Committed Critic

Today I voted for the first time since Bob Dole ran against Bill Clinton in 1996, and the experience of going to the polls calls my attention to two huge flaws in the American electoral process that I feel we should all be talking about. So, straying briefly from theology, here are my criticisms of, and proposals for, the two dynamics that I think ruin American politics.

PROBLEM ONE: You have to vote for a winner.

I have a housemate and another good friend who are strong supporters of Ron Paul, and I have a lot of sympathy for their choice. In particular, he’s the only candidate in either party who is opposed to both abortion and the Iraq war. I also like Barack Obama (whom I voted for today), but I have to admit that I would strongly consider giving my support to Paul instead, except for one thing: Ron Paul can’t win.

Normally, I believe in making decisions based on principle, but in this case the situation is more complicated. Aside from liking Obama as a leader (which I do), I’m also concerned about the alternatives.

To put it as briefly as I can, I don’t think Hillary can beat McCain or Romney, so a vote for anyone but Obama in the democratic primary simply makes it more likely that Clinton will win the nomination and that, therefore, McCain or Romney will be our next president.

Now, I could support Ron Paul as a Republican, but I don’t think he has a shot to win the nomination. And I can only vote in one Massachusetts primary — either Democrat or Republican. That means, paradoxically, that I am forced into a situation where a vote for Ron Paul basically amounts to a vote for McCain/Romney.

Some of this is unavoidable, especially in this case since it wouldn’t make sense to let everyone vote in both primaries — then we’d really see political games going on. But the problem in our system is that Ron Paul might actually have a shot to win if people were voting for exactly who they wanted, without worrying that it might help someone else win. Paul has a lot of appeal, but I’m sure there are many people who won’t vote for him simply because it would help one of the other candidates.

Solution:

There’s a clear (though only partial) solution here, that would complicate our current electoral process, but that I think is worthwhile. I’ll describe how it would work in the primaries.

The only truly just way to have an election with multiple candidates is to require a candidate to get more than 50% of the total vote in order to win. That way, if 60% of the Democrats don’t want Clinton, she can’t win the nomination with 40% just because the rest of the voters split 30/30 for Obama and Edwards. So none of those 60% percent have to worry about inadventently helping Clinton by voting for Obama or Edwards.

The way this works is, if no one gets 50% (which is likely in this case), you drop the lowest vote-getters from the ballot and then have a run-off election. I would suggest the best way to do this would be to keep the top four candidates, provided they each got at least 10% of the vote. Among the Democrats, you’d probably end up with Obama/Clinton/Edwards, and among the Republicans it would probably be McCain/Romney/Huckabee/Paul.

If someone in the run-off gets more than 50%, they win. But if they don’t (which would probably be the case in both parties this time), then you drop the lowest vote-getter and run it again.

This doesn’t solve the problem completely. For example, I still couldn’t support Hillary in the primary because I don’t think she can beat the Republicans in the general election. However, what this system does do is help candidates like Ron Paul — candidates who have a lot of supporters, but whom people doubt can really win.

The key point is that a vote for Paul in this system makes it no more likely that McCain or Romney will win. So for example, if I just want anyone but Romney, a vote for any of the other Republican candidates will take away from the number of votes Romney needs to get 50%. Once voters feel freer to vote for the candidate they actually want, Paul might end up having enough real supporters to beat Huckabee, which would leave McCain/Romney/Paul for the third run-off.

But — and here’s the key point — even if he doesn’t win, everyone who wanted Paul had the opportunity to vote for him. If it turns out that he doesn’t have enough support to make it to the next ballot, then the people who voted for him get to choose which of the other candidates to give their support to in the run-off. Not only has Paul been given a fair shot at winning (since he didn’t lose the votes of people who were scared of helping someone else), but also his supporters still get a voice in who the nominee will be, among the remaining candidates.

The same process would hold in the general election, which would give a third-party candidate (like Perot or Nader) a fair shot, for all the same reasons I’ve described.

People would object to this system because run-offs would require people to vote more than once, on different days. Also, you’d have a somewhat different electorate for each run-off, since different people would be busy or out of town each day. However, in light of the resources that America already pours into its absurdly long, year-and-a-half presidential election, surely people could find the time to vote three or four times in January and three of four times again in November.

PROBLEM TWO: The only real contests are in swing states

This is the common complaint about the electoral college, which many people think should be replaced with a direct popular vote. That could work, but you still have the problem that each person is only one out of tens of millions of votes, so no one vote seems particularly important.

I think an even better system would be to keep the electoral college, but for each state to divide up its delegates according to the percentage of the state-wide popular vote.

So imagine living in Texas, as I did, when George W. Bush was nominated in 2000. It was so obvious that he would win the state, that I didn’t bother to vote. People who supported him had no reason to doubt that he would beat Gore, and people who supported Gore knew they had no chance of taking the state.

But imagine if Texas’s 34 delegates were assigned by percentage of the state-wide popular vote. Then Democrats would have real hope of winning some delegates, and Republicans couldn’t just sit back knowing they would win the state. Each party would be fighting over real delegates that they had a real chance of winning or losing to the other side. We would no longer have the kind of nonsense from 2000, where Florida could swing the entire election with all of its 27 delegates having to go to one party or the other. Plus, a third-party candidate could win a substantial number of delegates nation-wide even if he or she couldn’t command a majority in a large state.

What’s more, because the parties would be fighting for delegates (rather than just having a national popular vote), a few thousand votes could swing an entire delegate, which could have a recognizable impact on the national election. There would be a real reason to campaign for your candidate locally, and a real reason to try to get out the vote. I have to think this would give a substantial boost to voter participation, and it would also increase the likelihood that the electoral college would mirror the national popular vote.

COULD THIS WORK?

Both of these suggestions have varying degrees of difficulty.

Having a run-off in the general election would require a constitutional amendment, so it seems the least likely to work out. At the primary level, however, I believe each state’s party can decide on its own procedures, so I see no reason why at least some states couldn’t adopt this kind of system right away.

Concerning the logistical complexity of having repeated run-offs, we might be able to solve the problem by setting up a virtual run-off, where each voter would rank their choices for president. For the first ballot, only first choices would be counted. But if a run-off was necessary, we would simply re-count all the same ballots, but for anyone whose first choice was no longer on the ballot, their second choice would be counted as their vote — and so on, until a candidate won more than 50% of the votes. News broadcasts could do a quick breakdown of each election to show how the various candidates were eliminated and what percentage of the vote they received in each run-off. This would work better in the primary election, since it would be difficult to have states assign their delegates to the electoral college in the same way. Of course, if we went to a national popular vote, this system would make sense at the national level.

As to dividing up states’ delegates according to state-wide popular vote, the difficulty is that the Republican voters of Texas aren’t going to want to pass a law that gives some of their delegates to the Democrats each election, any more than the Democratic voters of Massachusetts are going to want to give up delegates to the Republicans. So this method of choosing delegates would be the most feasible in swing states, where there is no clear majority that wants to protect its block vote. And since the constitution allows each state to decide how to choose its delegates, we can’t simply pass a federal law to change the system.

The other possibility is for various state legislatures to get together and make a binding agreement to apportion their delegates according to state-wide popular vote. (There has been recent talk of a similar suggestion using the national popular vote, but I’ll leave that to anyone else who wants to explain it.) There would have to be enough red states and enough blue states in on the deal, in order for people to feel that the agreement would result in a just election. For it to be truly fair, I think it would require all 50 states plus DC, so it’s hard to imagine how it would happen.

A constitutional amendment, dictating how states must choose their delegates, might be the only way to make it work.

I’d love to get some good discussion here. Surely our presidential elections demand a better system than what we have, but we need solutions that are feasible.

A couple of weeks ago, a nearby Massachusetts school district decided to cut off all their high school sports programs, as well as their elementary and middle school art and music classes, because of lack of funding. Parents voted against higher taxes, and so the district did what they apparently had to do.

Meanwhile, the high school across the street from my house is rebuilding a new high school, on the same lot, to replace their current building, which they’ll tear down as soon as this one is done. Funny thing is, the current building was built just 35 years ago to replace an older building, which was where the new one will be now.

This newest building will take two and a half years and will cost about $150 million. The stated reasons for replacement, according to today’s paper: inadequate science labs, poor air circulation, and a lack of natural light. Since they could have just built a new wing of science labs, the last two reasons are apparently the real point. Translation: spoiled teenagers are tired of their ugly school, and their rich parents know how to get their own way.

I don’t really like what’s happening in either place, but I don’t suppose I could do much of anything about either one. Sad thing is, I’m mostly just irritated because I don’t like the noise across the street.

Note: This is a thorough rewriting of an original post that more harshly criticized Christians who forward conservative emails. I regret the tone (sarcastic and condemning) of the original post, because I ultimately just supported the same kind of tribalism I was trying to attack.

My hope is that this version of the post will give a clear debunking of the supposed Dobson email and will challenge each of us to think about the ideas we adopt; I also hope that I can accomplish this without belittling anyone or pinning narrow-mindedness on a particular group that I tend to disagree with. –SDH, 12-24-07

I got an email forward this past week that I’ve received before:

Subject: Dr. Dobson and CBS Response
Will you please take a minute to read this, please? It’s
really important to our faith.
Thanks,
_____Dr. Dobson & CBS Response

Apparently we are to be allowed to watch TV
programs that use every foul word in the English
language, but not the word “God” It will only
take a minute to read this and see if you think
you should send it out

DR. DOBSON’S PLEA FOR ACTION

CBS discontinued “Touched by an Angel” for using
the word God in every program. Madeline Murray
O’Hare, an atheist, successfully managed to
eliminate the use of Bible reading from public
schools a few years ago.

Now her organization has been granted a federal
hearing on the same subject by the Federal
Communications Commission (FCC) Washington , DC

Their petition, Number 2493, would ultimately pave
the way to stop the reading of the gospel, our Lord
and Savior, on the airwaves of America

They got 287,000 signatures to back their stand!
If this attempt is successful, all Sunday worship
services being broadcast on the radio or by
television will be stopped. This group is also
campaigning to remove all Christmas programs and
Christmas carols from public schools!

You as a Christian can help!

We are praying for at least 1 million signatures. This would
defeat their effort and show that there are many Christians
alive, well and concerned about our country. As Christians
we must unite on this. Please don’t take this lightly.

We ignored this lady once and lost prayer in our
school and in offices across the nation

Please stand up for your religious freedom and let
your voice be heard. Together we can make a
difference in our country while creating a way for
the lost to know the Lord.

Please press “forward”, and forward this to
everyone that you think should read this.
Now, please sign your name at the bottom ( you
can only add your name after you have pressed the
“Forward”).

Don’t delete any other names, just go to the next
number and type your name and state. Please defeat this
organization and keep the right of our freedom of religion.

REMEMBER: Our country was founded on freedom of religion
and our Constitution is based on the 10 Commandments.

Agree or Delete: Instructions to sign are at the bottom.

PETITION FOR PRESIDENT BUSH

PETITION TO REINSTATE PRAYER IN PUBLIC SCHOOLS:
1.

2,236 people had typed their name into this particular email.

For anyone who doesn’t know, this petition is a hoax. In fact, almost every single thing in it is either fabrication or gross misrepresentation.

To begin with, an internet petition is basically useless, because there’s nothing stopping someone from either (1) making up names (since you can’t check the handwriting) or (2) changing the subject of the petition once everyone’s name is on it. Even assuming an email petition could work, this particular email is basically incoherent. It is written in sloppy prose with numerous mistakes (that James Dobson supposedly penned!), and on the whole it doesn’t make logical sense.

Here are a few of the problems.

1. Madalyn Murray O’Hair’s first and last names are both misspelled in the email.

2. Touched by an Angel ran (according to imdb.com) from 1994 until 2003, which is actually a long run for a tv show. It doesn’t take a conspiracy to get a show cancelled after nine seasons.

3. The email is riddled with grammatical errors, such as the missing period after “God” in the first paragraph.

4. O’Hair apparently did succeed in eliminating Bible reading from public schools in 1963; but calling that just “a few years ago” suggests that this was written up a long time ago.

5. One sentence reads, “Their petition . . . would ultimately pave
the way to stop the reading of the gospel, our Lord and Savior, on the airwaves of America”. So grammatically, in that sentence, “the gospel” is “our Lord and Savior”?

Then, right before the list of names, it says, “PETITION TO REINSTATE PRAYER IN PUBLIC SCHOOLS:”.

Wuh?! The email starts out saying it’s in direct response to the petition to the FCC to ban religious programming on public airwaves. Prayer in public school may be a related topic, but it has nothing to do with the FCC. The body of the email discusses one topic, but then someone seems to have just tacked on a petition for a different topic at the bottom.

Fact checking and the internet

Despite all this, it’s easy to see why people would read the email and assume it was legitimate; most people accept what they hear from people they tend to agree with. (More on this below.)

But, if someone were suspicious, how could they go about checking whether it was true or not?

At this point we’re in luck, because the one part of the email that is accurate is the fcc case number in question. When I first receive this email, I went to fcc.gov and typed “2493″ into the search box there. If you do that, the first result is a link, titled Religious Broadcast Rumor Denied, that explains the hoax. There also are other ways to research the claim:

• If you google “Madalyn Murray O’Hair fcc” (without quotes), the second link explains the hoax.
• If you go to Madalyn Murray O’Hair’s wikipedia page, the bottom of the entry explains the hoax.
• If you google “Madeline Murray O’Hare” (the incorrect spelling found in the email), the top five links all explain the hoax.
• Snopes.com (the urban legends site) has a page on this hoax, which you can find by typing “O’Hair” into their search box.

If you made it to the FCC explanation page (or to an older page with more information at this link), you would find that two guys named Lansman and Milam filed a petition in 1974 to prevent sectarian groups from using a couple of public access stations (which no one watches anyway), and the FCC turned them down in 1975. Turns out their request was unconstituational.

But what you really ought to know is that the FCC, since that time, has received millions of phone calls, form letters, and (more recently) emails from Christians opposing this supposed conspiracy. That means people were typing up chain letters, sticking 10-cent stamps on them, and dropping them in the mail to the FCC before I was born. That’s 33 years of Christians mobilizing in response to a form letter written by a crackpot.

What does it mean?

I think I’ve demonstrated that it’s not difficult for someone to check up on this kind of forward if they have questions about it.

That means that most people who forwarded this email must have assumed it was trustworthy enough that they had no need to check its facts. Moreover, it suggests that when we are presented with a position that we already agree with, we tend to accept uncritically what we’re told; in these kinds of cases we often don’t bother checking up on the facts.

I’m sure there have also been thousands of Christians who have seen this email, assumed it was a hoax, and deleted it. However, there’s good reason to think that those people (along with myself) hear lots of other ideas about religion or politics, in the course of our lives, that we accept uncritically. Personally, I disagree with the viewpoint of this email, and never would have forwarded it, so I can’t claim any real virtue for having tried to debunk it.

What seems to be the case is that many, many people (in this case Christians) will agree to just about anything, as long as they think it’s supported by people they generally agree with. As long as something is an ostensibly (conservative) “Christian” cause, all you have to do is show people where to sign.

My first thought was that this makes Christians look bad, which I’m sure it does.

But on further reflection, the potential consequences are a lot more serious, especially considering that Christian America often directs its efforts toward wielding real political power rather than passing around ineffective petitions. My question, then, is this: In what other areas are Christians liable to join a cause without considering its real implications? Some suggestions:

Evolution: Do most Christians really know anything beyond the basics of evolution (or creationism, for that matter) when they vote for new textbooks?

Abortion: Do most Christians know which groups of people have abortions and why?

Homosexuality: When the question comes up concerning whether gay couples should be allowed to adopt children, do most Christians actually know anything about gay couples, or do they just assume they’re all twisted child-molestors who don’t deserve such a right?

War: If our president sounds Christian (like the fcc email sounds Christian), how many Christians will just assume that he’s supporting a “Christian” cause and go along with it?

I know people can make arguments in favor of the supposed “Christians” stances on all these points. Furthermore, the questions can be flipped around. As someone who grew up in Texas but lives in the Northeast, I have often witnessed blue state folks dismissing the views of conservative Christians as if they are not only wrong but absurd. It’s easy to find, among supposed proponents of free thought, examples of the same kinds of suspicion and disrespect we see reflected in the email forward I’m addressing.

Is it any wonder that our political language is so divisive and that we rely on political might (i.e. getting a majority of the vote) to change policy rather than focusing our efforts on persuading people who disagree with us? I don’t want to trust people to make policy decisions if they support pretty much any initiative that sounds like something they agree with. And yet this seems to be how people work.

God help us.

On a road trip with my friend Josh a couple of weeks back, we were listening to a weekly podcast by the editors of Relevant magazine, when they started talking about the Israel/Lebanon conflict. We were both a little startled when the Scripture that says to “pray for the peace of Jerusalem” was mentioned, and one of the hosts commented about the need for Christians to support Israel. Then, the other two hosts chimed in in agreement.

That verse in psalm 122, they contend, commands Christians to actively support the modern political state of Israel.

It doesn’t surprise me when Pat Robertson makes a comment like that, but the editors of Relevant spend their energies hunting down interviews with Sufjan Stevens and Bono, so they’re hardly extremists who set themselves up against the world –– at least from what little I had previously heard about them.

But regardless of their particular loyalties, support of Israel apparently is a position shared by millions of North American Christians, and a position they believe is mandated by Scripture.

Naturally, we all should be praying for peace in Jerusalem –– as we should be praying for peace in Lebanon, Iraq, Iran, North Korea, and the streets and homes of America. But that’s not what the folks on the podcast were talking about, and I don’t think it’s what most of those featured on this website have in mind either.

But come on. To quote Mugatu, I feel like I’m taking crazy pills here. Something like sixteen different (but mostly interrelated) reasons jump out at me why this whole thing is nonsense.

Just read the psalm: It’s a song sung by a Jew about his pilgrimage to the Jerusalem temple to worship. It emphasizes the “tribes” going to worship according to the “statute given to Israel,” visiting the place where those who sit on the “thrones of the house of David” maintain justice for the land. The prayer for peace is for “the sake of my brothers and friends” and “for the sake of the house of the Lord our God.”

It’s difficult to imagine a more culturally specific psalm. There’s not a lot of mystery here: the Jerusalem temple was the symbol of God’s presence among the Israelites, and to pray for its peace was to pray that God would remain faithful to his people and protect them and their king amidst the enemies that surrounded them. The pilgrimage (”going up”) was a regular event as commanded in Torah, and Jews (Jesus and his family among them) obeyed and celebrated it.

Now try to apply that to Christians today. The temple was razed 1,936 years ago, the sacrifices have stopped, and virtually none of us make the pilgrimage for the feasts. Everything tying the religious content of Psalm 122 to Jerusalem no longer exists. So by what sick interpretive contortion do we pull from this that God is commanding us to help Israelis keep Palestinians out of their homeland?

The first problem, I suppose, is a misunderstanding of genre. Psalm 122 is a song of praise and exhortation to worshippers, not a legal text prescribing what everyone must do. How much of what’s said in the psalms do we actually consider commands to be obeyed? To use the easiest counter-example, if we could find a society of Babylonians, should we bash their infants’ heads against a rock (Psalm 137)? Wait –– Babylon is essentially modern-day Iraq, so maybe that’s not such a stretch…

But second, even if the psalm was intended as a genuine command, it clearly is a text for Jews worshipping under the old (from a Christian perspective) covenant. The pilgrimage to Jerusalem was absolutely essential to Palestinian Jewish identity, and absolutely not required of Gentile believers.

To borrow from a recent discussion on matthew’s blog the other day, Jesus claimed explicitly to inaugurate a new age in which worship is centered not on a location, but in which “true worshipers will worship the Father in spirit and truth” (John 4:23). So even a conservative reading of Scripture here should lead us to see the entire context of Psalm 122 as obsolete. If we are to read this psalm as Christians, then, it must be symbolically. As commentator J. Clinton McCann Jr. writes,

Ironically, much of the ongoing controversy surrounding Jerusalem stems from the failure to discern its symbolic function; the city has often been viewed only as a place to be possessed rather than a symbol of the concrete presence in the world of a God who cannot ultimately be possessed and whose presence certainly cannot be limited to a particular place (as Psalm 121 proclaims!).

A Christian reading of Psalm 122 should focus on worship, not geography, and we ought not pray concerning a particular geographical/political entity, if what we’re aiming for is the preservation of God’s presence among us. To do so is actually to deny what Jesus claimed about the nature of worship under his messiahship.

So am I missing something here? Have I just lucked into a better reading of the psalm because I grew up in a tradition that believes in a sharp divide between the old and new covenants? Or am I ignoring some key New Testament text concerning the end-times, which would give me a fuller perspective?

Feel free to comment with agreement, disagreement, lament, outrage (at me or at these other folks), or perhaps suggestions for broader perspective.