Past the Roadblocks and onto the Freeway!

This Monday marked a crucial moment for me. I ended months of pre-writing and finally began writing a draft of the introduction to my book. Thus set into motion, the process will carry me. I feel great. And I am confident that I will get a draft of my manuscript to my editor by October 31, 2015.

Getting down to writing the book has proven challenging. On long academic pieces, I work slowly, a victim of my perfectionism. I struggle to get past the burdensome sense that I am not yet prepared to begin tackling the issues. I fear that I don’t know enough, that I haven’t yet read or reread the important materials. I worry that I haven’t kept up with the literature enough to be ready for any fellow historians who might blindside me. “Is this guy Rubin an idiot? Doesn’t he know that his stupid argument has been repeatedly been debunked? Why has he conducted such an obsolete study? Why did he bother writing such a book?”

I then drag out and apply my trusty old wherewithal, and I remember that such responses are unlikely. And, if anyone should respond in that manner, then I need not care a whit. Every book has its critics—lots. I should be delighted if enough people read the book to bother eviscerating it. What could be more fun than to join the historiographical fray, the give and take among smart, excited scholars?

Above all, I remind myself what I’ve been telling students for years. Writing is not the end result of the thinking process; writing is the thinking process. A horrible draft of my introduction would be a gift to myself, as it would enable me to get my ideas out, rearrange them, add and subtract, and generate a strong product. Now is the time to write badly! Now is the moment to heave up stones of thought, so that I might chisel them into what my mind’s eye already sees clearly.

Angry in Seattle

Something has me baffled. In my new home town of Seattle, there’s this popular church that seems very un-Seattlelike. I’m having trouble squaring the place, and especially its pastor, with the Seattle I have come to know.

Over many years, I have found Seattlites, across different venues, to demonstrate the egalitarianism and tolerance for which the city is famous. That has been reinforced over the past three months, during which I’ve made Seattle my home. Respect for difference informs people’s attitudes and fills their conversations.

I am therefore fascinated by the prominence of one particular Christian church thriving in the heart of the city. Mars Hill Church was founded in 1996 by its pastor and leader, Mark Driscoll. Driscoll’s brash, informal style has earned him a wide local following, just as it has brought him fame and notoriety nationwide. The renegade culture of Seattle’s Ballard district, home of Mars Hill’s first and main location, has infused the pastor’s style. In his writings and interviews, Driscoll talks openly about sex, referring directly to masturbation and fellatio. He and his congregants cut a decidedly hip appearance. Driscoll himself can be found in t-shirt and sweatshirt, and he has at times worn a Mohawk-type haircut. Many of his congregants sport body piercings and tattoos. Among those who are drawn to Driscoll—and there are thousands—some cite his cool, dressed-down style, as well as the edgy rock that fills Mars Hill’s pews, as the basis for their attraction.

Driscoll has drawn widespread attention for more than his style. Notoriety has come Driscoll’s way on account of his crude, antigay, anti-woman, testosterone-driven pontificating. Ugliness is his standard fare. Much of it appears in print or on video. His crude, tough-guy persona speaks especially to young men, whom Driscoll aims to rescue from a mainstream culture that supposedly feminizes them. In a 2009 in depth analysis of Mars Hill, historian Molly Worthen 

found that

what bothers Driscoll—and the growing number of evangelical pastors who agree with him—is [the standard] portrayal of Jesus as a wimp, or worse. Paintings depict a gentle man embracing children and cuddling lambs. Hymns celebrate his patience and tenderness. The mainstream church, Driscoll has written, has transformed Jesus into “a Richard Simmons, hippie, queer Christ,” a “neutered and limp-wristed popular Sky Fairy of pop culture that . . . would never talk about sin or send anyone to hell.”

Molly Worthen, “Who Would Jesus Smack Down?,” Jan. 6, 2009.

At the center of Driscoll’s theology is “complementarism,” the notion that God intends women to serve their husbands as helpmates—to “complement” men rather than live as their equals. To empower women, Driscoll believes, is to offend God. Thus, the Episcopal Church, in anointing a woman as a bishop, had ventured down a slippery slope toward naming “a fluffy baby bunny rabbit as their next bishop to lead God’s men.”  

Craig Welch, “The Rise and Fall of Mars Hill Church,” September 13, 2013.

Apparently, misogyny makes for good theology. In a 2001 blog post signed pseudonymously but later claimed as his own, Driscoll informed readers that

the first thing to know about your penis is, that despite the way it may seem, it is not your penis. Ultimately, God created you and it is his penis. You are simply borrowing it for a while. . .

Knowing that His penis would need a home, God created a woman to be your wife and when you marry her and look down you will notice that your wife is shaped differently than you and makes a very nice home.  

Jenny Kutner, Evangelical Megachurch Begins Closing Branches after Pastor Calls Women “Penis Homes,” September 8, 2014. 

Homemaker indeed.

                  ------------------------------------------------              

The vulgar Driscoll has recently come upon hard times. Large numbers of his congregants have become troubled by him, and many have departed the church. As a result, Mars Hill has been forced it to close some of its satellite churches and reduce its staff. This has prompted Driscoll to step down from his position as pastor of Mars Hill Church.

A number of factors combined to bring relentless scrutiny and then discredit to the popular preacher. Driscoll has come under fire for plagiarizing sections of his book, _Real Marriage,_ and for devising a complicated scheme to exaggerate sales numbers. He has been widely accused of misusing church funds. A group of twenty-one former Mars Hill pastors resigned and wrote an open letter calling for Driscoll’s removal, charging him with spiritually abusive tactics. Outed as a bully and a cheat, Driscoll chose to diminish his public visibility—at least for a while. Warren Throckmorton, “Twenty-One Former Mars Hill Church Pastors Bring Formal Charges against Mark Driscoll," August 21. 2014.

Enough background about Driscoll and Mars Hill. Scads of blogposts and articles abound.

                  ------------------------------------------------             

Most noteworthy to me is that ground zero for Driscoll’s ministry has been Seattle. What’s up with that? Seattle is often identified as the gay-friendliest city in the U.S. It is the city that housed the famous 1999 uprising against the World Trade Organization. A 2011 study identified Seattle and Portland (Maine!) as the cities containing the highest per capita number of atheists. Here, radicals of all stripes fill the coffee houses and pubs. No Mississippi, this town!

How is it that Seattle provided Mark Driscoll a large, boisterous, and outspoken support base? Should we simply rest assured that Mars Hill is not a representative voice amid Seattle’s chorus, but simply a loud and dissonant one? Could there be there two Seattles, one progressive and one reactionary?

These explanations might perhaps be valid. Driscoll’s supporters are certainly not typical Seattlites. Apparently, there does exist a reactionary element among the city’s residents. But I wish to point to another factor, one that exerts a subtle but real influence on the city’s political culture.

Seattle is unquestionably a liberal city. On display here is a key element of liberalism: egalitarianism, including the tolerance for difference that typically accompanies it. Yet, while egalitarianism dominates Seattle culture, it entwines with a rather different ideology, one that sometimes combines easily with it and sometimes does not. That different ideology is anti-establishmentarianism. For some Seattle radicals, “the establishment” is the Enemy One. They complain that the autonomy of ordinary people is always under siege by those who exercise the lion’s share of power. Such sentiments surfaced colorfully during the WTO protests and in the local initiatives of Earth First!. In Seattle and elsewhere, anti-establishmentarians celebrate the “uncorrupted” grassroots and resent the powerful elites who would squash the grassroots under their heavy heel.

Anti-establishmentarianism cuts either toward the left or the right, depending on the kind of elites who draw its ire. Some anti-establishmentarians conceive power primarily in political terms; others focus on economic power; still others understand power mostly as a cultural phenomenon. These differences matter, because they determine where on the ideological spectrum one is likely to fall.

Critics who focus on the economic establishment tend to sit on the left. This has been the case in the U.S. at least since the 1880s, when radical labor and farm unions advanced the cause of poor laborers by denouncing the corrupt “plutocrats” who used their unconscionable wealth to control the nation. By the turn of the century, left-wing anarchists would play important roles in the more radical unions.

Yet, even when anti-establishmentarianism cuts leftward, it differs from other left-wing ideologies. This is demonstrated by the left’s complicated reaction to Lyndon Johnson. For those with a social democratic bent, the Great Society epitomized government’s proper role of helping increase economic equality. But for anti-establishment leftists, the Great Society’s intrusion into private life signaled an improper grab for power. The latter generally maintained that people could do more good by organizing themselves than by signing their power away to the state. Anti-establishmentarians, even on the left, tend to mistrust government, to view it as part of the power elite—along with the military, the university, and the corporations.

Given Seattle’s anti-establishmentarian strain, it is not shocking that one can find, among some residents, a disdain for those in political and cultural power. And that disdain potentially alienates them from the city’s dominant liberalism. Anti-establishmentarians who focus their ire on the state fall somewhere between the left and right; their orientation is more toward libertarianism than toward the social democracy more typical of the American left. Meanwhile, those anti-establishmentarians most concerned with culture register only disgust for liberal “elites.”

Mark Driscoll and his flock evince anti-establishmentarianism of the cultural breed. They mistrust “over-education” and the “political correctness” to which it gives rise, including gender and sexual-orientation equality. Driscoll’s diatribes are red meat to his followers, many of whom hunger for brute, unsentimental leadership. When he stokes men’s sexual aggression toward women (within the bounds of marriage, of course), he enacts revenge-by-proxy against effete liberals and their libertine morals. He vindicates those for whom morality emanates outward from the gut, for whom love is raw rather than cultivated. No “hippie, queer Christ” for these Christians.

Driscoll’s masculinity-run-rabid contradicts nearly all that Seattle represents. His mistrust of women and disdain for LGBT folks may seem anathema to Seattle culture—and, overwhelmingly, it is. But not entirely. The anti-establishment impulse that runs through the city’s culture manifests occasionally as conservative populism. When it does, it can provide fertile ground for the sort of right-wing evangelicals who resonate with the rumblings of a Mark Driscoll. Strange, but true.

Yom Kippur Redux

I suggested in my previous post that, this year, the prayers of Yom Kippur did not speak to me. A few days after writing those words, I was again confronted by the Yom Kippur liturgy. I was forced to reconsider my verdict.

Recently, I began teaching a course in Jewish ethics to middle-school children and their parents. Last week, we unpacked a brief passage from a text read on Yom Kippur. The text came from the Haftarah, a cycle of readings taken from the Prophets, a series of late books within the Hebrew Bible. The Haftarah portion read on any given Sabbath or holiday complements other parts of that day’s liturgy, including the portion read from the Torah, the five books of Moses.

The Haftarah is often the most moving and unsettling part of the service. The prophets of the Hebrew Bible stood outside the societies in which they lived. Typically, they rebuked their contemporaries for their decadent, selfish, self-absorbed behavior. It was the mission of the prophets to alarm their fellow Israelites and exhort them to act as God had commanded them. To a modern-day reader, the prophets come off sounding ethical, insightful, and inspired, if eccentric. They seem wide awake. They seem worthy of emulation.

The Haftarah passage that my class and I examined last week was from the Book of Isaiah. In it, the prophet Isaiah describes for us what the Yom Kippur fast, in his opinion, ought to consist of. His is not the typically private, self-absorbed fast. Rather than focusing on his private prayers and his bodily discomfort, Isaiah engages with conditions outside himself.

The class then broke out into three-person groups. I joined together with one of the groups. We began our study by reading a passage from the Haftarah portion:

No, this is the fast I desire:
To unlock the fetters of wickedness,
And untie the cords of the yoke
To let the oppressed go free;
To break off every yoke.
It is to share your bread with the hungry,
And to take the wretched poor into your home;
When you see the naked, to clothe him,
And not to ignore your own kin.

(Isaiah 58:6-8)

The two fathers, one student, and I examined ourselves in light of the passage. We discussed our own attitudes and practices regarding homeless people. We considered whether we personally could have “take[n] the poor wretched into [our] home.” We didn’t agree about the usefulness of Isaiah’s prescription. But we all felt challenged by the words.

Suddenly, Yom Kippur didn’t seem so beside the point. Suddenly, I found myself pushed to engage in the most important sort of action. What could be more crucial to right living than to sacrifice one’s own comfort, and even safety, so that others might share in life’s basic necessities? And what could be more difficult to do?

Suddenly, Yom Kippur felt too audacious, too difficult. A week after dismissing the day’s worship as not in keeping with my spiritual yearnings, I was confronted by exhortations too demanding for my rather timid social justice practices. And this had significance for my spiritual life. I had spoken a bit too soon.

I am probably not likely to invite homeless people into my home (especially nowadays, when my family and I don’t have enough room). But, if I can remember to bear these words in mind next year, I will be tasked to build an outward, interpersonal dimension into my fast. Yom Kippur, refracted through the day’s Haftarah reading, perhaps requires me to get out of my head—on a day when most Jews are unusually inside their own heads. I am reminded that to repent is to act differently, to do what is difficult. Next year, I hope, I will bear in mind that seeking forgiveness requires more than words. It requires that I demonstrate a readiness to live more generously, more compassionately. It requires me to wake up and love.

What was it I was saying about “idol worship”?

Present but Absent on Yom Kippur

This weekend marked the passage of Yom Kippur, the most powerful day in the Jewish calendar. Its liturgy and rituals press the worshipper, issuing fierce demands. Yom Kippur is not for the faint hearted.

On Friday night and Saturday, I observed Yom Kippur. The liturgy and rituals spoke loudly, but not to me this year. They did not seize and hold me captive. My heart, mind, and soul strayed from the prayers and occupied themselves elsewhere.

It was seventeen years ago when Yom Kippur services helped restore me to the religion of my upbringing. On that day, I was emotionally overcome, partly from abstaining from food and drink (and coffee!) for approximately twenty-seven hours, as is the custom. Fasting intensifies the solemnity we participants feel as we engross ourselves in self-reflection, examining our thoughts, words, and actions from over the past year for all traces of mean-spiritedness, dishonesty, and dishonor. We spend the day in synagogue confessing our transgressions and asking God (the Father, the King, the Deity-out-There) to forgive them. We come clean, and we pledge to behave more virtuously.

For many years, Yom Kippur’s activities have inspired me. They have invigorated me. On Yom Kippur, I have affirmed my alignment with what is right and what is good.

What made this year different? Well, throughout this entire year, I have held closely to the practice of examining my thoughts, words, and behavior. Being in the habit of self-examination robbed this year’s Yom Kippur of its singular importance.

Yet there was an even more critical factor. This year, Yom Kippur’s confessions contrasted jarringly with my deepened ongoing spiritual practice. The Yom Kippur prayers felt empty and inauthentic, foreign to my evolving mode of spiritual immersion. For the first time, I felt not at home in this liturgy that has so enraptured me.

Increasingly, I immerse myself within a loving force, a force that I enter, a force that enters me. Rarely any longer do I turn to a heteronomous God who judges me. Imagining myself as observed and judged by an external force seems only to reinforce the illusion that I am separate from the source of all power. Yom Kippur, in my experience, asks me to stand before God and quiver. At no point during worship do I feel lifted and carried by a loving current.

This Yom Kippur, I couldn’t bring myself to stand before God the Judge. I could not dam myself off from the current of love that carries me to infinite expanses.

Throughout my time in prayer this Yom Kippur, my focus drifted away from the confessions at hand. Instead, I found myself meditating, confirming my oneness with the One. Instead of begging forgiveness from the heteronomous God, I focused on my soul’s light and invited it to fill me. I did not stand before God. I melted inside God.

Inside God, the One Energy flows through me. I am powerful, a conductor for the One Energy. I do not cower before an external God who sits in judgment.

Perhaps, in upcoming years, a deeper experience of Yom Kippur will come to me and fill my worship with renewed purpose. Until then, I will annually attend Yom Kippur services and abstain from eating, in solidarity with the Jewish people. Maybe next year I will reconnect with the day’s confessional prayers. Right now, they feel absurd, an exercise in idol worship. So be it.

When God Pledges Allegiance

A recent court case prompted me to rethink the relationship between God and nation. As per usual, the results surprised me. How delightful it is to surprise myself!

This past May, the Massachusetts Supreme Court ruled that asking schoolchildren to recite the words “under God” in the Pledge of Allegiance did not obstruct those children’s equal protection under the law, which is guaranteed by the state’s constitution. According to the court, the state was not seeking to promote or restrain religious belief. In asking students to recite the pledge, the state was conducting “a fundamentally patriotic exercise, not a religious one."

The court emphasized the voluntary nature of the pledge. No student was being forced to recite the pledge, the court pointed out. Massachusetts was thus abiding by federal law. In West Virginia v. Barnette (1943), the U.S. Supreme Court ruled that a student cannot be punished for refusing to recite the pledge. 

West Virginia State Board of Education v. Barnette,_ 319 U.S. 624 (1943). 

For the plaintiffs in the Massachusetts case, the voluntary nature of the recitation was immaterial. Their point was not that their children were being coerced into reciting the pledge. Their point was that their children were being discriminated against and were in danger of becoming ostracized within the classroom. The plaintiffs argued what school prayer opponents have argued—successfully—over the past half century. The voluntary nature of the exercise, they insisted, did not diminish the emotional suffering caused by having either to abstain from the exercise (and thereby become socially marginalized) or to participate in it (and thereby violate their conscience).

The plaintiffs

expressed concern that the recitation of the pledge “marginalizes [their] children and [their] family and reinforces [a] general public prejudice against atheists and Humanists, as it necessarily classifies [them] as outsiders, defines [them] as second-class citizens, and even suggests that [they are] unpatriotic.” They claimed that “[i]t is inappropriate for [their] children to have to draw attention to themselves by not participating, possibly leading to unwanted attention, criticism and potential bullying,” and that at their children's ages, “ ‘fitting in’ is an important psychological need.”

Doe v. Acton Regional School District,_ S.J.C. 11317 (2014).

The plaintiffs were acting on principle. Their children hadn’t actually been bullied or marginalized; other children and parents had not, in fact, condemned them for exhibiting insufficient patriotism or Godliness. For the plaintiffs, the state’s error lay in unconstitutionally aligning itself with religion and, in so doing, failing to extend equal protection under the law to those students who didn’t believe in God. That is, an establishment of religion was being signified—as it was whenever God was mentioned in a recitation led by a state employee and carried out in a public institution.

Whatever the merits of the plaintiffs’ argument, I am struck by how fully and utterly they resisted any mention of God. I understand their antipathy toward organized religion. I feel a bit of it myself. But why battle against invoking the name of God? If one is a disbeliever, then why not simply remain silent when those words are read? Choose to dissent—and then, like any dissenter with the courage of her convictions, incur the costs. How deep is the animus of those who would litigate to remove from the schools any mention of the name of God!

When I first began my doctoral research over a decade ago, I empathized with these parents’ sentiments. At that time, I considered strict separation of church and state proper and necessary to ensure fairness in the classroom. Today, I feel somewhat differently. If the American people see fit to ask their children to swear allegiance to the flag, and if they wish to assert their devotion to God as part of that pledge, then the people probably are within their right to do so. For dissenters to abstain is perfectly reasonable, but I don’t know that their abstention requires special accommodation. The schoolchildren were not being asked to pray or read the Bible. They were being asked to permit their peers to acknowledge God in a brief, two-word phrase. Enduring that acknowledgement might infringe on the atheist minority, but even more would stifling it infringe on the majority.

Equally curious for me is the connection between God and country. What exactly do Americans have in mind when they swear loyalty to “one nation under God”? Are they simply asserting that Americans are loyal and obedient toward God? Or, are they suggesting that God is loyal to America and committed to its wellbeing? History would suggest the latter. Indeed, throughout human history, nations have imagined themselves specially favored in the eyes of God.

Perhaps it is inevitable for a nation to want God as a partisan of its cause, given the insecurities that any nation must endure. Still, the notion boggles my mind. Understanding God at all is difficult enough. Spiritual reality transcends human knowledge. But conceiving of God as a sports fan with team loyalty is bizarre. God the Partisan would be as small as nations themselves—a party to jealousies, injustices, and the worst sorts of violence. Of course, the God of the Torah and Old Testament was often such a party. But, for me, that is a dangerous conception of spiritual reality, one that propels believers into waging war rather than peace. Surely, God has nothing to do with national boundaries and national grievances.

If inclusion of the words “under God” in the Pledge of Allegiance is a problem, the problem lies not in mentioning God’s name. The problem lies in glorifying nationhood to such a degree.

My Fascinating Topic

Yesterday, I had coffee with a colleague. I got to talking about my book project, which I haven’t done any work on for about three months. Packing up my family’s belongings, moving, and setting up shop in Seattle has taken up most of my time. Now, finally, writing is once again becoming a priority. And so I’m once again ruminating on my topic, getting up a head of steam, taking notes all the time.

Yesterday, I announced to this colleague—and to myself—that my goal is to explore how Christian conservatives of the 1980s thought about democracy in America, and especially about the role of the Supreme Court. I don’t believe that I ever before said this so plainly. I’ve known for some time that this is one of the underlying issues with which my project wrestles, but yesterday I found out that this is perhaps the issue.

This got us wondering what Americans today think about the Supreme Court, and whether they even think about it at all. Do most Americans care about the Court? Do they reflect much on judicial review (the Court’s right to declare laws unconstitutional and thereby strike them down)?

The vast majority of my friends and colleagues are liberals or lefties. To the extent that they think about the Supreme Court, they tend to consider it (at least during its recent decades) as merely a shill for the very wealthy. Generally speaking, the left today believes that the Court obstructs the will of ordinary Americans and instead services the interests of the rich and powerful. As such, the Court provokes the ire of liberals and radicals. They point to campaign-finance decisions such Citizens United and McCutcheon as proof that the Court functions primarily to stamp with approval wealthy people’s attempts to buy the political process. Others on the left seize on decisions such as Hobby Lobby as evidence that the justices care more about a particular subculture’s religious convictions than about the majority’s right to affordable health care. In these and other ways, the Court appears to those on the left largely as a roadblock to democracy, an institution that frustrates the will of the 99 percent.

Citizens United v. FEC (2010) 

McCutcheon v. FEC (2014) 

Burwell v. Hobby Lobby Stores (2014) 

What is fascinating about this is that, for years, conservatives issued similar denunciations of the Court. Rulings on desegregation, abortion, school prayer, the voting rights of racial minorities, and the civil rights of criminal suspects, all suggested to conservatives that liberals had captured control of the entire federal court system and used it to override the will of popular majorities. Critics on the right accused the justices of “judicial activism” and “judicial overreach.” Such critics abounded in states where popular majorities expressed conservative values. They accused federal judges—unelected political elites frequently from outside the state—of callously disregarding local customs and statewide policies. So unpopular was the Court among conservatives that, during the 1950s and 1960s, billboards exclaiming “Impeach (Chief Justice) Earl Warren” could be seen along many roadsides. 

Ours is a political system where laws are passed by representatives voted into office by popular majorities. Within that system, the authority wielded by federal judges—unelected public officials—constitutes a anomaly of sorts. This was recognized in 1962 by constitutional scholar Alexander Bickel, who labeled judicial review a “counter-majoritarian difficulty” in American democracy.

Bickel's "Counter-Majoritarian Difficulty"

At various times, different parts of the American electorate have felt frustrated by the Court for exactly this reason. Those who at any time dislike the Court’s current political orientation denounce it as an obstacle to self-rule by “the people.”

To the extent that people think about the Supreme Court, they tend to think about it as a problem, something whose power and influence need to be stemmed. This may or may not be inevitable, given that nobody votes the justices into power, and so few people develop any loyalty to them. Either way, judicial review provides a permanent source of displeasure and frustration. This is not a recipe for satisfaction with our larger political system.

I suppose I have an interesting book topic.

 

Writer's Cramp

Boxes engulf me.

My family and I arrived in our new hometown of Seattle five weeks ago. Since then, our living space has been dissected and cordoned and blocked by stacks of boxes four and five high. Although the walls are gradually receding, they yet remain, constant reminders of our unfinished transition. Boxes form walls beyond walls.

Our apartment is small—smaller than our apartment back in Connecticut and much smaller than our house immediately prior in New Hampshire. Although we have purged many of our belongings, we still own a lot—a lot more than we can easily store. Squeezing into a small apartment is one of the prices we pay for locating in a happening, urban neighborhood in a happening, urban locale. I love the choice we made. But it brought living conditions that constrain us daily.

Our crampedness most affects me when I sit down to write. I suffer from writer’s cramp. I still haven’t uncovered the small table that will serve as my desk, and so I work at the half–dining room table that we’ve managed to unfold. Or, I write in coffee houses, as I have throughout my adult life. I don’t yet have a writing space in our home. I want a writing space, and I don’t yet have one.

Don’t get me wrong: merely living in this magnificent city excites me continuously. But, as of now, the environs inside my home don’t prod and support my writing the way my outer environs do. Right now, I’m not a Seattle writer—I’m a cramped writer.

Downsizing profoundly has shown me how dependent I am on comfortable writing space. I never really thought about it before, probably because I didn’t have to. Now I know. I need to spread out my books and papers; I need to stretch out my body; I sometimes need to pace back and forth like a first-time expectant father. I didn’t realize that these were my preconditions for free, fluid writing. Now I know.

In their way, boxes are wonderful. They foretell of unpacked joys of sorting through books removed from their old order on their previous shelves—books that will become new again, as if appearing for the first time. I am grateful for the content inside these boxes. But, for the moment, these boxes make my life a bit too boxy. My inner writer roars in anticipation of roaming free inside a cage free from clutter.

Free to Prostitute?

Phoenix, Arizona, which has some of the nation’s severest laws against sexual solicitation, has put into place a controversial project that has drawn both praise and condemnation. For two days out of the year, undercover police officers go online and travel to red-light districts, in an attempt to snare and detain women suspected of prostitution. The police handcuff suspects and place them in custody, although law-enforcement officials delay arresting those suspects who have no pending warrants and no drugs in their possession. To those who qualify, officials offer an alternative “diversion” program that, if successfully completed, spares them from legal charges. During their detention, they are offered a variety of health and housing services, as well as a hot meal, clean clothes, and toiletries. Thereafter, they are required to complete a social-retraining course that can last up to six months.

This essay weighs the and benefits of the Phoenix program, in an attempt to determine its impact on the dignity and rights of those apprehended. Ultimately, this essay considers prostitution itself. Lurking throughout is the question of whether or not the program serves the interests of the individuals concerned and the society they inhabit.

************************************************

The police, prosecutors, and Arizona State University social workers who designed Project Rose (Reaching Out to the Sexually Exploited) defend it as an innovation in ameliorating the misery associated with the selling of sex. They recognize that sex workers are victims as much as criminals, they say, and so they offer suspects a rare opportunity to change their lives. The project’s designers hope that histories of violence, drug addiction, poverty, and sex trafficking can be reversed through timely, comprehensive intervention.

Detainees are not hauled to a police station. Rather, they are brought to Phoenix’s Bethany Baptist Church and questioned in a prosecution room where a cross hangs prominently on a wall. The social retraining course that follows is overseen by Catholic Charities of Phoenix. The project exemplifies the sort of “faith-based initiative” lauded by many American citizens and government officials over the past twenty-five years.

Newspaper Account of Project Rose 

************************************************

Detractors of Project Rose raise three basic objections. One is that detainees are denied the civil liberties constitutionally guaranteed to criminal suspects. Although the women apprehended are not initially arrested, they are handcuffed and confined within the project’s “command post,” where they are confronted by a project volunteer and a city prosecutor. They are prevented from consulting with a defense attorney, even though they have been denied the constitutional right to leave freely. Those who refuse to undergo the diversion program face criminal charges of “manifestation,” which bring a mandatory minimum prison sentence. With these conditions in mind, Dan Pochoda, legal director of the American Civil Liberties Union of Arizona, complains that the project tramples over detainees’ civil rights. 

The second basic objection is that the program violates the Constitution’s prohibition against a government establishment of religion. Some observers find it objectionable that detainees are brought to a church facility to decide whether or not to accept the social services being offered, and that, if the detainees agree to accept those services, they must specifically authorize Catholic Charities to enroll them in its diversion program.

“Phoenix is essentially telling criminal suspects that they can go to church or go to jail,” charged Rev. Barry W. Lynn, executive director of Americans United for the Separation of Church and State. “The government has absolutely no right to force anyone into a position like that. These suspects shouldn’t be coerced into participating in a program that might not reflect their own beliefs.”

Comments From Americans United 

The two objections raised above are legitimate and point to fatal flaws in Project Rose. It is unacceptable for law enforcement to apprehend and detain suspects as if they have been arrested while failing to extend the constitutional protections that attend arrest. Moreover, to detain suspects in a church and then coerce them into undergoing a program carried out by a religious organization is tantamount to establishment of a government-sponsored religion. This violates everything the First Amendment implies. As soon as suit is filed against Project Rose, the courts must find it—at it now exists—a blatant violation of civil rights.

************************************************

The third and more complicated concern is that any program aiming to constrain or reprogram sex workers violates their basic human rights. This was the view of an editorial in Affilia: The Journal of Women in Social Work.  The authors, two Portland State University social-work scholars, argued that Project Rose deprives its targets of their dignity and rights as individuals. "We challenge the assumption that arresting (or participating in the arrest of) people 'for their own good' constitutes good or ethical social work practice," the authors claimed. "Rather, we believe that targeting people for arrest under the guise of helping them violates numerous ethical standards, as well as the humanity of people engaged in the sex industry."

Editorial in Affilia 

Project Rose comes under similar attack by the Sex Workers Outreach Project (SWOP), which describes itself as “a national grassroots movement that focuses on improving the lives of sex industry workers by promoting safety, dignity and diversity in sex work, and fostering an environment that affirms individual choices and occupational rights.” SWOP rejects Project Rose’s claim of providing services to those it targets.  “Project ROSE and programs like it violate ethical standards in social work and perpetuate the idea that individuals who sell sex are not human. Further, Project ROSE frames its work as saving sex workers—who are stigmatized as scarred victims— rather than people with civil and human rights (the right to work, the right to be free from violence, the right to due process and much more).”

Sex Workers Outreach Project 

This third objection—that constraining or reprograming sex workers violates their basic human rights—proceeds from fundamental conceptions of sexual behavior.  These begin with the inherent dignity in all consensual sexual acts and the inviolable liberty due sex workers. Their dignity is violated, the argument goes, not by their livelihood, but by efforts to squash their livelihood and to remake their values and desires. According to this third objection, Project Rose could not pass ethical muster even if its church-state and criminal-rights infirmities were remedied. To be defensible, the project—indeed, any effort at thwarting sexual commerce—would need demonstrably to honor the humanity of the sex workers it apprehends.

************************************************

Officials who oversee Project Rose defend it as an innovative approach to saving women from a self-destructive lifestyle. By offering suspects basic human services (public health, public housing, a hot meal, clean clothes, toiletries, and a social retraining program), officials claim that they offer suspects a rare opportunity to change their entire lives.

Law enforcement officials such as City of Phoenix Prosecutor Aarón J. Carreón-Aínsa believe that prostitution is a scourge that society needs to try to eliminate. “If prostitutes are indeed victims,” Carreón-Aínsa concedes, “then let's treat them as victims.” But, “at the same time, they are doing things that are harmful not only to themselves but to society." To protect society as well as redeem individuals, he maintains, Project Rose is justified.

The law enforcement officials, prosecutors, and academics who designed Project Rose assume that the program can potentially cure prostitutes from the spiritual and psychological maladies responsible for their depraved lifestyle. This assumption rests on beliefs about free will. The designers seem to believe that detainees, in choosing to prostitute themselves, have already been deprived and perhaps become incapable of free choice, long prior to this intervention. After all, no one would choose prostitution. Although detainees do retain a degree of free will insofar as they can agree or refuse the diversion program, their life choices have been profoundly limited by sexual abuse, drug addiction, and the like. Ironically, it is only by circumscribing their remaining available choices that social workers acquire any chance at reversing the women’s hard and set lifestyles. Because these women have been brutally deprived of any meaningful free will, the program’s designers would likely claim, they cannot readily acquire it; rather, it can take root only if their thoughts and behavior are cured, so to speak—if their inner and outer compulsions have been removed and so no longer prevent them from making genuine choices.

************************************************

Proponents of Project Rose thus assume that it honors women’s humanity. They assume that prostitution itself, and not the intervention, violates women’s humanity. The project’s defenders thus proceed from three fundamental premises: that women who sell themselves do so because of abuse or harm suffered; that, in selling themselves, women behave out of compulsion rather than free will; and that, by redeeming them from the sex industry, criminal law, with all its force, is an optimal tool for restoring a measure of free will to the lives of sex workers.

More than just supporting Project Rose, these assumptions provide foundation for a wider attack on prostitution, its purported morality, and its legalization. Sprung from these assumptions, the project carries out more than an intervention. Essentially, it is an attempt to stem a social and personal malady by pressuring the individuals who carry out its most sordid acts. For its proponents, to defend Project Rose is to defend women’s dignity by trying to stem one of its most heinous threats.

************************************************

Andrea Mrozek, a conservative commentator and opponent of legalized prostitution, operates from these premises. In the Huffington Post, Mrozek responds to the Canadian Supreme Court’s December 2013 ruling striking down Canada’s criminal laws against prostitution.

Article on Court Ruling

Mrozek defends the coercive power of criminal law. She contends that law, at its best, morally instructs those it affects. It can teach either that the buying and selling of sex is destructive and intolerable or that it is healthy and acceptable. Mrozek argues that, whenever law sanctions sexual transactions, it licenses impulses stirring inside perhaps all of us. In particular, it stokes stirrings in those among us whose upbringing lacked adequate love and attention—those whose stirrings most need to be dampened. Law that sanctions sexual transactions causes at-risk women to “play with fire.” “By the time they realize where precisely they are,” those who give in to the temptation to sell themselves can no longer “turn around in the middle of the blaze and come back.” The blazes of destruction can be extinguished only by laws that staunchly prohibit such behavior.

Mrozek Essay 

Short Bio of Mrozek

Mrozek’s argument gets at the core of what, I believe, the project’s designers really intend—and what some of its graduates report. One, Elisa Cordova, believes that the intervention literally saved her life. “I had been beaten, I had been tortured, and I had been raped," she reported. "I finished my classes, and I focused mainly on what I wanted out of life, because I was going to die out there."

************************************************

Like Mrozek, the project’s designers believe that human dignity is protected rather than breached by the diversion program. So valuable to them is the program that they would probably, if required by the courts, agree to rectify its first two infirmities. In all likelihood, they would insist that they could accomplish their goals without violating the rights of those apprehended. And, without question, the project could be thusly reformed. This much was admitted by the legal director of the American Civil Liberties Union of Arizona, Dan Pochoda, who conceded that diversion programs shorn of coercive elements can offer sex workers useful services. Moreover, if those apprehended were not threatened with criminal charges, and if they remained free to walk away from the intervention, then the program’s church affiliation would be voluntary and not in violation of the First Amendment.

We could then question the virtues of a reformed Project Rose based on this question: Is it prostitution or its suppression that violates the dignity of sex workers? Behind that is the question of whether prostitution is the product of circumstances that compel sex work, or whether prostitution is a freely chosen career path. Compulsion is the absence of free choice. An individual whose behavior is compelled has been stripped of dignity, whereas freely chosen behavior is dignified behavior.

************************************************

Arguments about the cause and nature of sex work are legion and are often in mutual conflict. Given that proliferation and contestation, our view of the practice necessarily rests on our underlying beliefs rather than on indisputable data or argumentation. My own view resonates with the qualitative research recently conducted and published by Shahid Qayyum. His article, “Causes and Decisions of Women’s Involvement into Prostitution and Its Consequences in Punjab, Pakistan,” discusses the factors that lead women into prostitution. Foremost among the factors he discovers are poverty, debt, family and personal illness, parental neglect, drug addiction, marital violence, rape, and sexual trafficking.

"Causes and Decisions of Women’s Involvement into Prostitution"

I provide no social science findings of my own. Like anyone having done no research and gathered no direct experience, I can only surmise. I can say only that Qayyum’s findings support my presuppositions. My inexpert belief is that prostitution is the result of past suffering and the cause of further suffering. Most of what I have heard and seen anecdotally suggests that those (mostly women) who perform sex for money or drugs have previously surrendered their capacity to choose how to live, and that any free choice they might retain is only further circumscribed by their selling of their services.

I am not surprised that some sex workers claim to enjoy their work and the freedom of choice purportedly behind it. Dealing with one’s own dire lack of freedom must be unbearable. Denying such circumstances must be an attractive, if ultimately deceptive, means of coping.

While I might well dissent from most of Andrea Mrozek’s positions, I concur with her stance on prostitution. Like her, I believe that sex work is a horrifying practice that anyone would do well, if at all possible, to avoid or escape. No one should be coerced, but everyone deserves the opportunity to get out. Now, I don’t know how reliably law actually helps victims avoid or escape the profession’s clutches. I would assume that, in practice, law-enforcement efforts to wipe out prostitution—efforts such as Project Rose—sometimes treat suspects harshly and tread on their civil rights. On those grounds, Project Rose is intolerable. But a remedied Project Rose would stand as an example of law helping to restore dignity to human beings whose lives lie in tatters.