked by a fundamental truth; it is suffering that brings people together.

Pride -whether in Palm Springs, Los Angeles, San Francisco, or New York- is about people standing up and saying “no more” to being treated as second class citizens.

The Healing Field is about coming together to find solidarity in the shared loss of friends, family, neighbors, and fellow Americans.

In the end, at Pride I think of Gloria Gaynor’s lyric “I will survive,” and I honor the perseverance of the LGBTQ community in its ongoing quest for an authentic place at the table in the American Commonwealth.

At the Healing Field, reading the names -ever more every year- of the fallen, I remember the words of Grantland Rice: “I’ve noticed that the dead were hardly more than boys [and now, girls, too],” and I offer the simple prayer: rest eternal grant unto them, O Lord, may light perpetual shine upon then, and may their souls and the souls of all the departed rest in peace. Amen.”

And at day's end, I remember the teaching of the sages: live isn't meant to be easy; it's meant to be life.

"Death plucks at my ear," wrote a Roman poet 2000 years ago, "and says: 'live, I am coming.'"

A VOID IN OUR VALLEY: BIDDING FAREWELL TO ROY WILSON

The hits just keep on coming.

Less than 24 hours after the passing of Sen. Ted Kennedy, our valley mourns the loss of another distinguished public servant.

Though Roy Wilson did not have the national prominence of Ted Kennedy, he was our neighbor. That Roy Wilson would be engaged in some manner of public service for the people of this Valley was always a constant. Thus, his sudden resignation last Friday came as a surprise.

His death earlier tonight came as a shock.

Events moved too quickly. We did not have the time to think about a time when Roy Wilson would not be serving us as our County Supervisor; we certainly did not have time to contemplate his demise. We lacked the opportunity to prepare for his leaving us, as we did have time to prepare for Ted Kennedy’s passing.

Now is not the time to try to parse the political ramifications of what has happened. There will be time for that.

Instead, we remember a Supervisor who never placed ideology in command, a pragmatist who understood that -as the late, great Tip O’Neill used to observe- all politics is local, and that at the local level, we have neither the resources nor the luxury of the sort of partisanship that is par for the course in Sacramento or in Washington City.

Though Roy was a registered Republican, he never made his registration a barrier to working with local officials who were registered Democrats or who declined to state a party affiliation. He understood that for us, the issues that mattered -whether in the realms of land use, environmental conservation, infrastructure, or the myriad of other “kitchen table” issues that challenge local communities- were issues that transcended partisan politics. What benefits one benefits all.

In a time when some have chosen to draw lines in the sand, and to shed more heat than light, Roy never did that. He was always willing to work to find common ground. He was always a teacher, and in many ways, his tenure of office was a master class in creating positive change for the people he served, and those of us who had the opportunity to work with him always came away with some new insight from him that helped illuminate and improve our own public service.

I had the privilege and the pleasure of working for nearly a decade with Roy Wilson -first as a local community activist, later as a Special District Trustee, and since 2002 as a City councilmember. From him I learned much; for what I learned from Roy Wilsom, I remain grateful. Neither I nor the rest of us in the Coachella Valley shall see his like again.

I extend my profoundest condolences to his widow Aurora Kerr Wilson and to all of his family, praying that a merciful and loving God will be with them and comfort them in this time of separation.

Requiescat in pace, Roy Wilson.

Requiem æternam dona eis Domine, Amen.

Paul S. Marchand is an attorney who lives and works in Cathedral City, where he serves on the City Council. The views expressed herein are his own.

August 26, 2009

The Dream Lives On: An Appreciation for Senator Edward Moore Kennedy

To be Irish is to know that in the end, the world will break your heart.

- Sen. Daniel Patrick Moynihan, variously attributed, either on the assassination of President John F. Kennedy or on the assassination of his brother, Sen. Robert F. Kennedy.

I have fought a good fight, I have finished my course, I have kept the faith.

-2 Timothy, 4:7

The dream lives on.

-Sen. Edward Moore Kennedy, at the Democratic National Convention, August 25, 2008

America sustained a great loss late last night.

Senator Edward Moore Kennedy slipped away from us at 77, after a life full of years, of honor, of controversy, and of service to an America to which he was always passionately committed.

With Sen. Kennedy’s passing, an era ends. Ted Kennedy was the last of three brothers -the others being President John F. Kennedy and Sen. Robert F. Kennedy- whose service to America shaped this nation in ways that will be felt for generations to come.

We all expected Teddy’s passing, yet his death -a year to the day after his astonishing “The Dream Lives On” speech at the Democratic National Convention in Denver- is still hard to bear. For the millions of Americans, myself included, who are of Irish ancestry, his going from us reminds us of the poignant words of another Irish-American Senator, Pat Moynihan, who famously opined that “to be Irish is to know that in the end, the world will break your heart.”

Right now, many of our American hearts are broken, irrespective of our ancestry.

Because, for all his faults and flaws, and for all his failures and foibles, which were many, Teddy Kennedy nevertheless believed passionately in an America where every person had a place at the table, no matter how we look, live, or love; how we work, worship, or vote, where we live, or where our ancestors came from. His commitment to an America in which everyone was entitled to a place at the table was instrumental in work to pass the Civil Rights Act of 1964, the Voting Rights Act of 1965, Americans with Disabilities Act of 1990, and the Family and Medical Leave Act of 1993, among others.

Of Edward Moore Kennedy, we may truly speak the words St. Paul the Apostle first penned in his second Epistle to Timothy: “I have fought a good fight, I have finished my course, I have kept the faith.” For in the end, Teddy Kennedy did keep his faith -both a deep and abiding Christian faith as he learned it in his profoundly Irish Catholic family, and also an equally deep and abiding faith in the promise of America.

For Teddy Kennedy, like every Irish-American, understood that America represented a land of opportunity in which every child of oppression and every victim of dispossession could find what Abraham Lincoln called “a new birth of freedom.” For the Irish, whether the Wild Geese, or the bog Irish, or the Famine Irish who came to these shores fleeing the Potato Famine (as the Kennedys did) America was, and is, a place where great things have always been possible.

In his speech in Denver last August, Teddy Kennedy spoke of being called to a “better country and a newer world.” Irrespective of our party affiliation, we should all fell ourselves called to help build a better country and a newer world. For irrespective of our party affiliation, America is our common heritage, which we are called by the very words of our constitution to make better, to “form a more perfect union.”

For even now, in times of confrontation and controversy, even in times when so may of us mourn the passing of Edward Moore Kennedy, and with him, the passing of Camelot, the dream of an America in which all can pursue happiness, of an America that remains a shining city on a hill, of an America that is still the last best hope of earth, still lives on.

And the dream shall never die.

Requiescat in pace, Edward Moore Kennedy.

Requiem æternam dona eis Domine, Amen.




Paul S. Marchand is an attorney who lives and works in Cathedral City, where he serves on the City Council. The views expressed herein are his own.

APPRECIATION FOR WALTER CRONKITE

And that’s the way it was.

As we remembered the 40th anniversary of the Apollo 11 moon landing, Walter Cronkite left us.

We shall not see his like again.

For many of us, Walter Cronkite was our primary experience of what the news was. His calm, balanced, delivery of the day’s events, and his wrap-up line, “and that’s the way it is,” helped put the world in perspective.

Not for nothing was he considered the most trusted man in America. Though Walter Cronkite was never afraid to identify his personal beliefs as being liberal, he always remained scrupulously objective in his evening newscast. If Walter Cronkite said it was so, you could rely on it in a way you can’t any more.

A generation of Americans remembers his calm, professional demeanor, his assurance that he was fulfilling an important public trust, and his evident conviction that his calling involved a commitment to candor and completeness in his reporting.

Today, the broadcast and internet media offer a smorgasbord of viewpoints and opinions to suit every persuasion and ideology. When Walter Cronkite was America’s news source, there was no such smorgasbord; the public necessarily relied on its network news anchors to tell it like it was.

Walter Cronkite told it like it was, and for this, I remain grateful.

And that’s the way it was.

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Paul S. Marchand is an attorney who lives and works in Cathedral City, where he serves on the City Council. The views expressed herein are his own.

Cathedral City Honored by California Resource & Recycling Association; Appreciation for Environmental Conservation Mgr. Deanna Pressgrove

Cathedral City has won a prestigious award from the California Resource & Recycling Association for its program for Sharps Disposal by Mail. The award is one of only five presented per year by the CRRA. Cathedral City is once again one of only five agencies in the State to garner such recognition.

The program assists residents whose medical conditions require them to use sharps, whether from hypodermics, lancets, blood glucose monitors, or the like, in disposing of these potentially hazardous items. The program makes available a heavy gauge container and a shipping box. When the container has been filled, the user can place it in the box, which has prepaid shipping, seal the box, and send it to a sharps disposal facility.

The program has been under way for a couple of years now, and the credit for it goes to Cathedral City’s Environmental Conservation Manager, Deanna Pressgrove. Her work in developing and implementing the program has been critical to its ongoing success. Moreover, the program involves no cost to the City’s general fund, as it is funded through state monies made available to support local recycling efforts.

The CRRA award is just the latest of many awards Cathedral City’s staff, including Ms. Pressgrove, have won through their efforts. While we on the Council are often the public face of the City, it is the hardworking and dedicated staff who do the heavy work to ensure that the public is well served. Too often, they do not get the credit they deserve, and it is thus a real pleasure to be able to acknowledge the real contributions our staff -in this case, Ms. Pressgrove- continue to make toward the life of our community.

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The views expressed herein are my own, not necessarily the views of the City of Cathedral City or its redevelopment agency, or of any other entity.

A NATION OF STAKEHOLDERS: Reaffirming Ownership of our Public Thing.

Six years ago, on my first Independence Day as a city councilman, I thought I would try my hand at some thoughts for the day. Since then, much has changed in American society. We have a new President, and here in California, a different governor and legislature than we had six years ago. We face challenges at home and abroad that call for careful and considerate action.

Nonetheless, the American Revolution continues, and each July 4, we engage in an important debate about what the American Revolution means, and such a debate is as appropriate on this Independence Day as on any other, and in revisiting my words of 2003, I thought them just as relevant today as they were then.

On Independence Day, the word “freedom” is much in the air. Now there are many kinds of freedom, including the freedom to do nothing at all or the kind of freedom that St. Francis of Assisi personified and which Janis Joplin sang about, that of having nothing left to lose.

But as Americans, as a people who insisting on living their lives in the present tense and in the active voice, meaningful freedom has to imply a lot more. Our American concept of freedom demands active participation in order to work. Because each one of us has a vested interest in the healthy functioning of our free society, we must be more than passive onlookers; ours is an involved, responsible stakeholdership. American freedom must be worked at to be preserved; this Union, and its republican form of government, is as much as a work in progress today as it was on that first Independence Day in 1776.

Independence Day reminds us that the true context of freedom is responsibility; the true rewards of taking responsibility for the well-being of our communities are to be found in knowing that in a community that draws its strength from the active participation of all of its members, each of its members may in safety and security pursue his or her calling, avocation, and dream. In a community where each of us is an involved stakeholder, where unfettered discussion, vigorous debate, and the free exchange of ideas are the currency of the day, we may dare aspire to the kind of wisdom, learning, and civic virtue that the men (and women) of 1776 saw as the glory of our Republic.

Indeed, we do well to remember that America has become the world’s intellectual powerhouse in large measure because our commitment to open inquiry and free speech has made possible a critical mass of research, scholarship, and discovery. Our institutions of higher learning draw scholars from around the world, and it was no accident that, when the dark clouds of fascism, Naziism, and Stalinism threatened to overcome the light of learning in Europe, an exodus of Europe’s finest minds found refuge in this country. Nor was it an accident that when Mao’s China declared war on its intellectuals, many of that country greatest thinkers should have come here as well.

Of course, our America is more than just institutions of learning. She continues to be -above all others- the place people come to. At her best, America has conferred a blanket absolution, and a blanket oblivion; on this side of the ocean, the ancient quarrels of ancestral lands have no place. If America’s refusal to live in the past tense sometimes bereaves us of some degree of historical perspective, it also insulates us from endlessly repeating cycles of grievance and victimhood. At her best, America trusts in her existing institutions to mediate the passions and controversies that can transfix even the most even-tempered society. Indeed, since the time of Alexis de Tocqueville, Europeans have noted again and again how controversies that elsewhere might be handled in the streets and at the barricades are in America usually settled in the courts.

Yet, above all else, what has historically separated America from so many other societies is that sense of stakeholdership which lies at the core of our American understanding of freedom. If we hold dear the rights of free speech, free elections, free inquiry, and freedom from government intrusion into our private affairs, it is because they are the foundation of everything else in our American politics of ordered individual liberties. On this Independence Day, the freedom we celebrate is inextricably wrapped up in our sense as Americans that it is not merely our right, but our duty, to participate actively in the running of our own society.

And withal, we know that our America remains a work in progress, subject to a series of imperfections, doubts, and insecurities. Americans often disagree passionately on a variety of issues. We know that there remain unresolved issues about which the dialogue is as vexed and conflicted today as it was at the dawn of the Republic. We know that we face challenges unimaginable to all but the most prescient of our forebears. Nevertheless, today is our day, irrespective of party, ideology, group identification, or faction. On this Independence Day, we reaffirm, as we have on every Independence Day since 1776, that our country is res publica, the Public Thing that is the possession and the inheritance of all of us.

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Paul S. Marchand is attorney. He lives and works in Cathedral City California, and is a member of the City Council there. The views expressed herein are his own. © 2009 by the author

Living With Books: An Appreciation for the Reopening of the Cathedral City Library

In an 1815 letter to John Adams, his friend and immediate predecessor as President, Thomas Jefferson wrote “I cannot live without books,” and it was Thomas Jefferson who offered his entire library to the United States to replace the holdings of the Library of Congress after the British had burned the Capitol (and the LOC) in August, 1814.

At the Cathedral City Library yesterday morning, we shared a Jeffersonian moment. More than two years after the Library suffered a fire and had to close, it reopened yesterday more ready than ever to resume its function as a vital resource for the increase and diffusion of knowledge.

Yet, the reopening of our Cathedral City library is more than just a cause for community celebration. It is a victory for civilization itself. For civilization is a knowledge-based enterprise. History teaches us that the material and mental advances we have come to take for granted happen in urban settings where, as novelist James Michener observed, a library can accumulate texts.

And those accumulated texts -and all the related items we entrust to libraries for consultation and safekeeping- become the foundation on which we educate the next generation, on which we increase our own knowledge, and on which we seek what English novelist Thomas Love Peacock once referred to as “the refreshment of the magic page.”

More than any repository of precious metals or gems, libraries are the treasure-houses of our civilization, whose destruction -either by totalitarians or by barbarians acting out against civilized things- is a crime against civilization.

What does any library -and particularly our Cathedral City library- do for its community?

A library bears witness against our forgetting -or worse, our vanishing. The texts of classical antiquity, the books of the Bible, the suras of the Qur’an, the Vedas and the Upanishads, the teachings of the Buddha and of Confucius, all come down to us because libraries made their preservation possible

A library is a repository of written memory and an insurance policy against the incremental errors that inevitably creep into a purely oral tradition. We can read the plays of Shakespeare, the philosophy of Plato, or the metaphysics of the I Ching as they were written because of libraries.

Libraries are both conservative and subversive at the same time; libraries conserve and preserve the words of our forebears, but many of those words are still considered even controversial and potentially even dangerous to this day. In the same library that has in its collection the conservative views of Edmund Burke may also be found The Anarchist’s Cookbook. The Bible shares shelf space with the Qur’an, and the writings of Chairman Mao with those of his great antagonist Chiang Kai-shek. Pulp fiction reposes next to the searing soul-searching of Dostoevskii. And all of these are available to the reader with the time, the inclination, and the curiosity.

Finally, libraries are formidable things. Where there is knowledge, there is power. Where that knowledge can be accessed by any literate person, without regard to race, creed, color, class, sexuality, gender, disability, or any other invidious classification, democracy can take root. The free knowledge available at a library is a thing precious to liberty and formidable to tyrants, something Thomas Jefferson clearly understood when he wrote those words to John Adams: “I cannot live without books.”

Because none of us can truly live without books, the lack of a fully-functioning library had left our community life in Cathedral City in syncope. Now that syncope is ended, and we who live in Cathedral City can -in our restored and improved library- experience again the refreshment of the magic page.

The views contained herein are my own, and do not necessarily represent the official views of the City of Cathedral City, its Redevelopment Agency, or of any other entity or person.

Justice Souter Retires: A Few Thoughts on His Successor and Her Desirable Qualifications for the Job

Justice David Hackett Souter submitted his retirement letter to President Obama this morning.

The news actually broke late yesterday, and left many -both in the legal profession and in the general population- with the kind of sinking feeling one gets when a family member discloses a terminal illness.

During 19 years on the Supreme Court, Justice Souter charted an independent course. When nominated by then-President George H.W. Bush in 1990, Souter was expected to be another deeply conservative jurist in the mold of Antonin Scalia or Clarence Thomas. Progressives braced themselves for the worst. I recall offering an egregious pun -that I’d rather have a lover than a Souter- that reflected my own anxiety about what the elevation to the Court this laconic New Hampshire Yankee might portend for the nation.

Certainly, Souter surprised both liberals and conservatives alike. Movement conservatives expecting a rigid or radical right-wing judge were disappointed -to the point where the very name Souter has become hateful to many of them. Though liberals professed themselves disappointed by some of Souter’s views on business and corporate issues, they took considerable comfort from Souter’s more moderate-to-liberal views on individual rights and liberties.

Now, of course, the feeding frenzy has begun again, and movement people on both sides of the political divide are gathering their troops; conservatives and liberals alike will want President Obama to appoint a justice who mirrors their own expectations.

Conservatives will inevitably be disappointed; a Democratic President is hardly likely to appoint the sort of judicial clone of John Roberts, Antonin Scalia, or Clarence Thomas that movement conservatives prefer. Conversely, movement liberals will probably be angered if the President does not select a staunch liberal.

Yet the Court has been moved too far to the right for a single appointment to redress the balance. As has been repeatedly noted, Souter has been numbered among the Court’s “liberals;” replacing him will not alter the ideological balance on the Supreme bench.

Still, as President Obama has already noted, the new justice should have certain qualifications, among them a real sense of empathy, and a realization that the law affects real people living real lives.

There are a number of other qualifications the person selected to replace David Souter should have, some of them technical, some of them political, all of them important, but half a dozen of which merit exploration:

First, she should have a fundamental passion for the law. She needs to be able to chart a careful course between precedent and innovation. She must respect stare decisis (the principle that existing precedent should govern wherever possible), while not allowing stare decisis to become a judicial straightjacket acting to perpetuate injustice or bad law. She must understand that the law is both conservative in its growth and functioning, and liberal in its solicitude for the rights and liberties of individuals.

Second, she must be an exacting craftswoman with language. Supreme Court opinions have grown fat and prolix, burdened with deluges of dicta and floods of footnotes -dangling from the bottom of the page in a display of gratuitous erudition like useless tassels on a Biedermeyer chair. Her opinions should be like vodka, powerful and clear, most effective in measured doses. When she writes on a matter that transfixes the nation, she should be aware that she is writing not just to decide the case, but for the ages as well.

Third, she must never forget that -as President Obama has observed- the Court’s holdings are not academic exercises, but are intended to guide real people dealing with real issues; they will affect not merely the parties to the case before the Court, but millions of people across the nation and around the world as well. The beat cop wondering when he can conduct a warrantless search, the school principal who needs to know what the permissible restrictions may be on student speech, the bankruptcy debtor who needs to know what he can hold on to out of the financial wreckage, the taxpayer uncertain what is and is not deductible. These are just few of the people whose actions will be guided by the views and decisions of the incoming justice and her colleagues.

Fourth, she must have a thick skin and should have some history in politics. Every opinion she writes will anger somebody, somewhere. In a wired world where everybody has an opinion, Supreme Court justices -like other public figures- can expect to be lauded and vilified at the same time. A justice with some political history, either as a candidate or elected official, or in a campaign, would bring to the Court an understanding of some of the political dynamics that operate outside the Supreme Court building -an understanding that the current Justices, given their career histories, may not possess.

Fifth, she must be her own person on the Court and in national life. She should not be identified with movement people on either side, nor should she herself be a movement person. She should be able to avoid being reflexively associated with any other Justice, not being “joined at the hip” to another member of the Court, in the way that Justices Scalia and Thomas are often linked together.

Sixth, she must be able to carry the Court with her, building workable coalitions where possible. Justices are often honored for their great dissents, but being a “Great Dissenter” does not always advance the law.

Finally, she should be a woman. The legal profession is no longer an exclusively male preserve; the gender ratio is approaching parity, and the Court, having only one woman among its membership, is increasingly disconnected from a world in which women participate as equals at every level. It is simply obscurantist and sexist to argue that there are not more than enough women with the intellectual chops to be first-rate Justices to whom President Obama can turn.

During the 2008 presidential primary campaign, then-Senator and now Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton spoke eloquently of the 18 million cracks in the glass ceiling that the votes for her had represented. The GOP nominated Sarah Palin as its vice-presidential candidate. To the extent that the arrival of each new justice essentially remakes the Supreme Court, rejiggering the interpersonal dynamics of the institution, the time is now to begin redressing the gender balance on the world’s most important court.

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The views expressed herein are my own, and do not necessarily represent the views of the City of Cathedral City, the Redevelopment Agency, or any other body or person.

LESSONS FROM THE LIVES OF THE SAINTS: THOUGHTS ON ST. PATRICK'S DAY

Growing up, I used to hear my Irish Catholic grandmother remind me that there are lessons to be learned from the lives of the saints. Such lessons can be applied not only to individuals, but also to nations.

Of all of the great nations of the world, America stands out as the quintessential "nation of immigrants," composed of voyagers and exiles from every one of the worlds tongues, nations, and stations; from every religion or none at all, from every zone of conflict or street of violence, from the vastnesses of continents scorched by equinoctial suns to the fringes of green and seagirt islands such as Ireland, granite-buttressed and battered by the ageless pounding of Atlantic breakers.

In a sense, every American is without exception a member of some minority group or other. To be sure, our American story has until recent years been largely identified as the history of the white settlers, primarily British and northern European, who came to what is now Virginia and the northeast. Yet in truth, our history is the history of a lengthy series of arrivals, even from that of the first peoples who arrived so many thousands of years ago across the now-drowned land bridge between Siberia and Alaska.

On Saint Patrick's day, of course, we recall the experience of the Irish in America, and rightly so, for that experience has molded the history of America and of Ireland, and has changed the lives of every Irish-American, and every Irishman.

The story of the Gael in the New World is almost a textbook example of how the contributions of a discrete and identifiable community can enlarge the American experience. We who are of Irish descent brought with us from the ancestral island a culture, a world view, a faith, and most importantly, a faculty for the written and the spoken word that has been almost without peer in the history of the English language. After all, James Joyce once asked, who but the Irish could have taken the tongue of the conqueror and made it so brilliantly their own?

Yet the one great sin against blood, faith, and heritage of which Irish-Americans can never be accused is that of being assimilated into an alien culture and entirely abandoning their own. Instead, the Irish, like so many others before and since, beginning as outsiders, integrated themselves into American society, and in so doing, influenced that society in ways both obvious and subtle. Even the Famine Irish, who fled the Potato Famine of the 1840s, and were often the poorest of the poor and the rudest of the rude, came as members of a culture that, though often dormant under English occupation, possessed and possesses still an ancient and noble heritage. And without the leavening and the gifts of the Irish and of their culture, our own American culture would be perceptibly poorer.

On the Feast of Saint Patrick, then, all of us may profit from the example of the Irish in America, not out of simple nostalgia, or even from mere pride of ancestry (if, dear reader, you happen, like yours truly, to be of Irish descent), but rather because the Irish have been our teachers, from whose achievements and history in this country we may take instruction and inspiration. For against the Irish immigrants, particularly the Famine Irish, were ranged many of the most powerful social and political forces of the day, united in fear and dislike of a proud but primitive people from a different culture, of a Roman Catholic people in a Protestant republic, of a communitarian people in a land of rugged individualists, and of poor people in a society just beginning to come to terms with the potentialities of staggering wealth. Why, the nativist element demanded, did we have to admit the Irish at all? And if we had to let them in, why couldn't the Irish just be assimilated until they adopted the faith and culture of the Protestant population? Against such an initial background, the history of the Irish community in this country was for some time a history of initial rejection, a history of anti-Irish and anti-Catholic bigotry and fear In the longer term, however, the history of the Irish in America has been a history of slow, steady surmounting of barriers, a history of building bridges, paying dues, and establishing bona fides, a history, in short, of integration.

Yet such a history is decades in the making, and true integration is the accomplishment of generations. For Irish-Americans, the struggle to secure equal rights was in many ways closely parallel to the struggles waged by other minority groups over the years. In that regard, the experience of the Irish is certainly not unique, but it is instructive.

And to the extent that we still struggle to recognize that those who may differ from us are nevertheless our fellow Americans, and just as entitled as we are to a place at the table in the commonwealth, and that we may profitably take the blueprint for the social and political integration of all Americans, of whatever creed, color, gender, orientation, or place of origin, from the Irish. For as the Irish demonstrated, participation in the life of the larger community leads to habituation; habituation leads to accommodation; accommodation leads to toleration, and toleration leads to acceptance and integration. When integration happens, barriers fall and hitherto separate cultures or subcultures can teach and learn from one another, and can enrich one another, fulfilling the American promise and making this nation stronger for it.

This, then, is the lesson for St. Patrick’s day.

FOR OUR OWN SAFETY'S SAKE: WHY IT IS IN EVERYBODY’S WELL-CONSIDERED INTEREST FOR CALIFORNIA’S SUPREME COURT TO CONSIGN PROPOSITION 8 TO THE ROUNDFILE.

Today's Palm Springs Desert Sun editorialized today urging the California Supreme Court to overturn Proposition 8. In three paragraphs appearing in various parts of its editorial, The Desert Sun nailed the issue.

The editorial notes that “Proposition 8, the voter-approved initiative to ban same-sex marriages, only serves to allow the fundamental constitutional rights of one group of people to be stripped away by a majority vote.”

“If,” the editorial goes on to warn, “Proposition 8 stands, it will set a bad precedent and could endanger the rights of other groups. This is an issue that is more about how the law is applied than about marriage. The California Supreme Court must ensure equal protection of its residents under the law.”

Finally, the editorial points out a critical truth about equality before the law: “We don't have true civil rights if some of us aren't entitled to them.”

The hardest, truest test of a democracy is not how well it takes care of those who are in the majority, but how well it accommodates those who may be in the unpopular, dissenting, or disliked minority. This is true whether we are speaking of the rights of the religious dissenter, the immigrant, the political opponent, or the GLBT person.

That was the prime reason a constituent, a self-identified “cultural conservative of color,” gave me to explain having voted against Proposition 8. Now I know this constituent thinks my sexual orientation is not “normal” or “moral,” and that the constituent entertains a “yuck factor” about what LGBT people “do in bed,” yet this constituent also understands one political reality very well: “If they can come after you today, they can come after us tomorrow.”

That’s well-considered self interest at work.

And well-considered self-interest is at the core of how any democratic republic works. James Madison understood that perfectly. That’s why the U.S. Constitution he was instrumental in drafting has stood up so well across more than two centuries of national growth, civil and foreign wars, and vast social change.

Of course, supporters of Proposition 8 have tried to couch the discussion in “moral” terms, about “protecting” families from the presumptively immoral inroads of GLBT people into the “sacred” institution of marriage, which -in their view- is either too fragile to be allowed to LGBT people, or so sacred that it has to be reserved to straight folks.

But somewhere along the line, the proponents of Proposition 8 forgot a fundamental reality: in America, every single one of us is in some kind of minority, whether racial, ethnic, religious, sexual, or other (southpaws take note), and thus in potential danger from the majority. In such a disparate society, our own well-considered self-interest ought to restrain us from legislation that targets the civil rights of groups we may not like lest our own group become targets of the next wave of scapegoating or wedge-issue politics. As Benjamin Franklin put it, “we must hang together, or we shall surely hang separately.”

We’ve seen scapegoating, discrimination, and wedge issue politics happen before.

Our own Californian history demonstrates a disturbing willingness on the part of California voters to write bigotry and discrimination into the Constitution or laws of the Golden State. Virtually without exception, these laws have had to be overturned by the courts:

● In 1879, the framers of our State Constitution included a prohibition against Chinese being employed.

● The 1913 Alien Land Act, aimed at Chinese, Japanese, Koreans, and subcontinental Indians, prohibited them from owning land.

● Proposition 14 (1964), which would written into California’s constitution a right of racial discrimination in housing.

● Proposition 187, ostensibly directed against illegal immigrants, but widely perceived as targeting California’s Latino community.

In each of these cases, California cast aside the better angels of its nature, cutting a great swath through the constitution in order to diminish the rights of unpopular minorities.

Proposition 8 supporters seek to cut a similar swath through the constitution to diminish the rights of LGBT people much as, in Robert Bolt’s play A Man for All Seasons, one of the characters declares his willingness to “cut down every law in England to get at the devil.”

In a devastating rebuke, the play’s protagonist, Sir Thomas More, asks:

"What would you do? Cut a great road through the law to get after the Devil? ... And when the last law was down, and the Devil turned round on you - where would you hide, ... the laws all being flat? This country is planted thick with laws from coast to coast, Man's laws, not God's, and if you cut them down ... do you really think you could stand upright in the winds that would blow then? Yes, I give the Devil benefit of law, for my own safety's sake!"

Perhaps an extreme formulation, but it aptly encapsulates the importance of cleaving to the rule of law in the face of the easy temptation to misuse the law for selfish ends, or to do harm to others in the service of a particular viewpoint or ideology.

The freedom of all of us is a function of the freedom of one. One may not support same-gender marriage per se, yet still understand that Proposition 8 is a bad idea. One may have that “yuck factor” about what GLBT people do together, yet still believe society as a whole is endangered by writing overt discrimination of any kind into law.

In our conversation, my socially conservative constituent of color happened to mention the famous “I didn’t speak up” poem, which has become so much a part of our culture that many quote it without even knowing its source. It comes from Pastor Martin Niemöller, the courageous German Lutheran clergyman (and sometime World War I U-Boat commander) who dared to stand up to Hitler:

"In Germany, they came first for the Communists,
And I didn’t speak up because I wasn’t a Communist;

And then they came for the trade unionists,
And I didn’t speak up because I wasn’t a trade unionist;

And then they came for the Jews,
And I didn’t speak up because I wasn’t a Jew;

And then . . . they came for me . . .
And by that time there was no one left to speak up."

“If,” my constituent asked, “I don’t speak up for you when they try to take away your rights, how can I hope you’ll speak up for me if they try to take away my civil rights?”

So, I concur with the Desert Sun. The Supreme Court should strike down Proposition 8, for all our safety’s sake.

DAY ONE: Thoughts on President Barack Obama's Inaugural Address

In eighteen brief minutes, President Barack Obama accomplished two seemingly contradictory tasks.

On one hand, he charted a carefully postideological course between President Lyndon Johnson’s Great Society faith in the ability of government to accomplish all things for all people and Ronald Reagan’s characterization of government as not the solution but the problem.

On the other, the President made it clear that on his watch, liberalism is back. Point by point, bluntly but never rudely, President Obama decisively broke with his predecessor George W. Bush’s administration and hard-line conservative world outlook. In doing so, the President enunciated a new and muscular liberalism, a liberalism that is articulate, passionate, sure of itself, and not so broadminded that it won’t take its own side in a fight.

After a generation in which the very word “liberal” had come to carry a conservative-imposed weight of pejorative baggage, liberalism’s world outlook has found a new, articulate, champion in President Barack Obama. Rarely in recent years have we on the progressive side of the aisle heard a President of the United States speak with such moral clarity and such conviction.

Today, Barack Obama singlehandedly took liberals off the endangered species list, and restored liberalism to its righful moral high ground in American discourse.

Yet, an inauguration is just that, a beginning. The challenge facing President Obama will be to find a meaningful way to keep his seemingly contradictory visions from working at cross-purposes. It is one thing to be postideological on the issue of making government work -and work well. It is another to ensure that the progressive values the President so clearly embodies do not become the victim of an excessively transactional worldview that ignores the American people’s clear expectations of change.

In short, President Obama’s administration must continue to strike the balance his campaign struck so brilliantly, between the transformational and the transactional, between “movement people” and “campaign people.” To cite just one example of the challenges that await; it is very much one thing to say that “waterboarding is torture” -and kudos to Attorney General nominee Eric Holder for candidly admitting it- but very much another to insist upon the immediate prosecution of senior members of the former administration.

And this Administration will stumble; all Administrations do. What reassures us, however, is that President Obama did not fear to confront forthrightly and articulately the national sense that we can do better, we will do better, we must do better. Not for a long time have the American people expected -and received- so clear a break with the past. Not for a long time have the American people greeted a new President with such general hope and rejoicing. Let us hope that President Obama’s inaugural address proves an accurate blueprint of his Administration’s achievements.

God willing; yes, we can.

The viewpoints expressed herein are my own, and do not necessarily represent those of the City of Cathedral City or any other entity.