It's a Dangerous Percentile

The Iowa decision also gives me an excuse to link to Ta-Nehisi Coates post explaining the linkage between conservative fears of gay marriage, and racism, and anti-Semitism (Amber says this is maybe the first thing to convince her of intersectionality, but I'm not actually sure this is an intersectionality claim).

The most laughable aspect of America's long war against racism, is the justification racist would always trot out--the specter of interracial union. I can remember being a kid and reading about black folks struggling for some small right, that, these days, we take for granted. So you'd have some black dude who'd been born a slave, in some one room shack, but had risen to become a lawyer, arguing for, say, school funding for black kids in rural Alabama. And then you'd see some bigot responding with, essentially, the following, "If we give the nigras school funding, they'll take our women! Do you want a nigra marrying yer daughter?!?!?"

I would read that and think, "What? The dude just wants some textbooks, WTF??" There's this great riff in Wattstax where Richard Pryor talks about Southern whites accusing a black dude of raping some white guy's wife. The guy brings out his wife and says something like, "The nigger raped her!" The assembled black folks look at the guy's wife who, let's just say is not Scarlett O'Hara, and go, "You sure??"

But in the white male paranoid mind, the deepest ambition of all black men lay between the two legs of some white woman--any white woman. And white women, of course lacking any real agency in the narrative, joyfully go along. Or are forcibly carried along. From that perspective, white racism really is a fear of a black planet--and (paradoxically) of white women.

Bigotry, in all forms, requires a shocking arrogance, a belief that other communities deepest desires revolve around your destruction. It is the ultimate narcissism, a way of thinking that can only see others, through a paranoid fear of what one might lose. The fears are almost always irrational. To go back to Chuck D, perhaps he was too cold when he said, "Man, I don't want your sister." But there was deep truth in it, the idea was, "Fool, this ain't about you and your fucked-up sexual hangups." In much the same vein when I read people complaining that gay marriage is a threat to traditional marriage, I think, "Fool, these gay motherfuckers ain't thinking about your marriage. This ain't about you and your hang-ups."

Coates mentions anti-Semitism, but making it more explicit, much of anti-Semitism rests on this idea of Jews as hyperpowerful -- pulling the strings of the entire world; an insidious cancer which if left unchecked will corrupt and destroy modern society.

I'm sorry to say that for the most part, Jewish lives are considerably less dramatic. We want the same things as most other people do, and live the same lives that most other people do. But the conceit is always there: the 1% of the population that was Jewish has always been seen as an existential threat to Christianity; and now is seen as an existential threat to humanity itself. And, again I hate to be this blunt but: Get over yourself.

Breaking: Iowa Supreme Court Unanimously Strikes Down Gay Marriage Ban

Here's a PDF of the opinion, which just came down. I'm not sure which is more surprising: that it was Iowa, or that the opinion was unanimous. Pam has snippets. I, personally, can't wait for Rep. Steve King's (R-IA) reaction, which I'm sure will be priceless. I'll have more commentary later in the day -- I'm particularly pleased to see that the Iowa court recognized that laws which discriminate against gay and lesbian persons should be met with, at the very least, heightened scrutiny.

But seriously -- congratulations to Iowa for this great step forward towards equality, and to the gay, lesbian, and straight citizens of that state.

First Guys

Men who are the husbands of G-20 leaders somehow don't feel obligated to pose for those lovely spouse photographs.

Good Luck With That

Alaska GOP calls on Sen. Mark Begich (D-AK) to resign, allowing for a special election "allow[ing] Alaskans to have a real, non-biased, credible process where the most qualified person could win, without the manipulation of the Department of Justice."

Cry me a river.

Another Jewish Roundup

This is becoming a near-daily occurrence. I wonder what that means.

The Forward obits Janet Jagan, former President of Guyana, and one of two Jewish women to lead a modern nation (the other was Golda Meir).

Also in the Forward, Rep. Keith Ellison (R-MN) "walks a tightrope" as he tries to craft a stance on Israel/Palestine that is genuinely pro-Israel, pro-Palestine, and pro-peace. I'd say he's doing a darn good job so far, and has seemingly maintained the support of the local Jewish and Muslim communities (both of which were early backers of our nation's first Muslim congressman).

Still from the same source, an examination of how and why Palestinians are so resistant to acknowledging the Holocaust (exemplified by the disbanding of a Palestinian youth orchestra which had serenaded Jewish Holocaust survivors).

Aliza Hausman writes on her experience as a Latina woman who converted to Orthodox Judaism.

For some people, every Seder is an African-American Seder.

UN Human Rights High Commissioner Navanethem Pillay is worried that the Durban II conference may get hijacked by the same elements who poisoned Durban I.

At a Norwegian dialogue on hatred, one speaker helpfully explained to his audience "Why I hate Jews".

A 13-year old boy was axed to death and a seven-year old wounded in a terrorist strike on a West Bank settlement. Though Islamic Jihad claimed responsibility for the attack, a Hamas spokesperson praised it, saying "This attack was committed in the framework of the resistance .... We are a people occupied, and it is our right to defend ourselves and to act in every way and with every means at our disposal in order to defend ourselves."

New Israeli Foreign Minister Avigdor Lieberman continues his zig-zag tacking, renouncing the Annapolis agreements while simultaneously criticizing his predecessors for refusing to evacuate settlement outposts. He said, however, that there must be "reciprocity" from the Palestinians when Israel follows the 2003 U.S. "roadmap" for peace.

Meanwhile, Syrian President Bashar Assad distressingly echoed Lieberman's claim that "If you want peace, prepare for war," arguing for his part that "The Israeli will not come by his own will, so there is no alternative but for him to come from fear."

Justice Thomas on the Bill of Responsibilities

Justice Thomas delivered the keynote address to a group of high school students who won an essay contest sponsored by the Bill of Rights Institute:

Thomas touched on familiar themes of responsibility and self-reliance. In the current economic crisis, Thomas said it is remarkable how many people think that "each of us is owed prosperity and a certain standard of living." But his own upbringing taught him that prosperity is not a constant, and he recalled a time when "air conditioning was the ultimate luxury." Laughing, he added, "I'm one of those who still thinks the dishwasher is a miracle," which he said explains why "I like to load it" at home.

Likewise, Thomas said the proliferation of taken-for-granted rights has led to the "virtual nobility that seems to be accorded those with grievances ... Shouldn't there at least be equal time for our bill of obligations, our bill of responsibilities?" Thomas did say that rights were important, and he extolled the 14th Amendment as the source of many of them.

I don't really have a comment on this; I just like collecting statements by Justice Thomas. He really is one of the more fascinating legal actors I've come across in my studies.

The Ultimate Revenge Scenario

I wonder how often it is that professors are teaching at a school which, at some point in their academic careers, rejected them? E.g., John Doe is teaching at Harvard University, when Harvard rejected him as an undergraduate (or better yet, for the Ph.D. program in the department he now teaches in).

On the one hand, that must be the ultimate feeling of vindication. On the other hand, I feel like I, at least, would have trouble with an inferiority complex if I taught at a law school which had rejected me as a law student. After all, I'd basically be looking out on a group of individuals who -- according to the value system I've enmeshed myself into -- are considered to be qualitatively smarter than I am. That makes it tough to project that scholarly authority thing.

Why Washington Failed

I meant to flag this post earlier, but I forgot. Ta-Nehisi Coates has a trenchant observation on why Booker T. Washington's self-uplift program for Black empowerment was such a resounding failure.

Washington basically said to the white South in 1895. "You win. We don't want the right the vote. We just want to till our farms, better ourselves, and be left alone. Leave us in peace, and you'll here no more of this voting or integration business." You have to remember the state of mind of black people, at that time. Reconstruction had been rolled back. The South was wracked by race riots. Three years after Washington's speech, the only coup in American history was orchestrated in Wilmington, North Carolina by racist thugs. Washington was basically conceding what he'd already lost. In return he hoped to simply secure the right of good Christian blacks to work the land in peace.

The dominant logic of the post-Reconstruction era held that the real problem wasn't white racists, but carpetbaggers and meddlers from up North who'd elevated illiterate blacks above their station. The white Southerner, presumably, had no existential objection to blacks, they just didn't want to live next door to them or have an illiterate and morally degenerate population electing their politicians. To this Washington, and much of black America, said Fine. Cease fire. You let us be, we'll let you be.

In retrospect, this was a grievous error. In point of fact, whites actually did have an existential objection to black people. Their beef wasn't that illiterates and moral degenerates might get too much power. Quite the opposite. Their beef was that blacks would prove to not be illiterates and moral degenerates, and thus fully able to compete with them. To see this point illustrated, one need only look at the history of race riots in the South. When white mobs set upon black communities they didn't simply burn down the "morally degenerate" portions--they attacked the South's burgeoning black middle and working class and its institutions. They went for the churches, the schools and the businesses. It's one thing to be opposed to black amorality. It's quite another to be opposed to black progress. The lesson blacks took post-Atlanta Compromise was that whites had used the former to cover for the latter. These days, it's popular to bemoan the fact that Washington has fallen into disfavor. But it wasn't blacks who proved the Atlanta Compromise fraudulent--it was the whites of that era.

You must understand the chilling effect this had to have on black people. To actually concede to all the racist propaganda out there, and then to be rewarded by hooligans burning down your community must have been psychologically devastating. People wondering why the GOP can't get a foothold in the black community, need to not just think about Goldwater and Nixon. They should think about Du Bois telling black men to go fight in The Great War, and then having those veterans come home to the Red Summer of 1919. They should think about the pogroms that greeted Booker T's compromise. There's a lot of hurt out there. A lot of ancient hurt. A lot of it, even in these times, quite deep.

This is important history to remember. And it's the reason I trace a direct line to Black Power and Black Nationalism from Booker T. The Black Power ideology was also about self-uplift. It just added a spin, learned from Washington's experience: "And this time, if you fuck with us, we're firing back."

As If We Didn't Know Already

John J. Mearsheimer, guest-blogging at Stephen Walt's place (good to see the old gang back together), has a post up which demonstrates quite clearly that he really doesn't understand the dynamics of the Israeli/Palestinian conflict. It's not that his predictive analysis is wrong -- he is quite right that if Israel pursues a "Greater Israel" policy unchecked, it will mean the eventual demise of the state. But beyond that, he ... how to put this gently? He doesn't know what he's talking about.

First, neither Ehud Barak nor Avigdor Lieberman "are committed to creating a Greater Israel." Barak proved his two-state bona fides at Camp David and Taba, and his Labor Party has been the primary mover in making the two-state solution official Israeli policy for nearly two decades. We can debate whether Barak should have brought Labor into government absent a commitment by Netanyahu to a two-state solution (one he wouldn't get), but there is no reason to believe that Barak will affirmatively use his position to try and create a "Greater Israel" that he has spent his entire political career trying to undermine.

Lieberman may be a racist, fascist thug, but Mearsheimer clearly doesn't know anything about his specific and peculiar brand of politics. Lieberman is most certainly not an advocate of "transferring" Palestinian Israelis (Israeli Arabs) out of the country -- a term which has a very specific meaning (essentially, expelling them). Lieberman wishes to redraw the borders of Israel so that predominantly Israeli Arab villages are incorporated into a new Palestinian state (and, in exchange, primarily Jewish settlement blocs are kept by Israel). This policy is inherently impossible to achieve without creating a Palestinian state. It is true that Lieberman doesn't see the creation of Palestine to be the immediate item on the agenda, but that's not because he's pursuing a "transfer" policy domestically.

Finally, Mearsheimer also doesn't understand the politics of the American pro-Israel community. He asks why "Israel's Jewish backers" think "Greater Israel is good for the Jews." Well, there's a simple answer to that: We don't. The settlements and the idea of Greater Israel are not particularly popular amongst American Jews. And even many (not all) of the more conservative Jewish organizations are not affirmatively in favor of Greater Israel or pro-settlement. They just either don't see the settlements as that big a deal, or think of them as a distraction from the "real" issue of Palestinian terrorism and Israel's security.

What American Jews tend to battle over is the degree to which settlements should be a primary item on the agenda. There are many Jews who will say that the settlements are a bad thing, but we have to deal with the problem of terrorism first. I think that's short-sighted -- I think the settlements are a major issue that has to be dealt with now, because they are continually aggravating the conflict, don't make Israel safer, represent an injustice to the Palestinians, and constitute a ticking time bomb on Israel's ability to maintain itself as Jewish and democratic. But that's the axis where the debate is.

I think the resistance many Jews have to putting the settlements front and center is the degree to which this conflict has been moralized into a game of "who is the worse evildoer." In the discursive climate we have, where there is nothing stupid, only something evil, saying the settlements need to be one of the primary items on the agenda table is read as saying that they are equally morally wrongful to, say, a Palestinian rocket attack on Sderot. Whether they are or not, though, is immaterial to Mearsheimer's completely correct observation that they still are a "remarkably foolish" policy. But until we can talk about Israel that way -- until not everything about the conflict is collapsed into this moral gamesmanship -- I think this debate will still be live.

But that's neither here nor there. At least in my lifetime, it hasn't been Greater Israel versus two-state solution. On that question, Greater Israel is in the definitive minority. The big debate is whether the degrees to which we should direct our energies towards pressuring Israel over the settlements versus pressuring Palestinians on terrorism and extremism. It's a debate I'm committed to winning, because like Mearsheimer and former PM Olmert I think the path Israel is going down with the settlements is suicidal. But Mearsheimer doesn't help his case when he fundamentally misunderstands the mindsets of the relevant players.

We've Got Legs

And they're neither knee-jerk nor lock-step.

The NY Jewish Week reports that Jewish groups are "not going to the mattresses" over America's decision to try and rejoin the UN Human Rights Council. The UNHRC is well reviled in the Jewish community for (a) engaging in one sided and hyperbolic criticisms of Israel and (b) doing very little else. But nonetheless, while some groups are more cautious about the decision than others Jewish groups by and large are adopting a wait-and-see approach. After all, maybe we can change the group for the better on the inside. Or maybe we can't. But the point is, contrary to some popular conceptions, the Jewish community is not some crazed animal which catches a whiff of something arguably anti-Israel and launches into a coked-out frenzy.

Stevens Is Out of the Fire

Citing major prosecutorial misconduct by the Justice Department attorneys who led the case, the Obama administration has announced it is dropping all charges against former Senator Ted Stevens (R-AK) and will not seek a new trial. Unfortunately, this is hardly surprising given the rather relaxed standards of competence the Justice Department enjoyed over the last eight years.

Gov. Sarah Palin (R-AK), of course, couldn't stop talking out of both sides of her mouth even if one was glued shut, released a statement bemoaning Stevens' treatment and the "frightening" misconduct he was forced to endure. "It is unfortunate that, as a result of the questionable proceedings which led to Senator Stevens' conviction days before the election, Alaskans lost an esteemed statesman on Capitol Hill. His presence is missed." Of course, after his conviction she was singing a different tune, criticizing him for failing to resign his seat and saying "Even if elected on Tuesday, Senator Stevens should step aside to allow a special election to give Alaskans a real choice of who will serve them in Congress."

Pardon Jack Johnson

There are very few things I agree with Sen. John McCain (R-AZ) on, but I do think he's done some genuinely good things in pressing for reforms in the sport of boxing -- a fanship that he and I both share. Now I see that along with Rep. Peter King (R-NY), McCain is pushing for a posthumous pardon for Black heavyweight champion Jack Johnson, convicted of violating the Mann Act in a racially charged and motivated case (Johnson was reviled in White America for not only being a nearly unbeatable boxer, but also for openly having relationships with White women).

12 Year Old Law Students

Today, we learned that asking which professor your fellow students have for Civil Procedure II becomes far more perilous when the choices are (Adam) Cox and (Diane) Wood.

Sweetie Pies

Afghan President Hamid Karzai is supporting some draconian restrictions on women's rights. Women can't go outside the home without their husband's permission, can only get work, education, or see a doctor with their husband's permission, and can't refuse them sex.

But don't worry! It's actually pro-women's rights!

Ustad Mohammad Akbari, an MP and the leader of a Hazara political party, said the president had supported the law in order to curry favour among the Hazaras. But he said the law actually protected women's rights.

"Men and women have equal rights under Islam but there are differences in the way men and women are created. Men are stronger and women are a little bit weaker; even in the west you do not see women working as firefighters."

Akbari said the law gave a woman the right to refuse sexual intercourse with her husband if she was unwell or had another reasonable "excuse". And he said a woman would not be obliged to remain in her house if an emergency forced her to leave without permission.

How generous. These "protections", incidentally, are all clearly linked to the purported strength of men and weakness of women. You don't see how that obviously counsels giving husbands a presumptive right to sex with their wives (subject to "reasonable excuses")?

The Songs That Saved My Life

PostBourgie takes on Andrew Sullivan's "gated community conservatism". But I'm not sure they pick the best example. This is the passage that they highlight:

I value the private healthcare system in the US, that, for all its faults, has innovated medicines that have saved my life.

And in response?

Almost everything Sullivan turns his attention to is filtered through the lens of “what is best for Andrew Sullivan?” More often than not, especially in the case of his writing on conservatism, that makes for some fairly interesting reading. With regards to policy though, this approach is terrible. The measure of a health care system isn’t whether or not it generates innovations which benefit Andrew Sullivan, it is whether or not it adequately serves the majority of health care consumers. And at this point, it’s virtually incontestable that that’s the case. Sullivan might understand this on an intellectual level but it has yet to pierce through his elitism, which at times makes for very frustrating reading.

It's not that this is technically wrong, but I think it loses a lot of its potency when it's directed against Sullivan's belief that he owes his life to current health care policies. I think you'd be hard pressed to find anyone who would say "I'd be dead if X policy wasn't in place, nonetheless, we should abandon X." That's asking a lot out of people.

"Gated community conservatism" is not always or even largely limited to cases like these. Mostly, "what's best for me" isn't "what keeps me alive" but rather is "what makes me marginally more comfortable while foisting huge costs on everyone else." PB's citation to the Ross Douthat/Ta-Nehisi Coates debate over whether our draconian crackdown on crime has been "vindicated by events" is a far better example: the persons behind the gates feel a little safer and a little more secure, and that's enough to justify massive intrusions on the safety, security, and liberty of poor and dark American citizens. But just as we might step more lightly when the speaker is someone who had been a crime victim themselves, I think we also might put on soft shoes when dealing with someone for whom the health care system status quo is not just mildly more convenient but literally life-saving.

Hammerhead

Kos on former netroots hero Rep. John Murtha (D-PA):

Of course, if you start a sentence with "If I'm corrupt", you've pretty much given up the gig. I'm not the biggest Steny Hoyer fan, but we dodged a bullet when Murtha lost his race for Majority Leader. Had he won (which Pelosi pushed hard, by the way), the parallels with DeLay would've been painful. As is, it would be nice if Democrats would work harder to clean house, rather than circle the wagons, GOP-style, and try to pretend that corruption within one's ranks is acceptable or justified.

As of yet, House Democrats are refusing to pursue a review, even as the FBI circles around Murtha's office.

Lest there be any doubt, Kos starts the post off with "Murtha, corrupt Democrat."

First Day Back Roundup

I was a responsible law student today. I got all my books, ran necessary errands, went to the grocery store, and finished my reading early. And I still had time to go out to dinner and go to the pub.

Winslow Robertson, guest-blogging at post-bourgie, on why he doesn't like the "Blackademy".

Howard Jacobson writes on the rise in UK anti-Semitism. He also adds something important: regardless of whether it actually is or is motivated by "Jew-hating" "The inordinacy of English Israel-loathing--ascribing to a country the same disproportionate responsibility for the world's ills that was once ascribed to a people--is toxic enough in itself."

Why is the mainstream/right Jewish establishment so spooked by J Street? Honestly, I didn't know they were. Matt Yglesias and Ezra Klein have more.

Do we need another anti-racism 101? The issue is being discussed over at Alas.

My college friend Moshe Lavi (an Israeli citizen from Sderot) makes the case for taking Yisrael Beiteinu's plan seriously.

Publius argues a) Barack Obama's economic recovery plan is not unconstitutional and b) conservatives are hypocritical for suggesting it is.

Meanwhile, Rick Hills wonders why conservatives like the non-delegation doctrine (the linchpin of the conservative argument for why Obama's plan does violate the constitution) in the first place.

Daring to Ask

Temple Law Professor Jaya Ramji-Nogales dares to ask: "What's wrong with teen sexting"? It's something I've wondered myself.

Posing for or simply allowing semi-nude photos to be taken of oneself seems to me to be typical teenage risk-taking behavior -- standard slumber party fare. The difference in today's world, of course, is the technology that can spread the image virally and have a real impact on a teenager's reputation and future. Rather than recognizing the problem as one of immaturity and perhaps naivete, the district attorney's heavy-handed approach seeks to brand these girls as immoral miscreants while letting the boys responsible for spreading the images do so with impunity. The message, then, is that girls must be chaste at all times or else they will face serious repercussions, but "boys will be boys." Moreover, this "blame the victim" mentality assumes that the girls are the sole cause of a rather complex problem. Perhaps that's what the district attorney plans to teach at his re-education program in which those charged are to "gain an understanding of what it means to be a girl in today's society."

Well, it's a good thing these girls have the nice DA to tell them "what it means to be a girl in today's society!" As far as I can tell, being a girl means that society can treat your body as its property and condemn you as a harlot if you choose to be sexually active.

The latest flurry of these stories, if nothing else, has shown that the cure is worse than the disease: the putative "victims" (the young women) are being met with the full fury of the law -- including threats to have them permanently labeled as sex offenders. The young men who are receiving the pictures are typically getting off with a wrist slap (no pun intended).

Nobody is denying that sexting is generally a foolish thing to do, but that applies to a lot of teenage behavior. Given that I don't actually have a problem with teenage sexual activity (so long as it is safe, consensual, and uncoerced), it is difficult for me to justify this reaction based on anything but the catch-all of slut-shaming young women.

It's All So Confusing

Oh, if only the feminists never came around. Then kids wouldn't be blaming Rihanna for being abused by her boyfriend.

What has happened — and what Rihanna and Chris have to do with Gloria and us — is that by inventing oppression where there is none and remaking woman in man’s image, as the sexual and feminist revolutions have done, we’ve confused everyone. The reaction those kids had was unnatural. It’s natural for us to expect men to protect women, and for women to expect some level of physical protection. But in post-modern America, those natural gender roles have been beaten by academics and political rhetoric and the occasional modern woman being offended by having a door opened for her. The result is confusion.

I'm not sure what work "natural" is doing here (or "post-modern", for that matter, but that's a common theme in conservative writing), but there doesn't seem to be any warrant for why "women are equal" should correspond to "blame women for being beaten." We "expect" men to protect women? What does that even mean? Historically, it means putting women "not on a pedestal but in a cage", as Justice Brennan put it. Historical masculine "protection" of women meant protecting their own exclusive rights to women, which, quite often, included their exclusive right to act violently against them -- through deprivation, through beatings, and through rape. What history is K-Lo reading where this traditional masculine paradigm didn't manifest itself in horrific violence towards women, particular in the home? And always this violence was justified either as the "natural" right of man to "his" woman's body, or as the proper response to "his" woman's obstinacy. Always.

Via Feministing.

Is it the Silence or the Speaking?

Jacob Shrybman gives his account of a presentation he attempted to give at Chicago's DePaul University detailing the experiences of Israelis who live in Sderot:

When I welcomed the custom of a question and answer period following my presentation, the very right of free speech that I welcomed to the audience of now over 100 people was thrown in my face and denied to me. First, an audience member verbally attacked me, expressed his support for the firing of rockets into Israel, and ended his anti-Semitic rhetoric filled rant with a question irrelevant to anything in my presentation. I then pointed out to the audience the same fact I want to point out in this article, that this person was not simply criticizing Israel but was clearly expressing his support for a terrorist organization.

Yet before I could finish answering the question, I was interrupted and silenced by the overwhelming Hamas supporters. Next, another audience member stood up and screamed out, calling me a “dirty whore” in Arabic and proceeding to grab his crotch and scream “Here’s your Qassam!” in Arabic.

Shrybman refers to this event as stifling his free speech. To me, that distracts from the issue. So much of the Israel/Palestine debate devolves into dueling accusations of "silencing" that I am now automatically leery of these sort of "free speech claims". Is aggressively hostile questioning during a Q&A session, after the presentation had concluding, a free speech violation (presumably in the moral, not legal, sense)? I dunno, maybe -- Shrybman seems to feel he was not actually allowed to answer the questions and that he was drowned out by a crowd that simply wanted to scream hate.

And that's the problem. As much as I care about open dialogue and norms of communication -- and I do, very much -- the content does matter. I'm less concerned that the conversation broke down here than I am by the fact that some members of the DePaul community engaged in anti-Semitic rants, vulgar threats, and at one point (according to Shrybman) "laughed at raw footage of kindergarten children running for shelter as a Qassam was fired at their city." In other words, the problem is that certain members of the DePaul community have become infected with a sickness -- a moral failure of imagination that lets them pronounce hate and cheer death and consider themselves righteous all the while.