I have been debating nearly all week about what to write in this week installment of the blog on veteran’s issues. I had originally thought that another article on the government shutdown would be boring considering the media talks about little else. However, less then 24 hours after my last post veteran’s issues became a hot topic. The VA has to furlough several thousand more employees thus causing the backlog of claims entering the system to continue. Many veterans will soon be without disability checks, education benefit checks and other services that their sacrifice for this country granted them.
I had fully intended of doing a “where are we know? “ type piece today but instead was inspired to do something different. While doing research about where exactly the shutdown has put the veteran community I realized that nobody actually knows the answer. I assume that in a few weeks I will not be paid, but in reality I don’t actually know. The VA has published that certain benefits and services will continue, which I mentioned last time. That list is more than likely to change as more employees get furloughed, especially the longer the shutdown continues.
Then of course there is the proposal of a partial reopening of the government that would allow for veterans services to resume. But in todays political climate that sounds almost to easy and naturally it didn’t pass. Which brings me to my next point an what I wanted to focus on primarily for todays post. I watched the news and read around on the internet and, as I am sure most people reading this are aware, a group of veterans protested in DC this weekend carrying “Don’t Tread On Me” flags, and American flags and proclaiming that Congress should of course open the government and pay them what they are owed.
As I mentioned in my previous post, I will try to be fairly neutral when writing, but it isn’t always possible. At some point and on certain issues an opinion is all that will suffice. Personally, even as a veteran I admired the protest, I find it hilarious that an open-air memorial would be closed and while I’m not going to pretend that I understand the logistics of a “shutdown” I can be pretty confident that wasn’t necessary. Particularly when a week or so early the park was opened for another kind of rally, this could have been for any number of reasons, but at first glance seems somewhat fishy to me. Even though I admire the enthusiasm of the protesting veterans, I find protesting a poor way of getting things done in today’s political world. Even looking back to a year or so ago with the Occupy movement, nothing was accomplished, clear goals weren’t met, and quite frankly I think most people flat out forgot that it even happened. In a few weeks I can only presume that the shutdown will be over and a few years from now no one will remember or care that the WWII memorial was closed, unless of course it happens again. My point in writing all of this is that if paying the active duty military can pass with 100 percent approval, why doesn’t paying for our veterans feel the same? The answer of course is because it isn’t the same, and the people that fought for this country are expensive to keep around.
On a side note, as I was reading news articles on the various news websites I noticed that the way we can receive and comment on news has changed our society, and quite frankly I’m not sure its for the best. I am not a big internet or social media person, but the comments section of a particular new story caught my eye. An anonymous commenter on the Washington Post, in response to the article about this weeks protest, posted that people who are out of work because of the shut down “have lost more than you silly veterans are capable of imagining.”. What’s odd about this is that there was a serious of responses in agreement with this post. And just to clarify on a personal level I can imagine A LOT. I know people that have been turned into confetti because they stepped on a land mind. Someone I know is either killed in combat or kills themselves at least once a year. I have other friends that can’t hold jobs or be around their children because the have to be medicated due to PTSD. Now, I don’t want to take anything away from someone who lost their job, and will struggle to buy food, pay rent, or whatever else it is they need, but to be completely honest, unless you were already in some financial trouble odds are you will be fine when this is all said and done. (Obviously I can’t know that for sure, but its my opinion). Where as many veterans will have a lifetime of problems that will never go away, legs don’t grow back unfortunately.
On a final note, and I apologize for this being fairly long post, is that I also saw a commenter exclaim that unless we were drafted veterans do not have a claim against the government. We volunteered he said and any damage we sustained while fighting for this country was by choice and we shouldn’t complain. I’m not entirely sure how to respond to this but I will quickly give it a try. That’s like saying the 8-year-old girl who volunteered to ride her bike and was maimed by a drunk driver shouldn’t complain or be upset. Riding bikes is dangerous, and anything can happen I suppose. I volunteered, specifically to fight in a war, I was infantryman, our job is tough and bad things happen, I knew all of that going in. I am actually lucky to be alive and in one piece. I didn’t ask for free education or health care, it was given to me and I am grateful for it, but you can be sure that I and many of my fellow veterans earned every penny that comes our way.
Month: October 2013
“Wild Justice”: A History of the Death Penalty in America
“Wild Justice”: A History of the Death Penalty in America
Last month, NPR’s Fresh Air featured an interview with Evan Mandery, a professor at the John Jay College of Criminal Justice and a former capital defense attorney, about his new book–A Wild Justice: The Death and Resurrection of Capital Punishment in America. The interview reflected the book’s title, explaining the strange and fascinating history of the death penalty in the United States. From backroom Supreme Court deals to Mandery’s argument that the death penalty is random and lacks deterrent value, this interview is worth a listen for anyone interested in the death penalty or criminal law.
Here is the introduction to the interview:
In the mid-1970s, Arkansas’ electric chair was being used by the prison barber to cut hair, and the execution chamber in New Hampshire was being used to store vegetables. That’s because in 1972, the U.S. Supreme Court shocked the nation by striking down Georgia’s death penalty law, effectively ending executions in the United States. But the decision provoked a strong backlash among those who favored the death penalty, and within four years the high court reversed course and issued a set of rulings that would permit the resumption of executions.
Evan Mandery, a professor at the John Jay College of Criminal Justice and a former capital defense attorney, has written a new account of the tumultuous legal and political battles over the death penalty. Mandery is sympathetic to those who tried to outlaw capital punishment, but his account focuses on attorneys for both sides in the battle, as well as the views and deliberations of the justices who decided the cases. His book is called A Wild Justice: The Death and Resurrection of Capital Punishment in America.
Immutability and LGBT Asylum
There are long-standing debates about the causes of homosexuality, if indeed any exist. Though the most current research of which this author is aware suggests that, rather than being the result of any one factor (e.g. a single genetic cause), it may be a confluence of factors, the more important and, in my view, the more interesting fact is that the biological, sociological and psychological underpinnings of sexual orientation and gender identity have important ramifications for legal and policy debates about how governments should deal with sexuality.
As the Western world has embraced the rights of gender and sexual minorities with surprising alacrity, one issue that has confronted several governments has been immigration of members of these identity communities. Particularly as domestic rights have expanded in some countries while others have remained discriminatory or hostile toward LGBT individuals within their borders, questions of immigration and asylum have sometimes become quite prominent. While many Western states have (relatively) clear standards for those seeking asylum on the basis of discrimination or persecution in their home countries, these standards often require that individuals be members of particular ethnic, racial or religious groups that are easily idenified, quantified and understood. The pursuit of asylum status on the basis of sexual orientation and gender identity can be more complex because of the standards in law about what precisely counts as an identity.
A related example is somewhat instructive: in American equal protection jurisprudence, the most stringent standards for equal protection adhere to classifications making use of groups that fall under a suspect classification. Some of the criteria that serve to qualify a group for this ‘suspect classification’ status include (1) a history of discrimination, (2) an immutable or highly visible characteristic, (3) political powerlessness and (4) no relation between the classification in question and the ability to contribute to political, economic and social life. When a group is considered a suspect class, any legal classification using that category of persons is subject to strict scrutiny. Legal classifications in the U.S. that currently meet this standard include any making use of race, national origin, alienage and (by some interpretations) religion. Each of these four classifications shares some level of the above criteria, but one above all others stands out as uniting them: the immutability of the classification. Immutability in American law is an essentially biological characteristic: individuals have no control over the circumstances of their birth and, thus, legal classifications that rely on such groupings are invalid.
In light of this immutability doctrine, one can begin to tease out the logical difficulty of treating sexuality as a suspect classification. Assuming an acceptance of this particular scheme (developed by the Supreme Court over several decades), sexual orientation and gender identity do not seem to match the requirements. While other characteristics may be subject to debate (histories of discrimination, political powerlessness and so on), there is something about sexuality which remains harder to pin down and quantify in easy terms. Even birth gender, which stands as a quasi-suspect classification, is a matter of biology, at least in law. The fluidity of sexuality and gender identity lead some observers to conclude that they cannot serve as the basis of any kind of suspect classification, thus requiring either a separate legal standard or no legal protections at all, at least any more than is afforded to any other group.
This brief foray into constitutional law is instructive to the matter of LGBT asylum seekers and refugees. While the United States and other Western countries have accepted claims for asylum on the basis of discrimination and persecution because of sexual orientation and gender identity, this remains one of the areas where bureaucracies continue to have some difficulty. Petitions have been denied in the United States and United Kingdom in recent years, and the issue has risen again as groups have pressured governments in the West to open doors to Russian asylum seekers. This has challenged bureaucrats, who are tasked with distinguishing between individuals genuinely seeking asylum and those who are simply seeking entry to a particular country with “false” claims.
A recent report by the Home Affairs Committee in the United Kingdom has shed light on the situation facing LGBT asylum-seekers not only in the U.K. but elsewhere. The BBC reports that some asylum-seekers in the U.K. have, because of seemingly skeptical officials, resorted to submitting evidence of same-sex sexual behavior to ‘prove’ their sexual orientation or gender identity as evidence for their asylum petitions:
The report said: “The battleground is now firmly centered in ‘proving’ that they are gay. In turn, this has led to claimants going to extreme lengths to try and meet the new demands of credibility assessment in this area, including the submission of photographic and video evidence of highly personal sexual activity to caseworkers, presenting officers and the judiciary.”
The committee said: “We were concerned to hear that the decision making process for LGBTI applicants relies so heavily on anecdotal evidence and ‘proving that they are gay’.”
It added that “it is not appropriate to force people to prove their sexuality if there is a perception that they are gay. The assessment of credibility is an area of weakness within the British asylum system.
Such reports, if accurate, are highly troubling for those of us concerned with the rights of gender and sexual minorities. They reflect a return to a way of thinking that places weight not on an individual’s identity but on an individual’s actions, the propensity toward (and actualization of) same-sex sexual desires or “genuine” evidence of gender non-conforming behavior and identity. As sexual orientation is not, like the immutable characteristics comprehended by the U.S. Supreme Court, a highly visible characteristic and may in fact be fluid, the weight of an asylum seeker’s identity may be placed on actual conduct. Much of the work by the LGBT community and its allies has been to reject this older, arguably outmoded view of sexuality. Yet it seems that some asylum-seekers are doubly burdened, having to prove discrimination or persecution and having to prove that the basis of that discrimination is in fact real.
Is The Two-Party System is Making America Ungovernable?
That was the proposition being debated on the Intelligence Squared podcast. The debate originally occurred in 2011; however, it has a particular relevance today with the government is shutdown and the debt ceiling looming.
Moderated by ABC News’ John Donvan, this debate featured David Brooks–Op-Ed columnist for the New York Times–and Arianna Huffington–Co-Founder and Editor-in-Chief of The Huffington Post, who argued for the motion; and P.J. O’Rourke–H.L. Mencken Research Fellow at the Cato Institute and Zev Chafets–Former columnist, New York City News, who argued against it.
Here is description of the debate:
The Republican and Democratic parties are entrenched in calcified partisanship, where politics is played as a zero-sum game. The rise of the Tea Party, liberal backlash, and the exodus of moderate voices from Congress all point toward the public’s growing discontent. Has our two-party system failed us? Is this a call to change our two-party system of governance?
Sunday Funday: SNL on NASA and Shutdown
On this week’s edition of “Sunday Funday,” we have the cold open from last nights’s Saturday Night Live featuring a skit about the government shutdown. Now in the 13th day of the government shut down and the debt ceiling fast approaching, the skit brings a bit of comic relief to an otherwise abysmal economic situation.