Posted on by rjonakait

A Scopes Trial in Florida

I recently read Summer for the Gods: The Scopes Trial and America’s Continuing Debate Over Science and Religion by Edward J. Larson,which won a Pulitzer Prize in 1998. Most of us know about the 1925 prosecution of John Scopes from the cartoonish but compelling 1960 movie Inherit the Wind. Of course, real life was more complicated than the drama, but the basic premise was correct: John Scopes was prosecuted for violating a Tennessee state law that prohibited the teaching of evolution in public schools. The trial depicted huge personalities important in American history. The movie had Spencer Tracy in the thinly-veiled Clarence Darrow role and the oft-underappreciated Frederic March as the William Jennings Bryan surrogate. (Tracy was born in Milwaukee, Wisconsin, and March forty miles away in Racine, three years apart. I have wondered if on the Inherit set they swapped reminiscences of boyhood romps on Lake Michigan beaches.) And in a daring bit of casting, Gene Kelly had the role of the acerbic journalist H.L. Mencken, who wrote commentary about the trial.

The movie seemingly portrays the triumph of rationality over the cramped world of closed-minded fundamental religion — the triumph of modernity over myth. However, the movie, based on the 1956 play, was aimed at McCarthyism more than fundamentalism just as The Crucible by Arthur Miller is not really about the Salem witch trials. (The opening cast of Broadway’s Inherit the Wind starred Ed Begley, Paul Muni, and a young Tony Randall as Mencken. It ran for over two years, and, of course, has been a staple of high schools and summer stock ever since.) Perhaps it was telling that one of the screenwriters for the Inherit film used a fictitious name for the credits because he had been blacklisted.  

Although William Jennings Bryan is portrayed in Inherit primarily as a religious buffoon, Summer for the Gods shows that he tried, given the populist he was, to cast the issue as one of democracy. He, and others, maintained that the people — speaking through their legislatures — had the right to control what was taught in the schools which they had created and funded.

The issues presented by the Scopes trial remain timely, most notably in Florida. Now, however, the issues are about more than science and religion. Religion may hover just below the surface, but Florida is raising again two of the most interwoven strands that have recurred throughout American history, sex and race.

The state, however, maintains that what is doing is not about religion, sex, or race; It is about protecting children. It is about who determines when children should be exposed to certain topics. It is about who determines the content of classes.

Indeed, a basic question about our public school is who controls the education? School boards, parents, state government, teachers, other educators, experts? There is no easy answer.

Few doubt that government sets at least broad requirements. And usually, educators determine how those requirements are to be satisfied. Perhaps a school board or the state legislature determines that a high school student must pass algebra to graduate. We would be surprised if that state agency developed a syllabus for the required course. Instead, the educators determine how the course is to be taught.

However, when issues of religion, sex, or race are present in a course, sometimes, as with Florida now and Tennessee in 1925, the government wants to control the course’s content. The state may say that the majority of people want them to control such content. However, since this happens primarily with issues of religion, sex, or race, and not with other topics, this is not really about majority or even parental control; if it were, the state would control content on all topics. No. It is only about religion, sex, or race.

Florida, however, is not merely mimicking 1925 Tennessee. It is going beyond the Volunteer State. Tennessee did not extend its meddling beyond the public high schools. It apparently assumed that its college students were rational enough, mature enough, and educated enough to be able to think for themselves. They did not require protection from whatever the state legislature thought pernicious. Ron DeSantis’s Florida, however, has taken this a step further. The Sunshine State’s governor does not believe that its college students are smart, educated, or mature enough to be able to come to their own decisions on these matters. DeSantis is seeking to control the content of university education as well as that in the lower schools.

Indeed, Florida has not stopped there. It seeks to mandate what can occur in corporate programs. This, of course, turns “conservatism” on its head. Promotion of free enterprise and minimal government regulation is a core tenet of conservatism. We should not be all that surprised that concerns about sex, race, and religion intrude into public education, for that has happened many times in our history. But it is a brave new world when the state decides to control corporate training in these matters.

Of course, we should be concerned about what is taught in our schools. However, as we consider who should determine curricular content, it is worth reflecting on what Curtis Wilkie reports in When Evil Lived in Laurel: The “White Knights” and the Murder of Vernon Dahmer. “In the middle of the twentieth century,” writes Wilkie, “any Mississippi schoolchild who achieved an eighth-grade education had been exposed to a state history textbook [Mississippi through Four Centuries] that told of the glories of the Klan.” In discussing Reconstruction, the textbook acknowledged that the Ku Klux Klan whipped and even killed Blacks “who had been giving trouble in a community. . . . The organization helped the South at a difficult time.”

However, now, a hundred years after the Scopes trial, I can imagine a prosecution of a Florida teacher who teaches the fact that on a per capita basis Florida had the most lynchings in this country.

Posted on by rjonakait

The Judge Ain’t No Umpire

          Americans believe that Supreme Court justices are biased and rule in line with their personal ideologies and preferences. There are many reasons for these conclusions. When justices such as Amy Coney Barrett tell us how unsullied they are, as she did recently, instead of just going about their judicial work, we can’t help but think about Gertrude and doth protesting too much methinks. But the American skepticism has other roots. Consider the present Chief Justice.

          John Roberts in his confirmation hearings described the job in baseball terms: “Judges are like umpires. Umpires don’t make the rules; they apply them. The role of an umpire and a judge is critical. They make sure everybody plays by the rules. But it is a limited role.”

          Roberts has been mocked for this statement, which revealed ignorance or disingenuousness, and since Roberts is smart, the latter is inferred. The Constitution contains numerous phrases that need interpretation, such as “direct taxes,” “the executive power,” “privileges and immunities of citizens,” “the due process of law,” and many others. Deciding cases involving such language is not the same as determining whether a batted ball is fair. Suggesting an equivalency between the umpire and the justice was an attempt to mask the inevitable values and policies that are involved in judging. While umpires do not make up the rules as the game progresses, Supreme Court justices in essence do. Issues are before the Supreme Court because they have not been decided before. If in deciding a case the Court must determine what is interstate commerce or what infringes the free exercise of religion, it is setting down that rule for the first time. It is making up the rules as it goes along.*

          The choices justices make are not inevitable. Legal scholar Sanford Levinson was correct in saying, “There are as many plausible readings of the United States Constitution as there are versions of Hamlet, even though each interpreter, like each director, might genuinely believe that he or she has stumbled onto the one best answer to the conundrums of the texts.” Thus, an interpretation will never be entirely objective. Justice Benjamin Cardozo: “There is in each of us a stream of tendency, whether you choose to call it philosophy or not, which gives coherence and direction to thoughts and actions. Judges cannot escape that current any more than other mortals. Every problem finds its setting. We may try to see things as objectively as we please. None the less, we can never see them with any eyes except our own.” Justice Louis D. Brandeis made the same point: “I believe that our judges are as honest as you can make them. But like all of the rest of us they are subject to their environment.”

          Judges are not gods. They cannot be purely objective, and like the rest of us, they cannot know everything that influences a decision. Cardozo again: “All their [judges’] lives, forces which they do not recognize and cannot name, have been tugging at them—inherited instincts, traditional beliefs, acquired convictions.” It is arrogance, chutzpah, or naïveté to proclaim objectivity for yourself and others as Barrett did, and the justice who unquestioningly believes in or promotes such objectivity is fooling herself. Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr., said, “It is a misfortune if a judge reads his conscious or unconscious sympathy with one side or the other prematurely into the law, and forgets that what seems to him to be first principles are believed by half of his fellow men to be wrong.”

          Justices without awareness of the limitations of their objectivity who do not practice what should be the accompanying humility are dangerous because the justices not only make up the rules, they make up the final ones. As Chief Justice Charles Evans Hughes said, “We are under a Constitution, but the Constitution is what the judges say it is.” Or as the more acerbic H.L. Mencken defined: “Judge—A law student who marks his own examination papers.”

          We should be leery—no scared—when a judge pretends his job is no different from being a baseball umpire or when another proclaims, “No judge is deciding a case in order to impose a policy result.” The first is blatantly wrong; the second attempts to obscure the fact that policy choices affect us all, including—gasp—the Supreme Court. If I may borrow a term I heard frequently in law offices, the courts, and the playing fields, “Don’t give me bullshit.” On that we should all agree.

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*         Roberts analogy was also wrong from baseball’s perspective and shows that he does not understand that endeavor either. Every fan knows that the strike zone varies in size and location depending on who is behind home plate. Some umpires have a wide zone and some a high one and so on. Perhaps whether the tennis ball landed within the service box would have been a better comparison for Roberts. Of course, now such calls are often automated and don’t require a human. I am quite confident, however, that no Supreme Court justice believes that he or she should be replaced by a machine.

Posted on by rjonakait

Days of Wines and Tagines

Our guide in Morocco did not drink alcohol.  He said that he had tried but had not liked wine and vodka. The guide, however, was a practicing Moslem, and I assumed that religion was behind his abstinence. I have been told that Moslems are not supposed to drink alcohol. (I have since learned that that is true for the majority of Moslems, but some believe that the Koran only bars intoxication, not drinking in moderation.)

I did not see any liquor stores, and the only bars I saw were in our hotels in the overwhelmingly Moslem Morocco, but at our meals we had plenty of drinkable, inexpensive local wine. Morocco has an active wine industry with most of the product staying in the country. The country has a lot of tourists, but more than tourists must be drinking all that wine. (The guide said that Morocco’s national liquor was very strong and made from dried figs. I did not try it because I could not find it.)

A westerner might see hypocrisy at work in this wine industry, but I remember that I was raised in an American Baptist Church that proclaimed that alcohol abstinence was necessary to get into heaven. This stance is true for most varieties of Baptists. In 2006 the Southern Baptist Convention reaffirmed this position. I have never understood this prohibition since wine is consumed by the godly (including, of course, Jesus) in both the Old and New Testament. My hunch is not that the Bible commands teetotaling, but the reason is more along the lines of what H.L. Mencken said about Puritanism: “The haunting fear that someone, somewhere may be happy.”

What I do know is that many Baptists do drink. Polls report that a third of Baptists admit to imbibing. And if a third are willing to concede this “sin” to a pollster, I am sure more than that drink alcohol. There are reasons that swaths of this country are laden with bourbon and Baptists. Probably the jokes I heard when I was fourteen are still told: “Jewish people do not recognize Jesus as the Messiah. Protestants do not recognize the Pope as the leader of Christianity. Baptists do not recognize each other in the liquor store.” “Why should you always take two Baptists on your fishing trip? If you take only one, he will drink all your beer.”

If there is hypocrisy about Moslems drinking, it is a hypocrisy shared by other religions and cultures. I am not about to cast the first cork.

The Moroccan wine, which I drank as much of as I could, was served most often to accompany a tagine. A tagine is the vessel in which food is cooked. The traditional Moroccan tagine is earthenware, with a circular, flat base with low sides and a removable cone-shaped cover that sits on the base during the cooking. That cover condenses escaping liquids allowing them to drip back onto the food. A tagine is wonderfully designed for slow cooking and is used in homes and restaurants throughout Morocco. Clearly using one can be a source of pride. Our guide, normally modest, bragged that his wife said that he made the best tagines. Apparently, it is a custom that men cook a tagine on Fridays.

Tagine means the pottery, but it also refers to the cooked food. We had tagines of many foods that can benefit from slow, moist cooking, including vegetables, beef, chicken, and lamb. We also had food that did not benefit from this cooking method—i.e., most of the fish dishes. The Moroccan cuisine is distinguished not only by the tagine pot, but also by the combination of the foods cooked inside it. Vegetables and protein together were obvious choices, but also fresh fruit such as plums were part of a dish. A careful blend of sweet and savory or sweet and sour was common. Nuts and dried fruit, perhaps apricots or dates, or even dried tomatoes were frequently used. And the careful spicing raises the cuisine to what is nearly mythic levels in some places. I have cooked lamb with rosemary, salt, and pepper. The Moroccan cuisine, however, had careful blends of spices. Cumin might be combined with cinnamon and ginger. Or saffron and paprika. Or with spices I don’t know. I am guessing that the best Moroccan chefs are known for their precise and innovative blending of spices. As a diligent tourist, I, of course, bought spice blends to bring home. (Oops, forgot to tell customs I brought back food.) And as a typical tourist, I have mostly forgotten how to use them.

The tagine was almost always accompanied by fresh baked bread. The bread was of many different styles and very good. I don’t know if the French influenced this baking, but the variety, the textures, the shapes, the tastes were about as good as I have had anywhere.

The tagine was usually proceeded by many small plates for the table of vinegary, cooked vegetables— several styles of carrots, beets, eggplant, and the like. Forkfuls from a variety of the dishes made a tasty salad. After the tagine sometimes we had a cake or some other confection, but mostly we had fresh fruit. Altogether, the meals we had were tasty and healthy.

And, yes, I looked for Moroccan cookbooks, but then I thought that it did not make sense to lug around a tome when I could find a good cookbook in New York to teach me Moroccan recipes. I have held on to that thought but so far with no action.