Crossposted at my new community blog, My Left Wing
Dear Future Democratic President,
I will give your campaign money, time and sweat. I will “go to the mat” for you every day. I will do everything I can do to help you win the Presidency of the United States of America.
I hope to admire you deeply and see your Presidency restore dignity, honour and honesty to the office you will hold – and to the words “liberal” and “Democrat.”
Make no mistake, however, if you believe me one of the solid Democratic “base” that will be satisfied merely by the ascension of a Democrat to the Presidency.
The joy I experienced in helping Bill Clinton win the office turned to despair and disgust by the end of his second term — and not because of the Lewinsky affair, either. In his eight years in office, here are just a few of the things Bill Clinton did that broke my heart:
• signed a bill outlawing gay marriages and took out ads in Christian radio stations touting his opposition to any form of legal same-sex couplings.
• kicked ten million out of the total fourteen million recipients off welfare.
• promised states “bonus funds” to reduce the welfare rolls further, and made it easier to get these funds by not requiring the states to help the ex-welfare recipients find jobs.
• introduced a plan to bar any assistance to teenaged parents if they dropped out of school or left their parents’s homes.
• despite calls from republican governors like George Ryan of Illinois to support a moratorium on capital punishment, he rejected all efforts to slow down the number of executions even after it was revealed that there were dozens of innocent people on death row.
• supported laws that put people behind bars for life after committing three crimes — even if those crimes were shoplifting or not paying for a pizza.
• signed orders prohibiting any form of health care to poor people who were in the U.S. illegally.
• supported a ban on late term abortions and promised to sign the first bill that crossed his desk with an exemption only if the life of the mother were endangered.
• signed an order prohibiting any U.S. funds going to any country to be used in helping women secure abortions.
• signed a one year gag order that prohibited using any federal funds in foreign countries where birth control agencies mentioned abortion as an option to pregnant women.
• refused to sign the International Land Mine Ban Treaty already signed by 137 nations — but not Iraq, Libya, North Korea or the United States.
• became the first President since Richard Nixon not to force auto makers to improve their mileage per gallon, which would have saved millions of barrels of oil each day.
(I am well aware that President Clinton faced a vicious and relentless opposition party. Still, I would rather have seen him do the right thing in his first term and lose in his second than what he eventually did.)
Future Democratic President, you can do better. I urge you, seize this opportunity to right the wrongs of your predecessors. Act boldly, reform this nation. Act as if you only have one term in which to establish your legacy. Forget spending four years tip-toeing through the world, fearful of losing the re-election bid. Let those chips fall where they may.
In short, Democratic President, be who your supporters want you to be, an American President who would be beloved of the world, would s/he only stand up and do the right thing.
• Force Israel to grant Palestine the lands and autonomy they need to be the nation of Palestine. Without our money, Israel is nothing; so why on earth should we not use the power that money gives us to force these recalcitrant children to stop killing each other?
• Be merciless with the budget. Cut the fat, redistribute the funds to the areas where they are most needed: education, healthcare, welfare, law enforcement, libraries, a higher minimum wage incentive, human rights enforcement.
For the love of God, the $200 Billion spent on the Iraq war would pay the salaries of almost half a million teachers (if they all made $45K a year, which is significantly more than they make now). Be forceful, be brave, be bold: strong-arm the Congress until they relent. There is no room for “pork barrel politics” in a moral society. Cut the waste. Cut it all.
• It should go without saying, but reverse the discriminatory policies of Clinton and Bush against abortion.
• Find a way to reduce (or, better still, eliminate) our dependence on foreign oil. Encourage, through tax incentives and penalties, the expansion of the hybrid auto industry. Reduce emissions. Require the auto industry to improve the mileage per gallon in their non-hybrid vehicles. If necessary, set a deadline forcing the auto industry to turn to all hybrid vehicles by a certain year.
• End this gay marriage controversy and the Democratic Party’s equivocating about it once and for all: declare “civil unions” the law of the land, and equally accessible by all. Retire the word “marriage” from the legal lexicon and graciously offer full rights to the word to non-secular organisations. Be clear: the separation of church and state will be the better for eliminating the ambiguity in terms shared by secular and religious factions.
• Use your office to push forward the elimination of the so-called “three strikes” laws and minimum sentencing. Restore authority and discretion to the judges.
• Call for the death penalty to be abolished. We are one of 59 nations who retain the death penalty for ordinary crimes. With few exceptions, the nations that have abolished capital punishment or discontinued its use are secular democracies. They include every nation in Europe except Belarus, and every country in Latin America except Cuba and Guatemala. Among the other death penalty abolitionists are Canada, Australia, New Zealand, Israel, and the Republic of South Africa. Newly democratic Russia has suspended executions, and pledged to abolish the death penalty.
Those who retain the death penalty fall into four slots.
• The first is the entire Islamic world, with the exception of Turkey, which has a secular democracy, and the former Soviet Republics of Turkmenistan and Azerbaijan.
• The second is India, the world’s second most populous country, whose government is in the hands of Hindu fundamentalists.
• The third is what remains of the “communist” world: China, North Korea, Vietnam, Laos and Cuba.
• The fourth is a grab bag of authoritarian governments, including Guatemala, Belarus, Burma and Zimbabwe.
What these four have in common is one or more of the following: religious fundamentalism, authoritarian regime or despotism. Clearly the latter two have little relevance to the United States.
But the distribution of the death penalty inside the United States clearly points to the influence of religious fundamentalism, in this case of the Christian variety.
Capital punishment has been abolished in 11 states, covering the Northeast and upper Midwest, plus Alaska, Hawaii, West Virginia, the District of Columbia, and Puerto Rico — all places where the religious right wing is weak. In two more states — Illinois and Maryland — it has been suspended.
In the remaining 37 states, the death penalty is still in effect. But nowhere is enthusiasm greater than in the southern Bible Belt, the crescent extending from Virginia to Florida to Texas to Missouri, and in Mormon Utah. Almost nine out of 10 executions occur in that region.
Underlying religious fundamentalism in all its forms is a sense of holy righteousness. There is a struggle underway between forces of “good” and “evil,” with the Almighty — whether called God or Allah — on the side of the righteous. Those tainted as evil are dehumanized, making it easier to forfeit their right to life.
That seemed to be the atmosphere in Texas in 2002, where authorities executed Mexican citizen Javier Suarez Medina without informing him of his right under the Vienna Convention to seek legal support from his government.
So bring us into the 21st century, Democratic President, and into the fold of civilized nations the world throughout. Abolish the death penalty.
Somalia is the only other country refusing to sign it.
We are one of 8 countries that execute juveniles (16 and up, here) — the others are China, Congo, Iran, Nigeria, Pakistan, Saudi Arabia and Yemen. In May 2002, Texas executed Napoleon Beazly, an African American who was a minor at the time he committed his crime. Beazly was the 10th child offender to be executed in the United States since 1995.
During the same period, only seven child offenders were executed by all other countries combined: three in Iran, two in Pakistan, one in Nigeria, and one in the Democratic Republic of Congo.
There is more, so much more, that I ask of you, Future Democratic President… but this will do, for a start.
Sincerely,
Maryscott O’Connor,
Fairy Blogmother of My Left Wing…
and
One Pissed Off Liberal Democrat
