Citizen Cartwright

AP series on the tension between gun rights and other rights

"In a country shadowed by the threat of mass shootings and neighborhood violence, courts have embraced an increasingly absolute reading of the right to guns. That raises difficult questions about how to protect the full range of freedoms Americans cherish," says The Associated Press.

"With nearly 400 million guns in civilian hands [U.S. population: 336 million], the violence they enable feels to many like a threat to their right to worship in peace, go to school and be safe at home,” AP says. "To many others, an unfettered right to own and carry guns is essential to protecting those liberties."

AP examined the rising tensions between those beliefs — and the struggle for answers:

 

— Churches: There’s increasing friction between the right to worship and the right to own guns. In a recent survey of protestant pastors, 62 percent said their duties now include making plans for responding to an active shooter in their chapels and grounds.

 

— Soldiers and veterans: Every year, thousands of U.S. soldiers and veterans, many haunted by trauma sustained in the line of duty, take their own lives, the vast majority using a gun. Families and experts say it’s likely many of those men and women still would be alive if not for their access to guns.

 

— Victims of domestic abuse: The Supreme Court is preparing to step into the issue of a victim’s right to safety vs. an abuser’s right to guns, weighing whether people deemed to be a threat can be forced to relinquish their firearms if they haven't yet been convicted of a crime.

 

— Schools: Amid a record number of mass killings this year and a surge in youth deaths by firearms, how can parents and children feel safe?

 

— People who’ve lost loved ones in mass shootings: How do they reconcile the pursuit of happiness with what they’ve lost?

In pain but not suffering

Recently, I’ve been getting migraine headaches. They’re not terrible, but I admit to dreading that they’ll start when I’m working on this blog. They can make it hard to see and to read, adding to the deadline adventure, to say the least.

 

One thing that helps me is the Buddhist idea that while pain in this life is inevitable, suffering is not. The Buddha said pain is like being shot with an arrow. And resisting the pain is like shooting oneself with a second arrow.

 

I like this, from Vietnamese Buddhist monk Thich Nhat Hanh:

 

"Breathing in, I smile. I smile to everything, even to my suffering, to my difficulties. Breathing out, I release and let go. This is the practice of freedom. Breathing in, I become aware of any unpleasant feelings. Breathing out, I hold these feelings with kindness.”

 

I’m grateful that a free, online “Buddhist wisdom for life summit” is running today through Oct. 2, with 35 Buddhist teachers and scholars sharing ways to help us meet life’s challenges.

Takeaways from the Supreme Court’s 2022-2023 term

The three 6-3 rulings at the end of last week — rejecting affirmative action in college admissions, favoring the speech of the religious over anti-discrimination laws and torpedoing President Biden’s plan to forgive student loan debt — showed the ongoing dominance of the court’s conservative supermajority, says an analysis by Robert Barnes, a longtime reporter on the court for The Washington Post.

 

But they were among only five cases — there were 14 last term — in which those ideological lines held.

 

Over the course of the term, Clarence Thomas and Samuel Alito, the most conservative justices, dissented more often from the court’s decisions than its most liberal members, Sonia Sotomayor and Ketanji Brown Jackson, according to the website Empirical Scotus.

 

Completing his 18th term, Chief Justice John Roberts was in the majority in every one of the court’s most important cases, and he chose to write the opinions in four of them. 

 

"It was a remarkable turnaround from last year, when he was unable to persuade his conservative colleagues not to overturn Roe v. Wade, the most defining decision of the court’s recent history,” says Barnes. 

 

The issues the court confronts change every year, and the ones tackled this term aligned with Roberts’ long-held views, Barnes says. "He has never voted in favor of an affirmative action program; his decision striking the admissions programs at his alma mater, Harvard University, and the University of North Carolina is a continuation of the aversion to race-based plans he expressed in 2007, in cases involving public schools in Seattle and Louisville.”

 

"Roberts’ rejection of the Biden administration’s claim of power to forgive student loan debt for more than 40 million Americans was an echo of his ruling last term that the Environmental Protection Agency lacked the authority it had staked out over climate change. His vote in 303 Creative v. Colorado, holding that a Christian web designer has a First Amendment right to withhold her services from same-sex weddings, was no surprise either, because of past rulings on religious rights.”

 

But Roberts wrote the decisions in both voting cases that were praised by liberals and Democrats, one on Alabama redistricting and the other rejecting the independent state legislature theory.

 

The American Civil Liberties Union was on the losing side in 13 of the 18 cases in which it filed briefs last year but had a winning 11-7 record this term.

 

“What seems clear is that everyone overread last term, and thought everything was up for grabs,” says David Cole, ACLU legal director. “The right advanced extreme arguments that the court rejected,” especially in the Alabama and independent state legislature cases, he says.

 

“Many saw as the emergence of a new center of the court, composed of Roberts and Justices Brett Kavanaugh and Amy Coney Barrett … all reliable conservatives,” Barnes says.

 

The justices restored, for now, the status quo on the availability of medication abortions, declined a request to reinstate West Virginia’s ban on transgender athletes in girls’ sports and put aside an attempt to block New York’s new restrictions on concealed firearms. In all three rulings, only Thomas and Alito noted concern.

 

“Justices Kavanaugh, Barrett, and even [Neil] Gorsuch at times have rejected the more conservative views of Justices Thomas and Alito in many of the term’s most high profile cases,” says Harvard law professor Richard Lazarus.

 

Here is a review of the court’s term by The Associated Press’ longtime reporter on the court, Mark Sherman.

 

And here is the analysis of NPR’s longtimer, Nina Totenberg.

How high achievers can turn professional decline into opportunity

An article in this month’s Atlantic is cheeringly titled “Your professional decline is coming (much) sooner than you think.”

 

It’s written by Arthur Brooks, president of the American Enterprise Institute, author and New York Times columnist.

 

Brooks is leaving AEI, and, at age 55, has been thinking about the way he wants to live the rest of his life.

 

“For the past four years,” he writes, "I have been on a quest to figure out how to turn my eventual professional decline from a matter of dread into an opportunity for progress.”

 

Brooks says "the agony of professional oblivion is directly related to the height of professional prestige previously achieved, and to one’s emotional attachment to that prestige.”

 

Brooks says his research has given him this road map for the remaining years of his life: 

 

— Strive to detach progressively from the most obvious earthly rewards — power, fame and status, money — even if continuing to work or advance a career.

 

— Move from activities focused on the self to activities focused on others, such as teaching or mentorship.

 

— Explore one’s spiritual self.

 

— Dedicate more time to relationships.

 

My own experience tracks with Brooks’ research findings. Most of my career was in journalism and politics, and now I tutor kids, whom I love.

Trump concludes tour of world’s 3 biggest monotheistic religions

The president and the pope met privately at the Vatican on Wednesday, "setting aside their previous clashes to broadcast a tone of peace for an audience around the globe," as The Associated Press puts it.

Recently, the pope and Trump have been in agreement on a need for Muslim leaders to do more against extremists in their own communities. But "there are few other areas where their views align," AP notes.

The pope said during the presidential campaign last year that a man who thinks about building walls and not bridges is "not Christian,” in response to Trump's pledge to build a wall along the U.S. border with Mexico.

Trump said it was "disgraceful" that the Argentine-born pope, who represents just over half of the world's two billion Christians, questioned his faith.

"If and when the Vatican is attacked by ISIS, which as everyone knows is ISIS' ultimate trophy, I can promise you that the pope would have only wished and prayed that Donald Trump would have been president," Trump said back then.

Part of Trump's motivation in meeting with the pope was to dramatize how the three major religions should rally against the threat from Islamist militants, says Reuters.

The broader picture of the Islamic State’s war on the West

The group wants to provoke the West to act contrary to its proclaimed values, hoping to demonstrate to Muslims that the only true governing system is the group’s self-declared caliphate, says The Christian Science Monitor.

“The crusaders claim to bear the standard of ‘liberty’ and ‘justice’ for all the oppressed peoples of the world, when in fact their tyranny knows no limits when directed against the Muslim ummah,” said the most recent edition of the Islamic State’s Dabiq propaganda magazine, released shortly after the Brussels attacks in March. The ummah refers to the international community of Muslims.

As part of its campaign against Western values, the Islamic State aims to provoke a strong military response, including an increase in airstrikes that kill civilians, to paint the West as careless with Muslim lives, says the CSM.

It also seeks to embroil the United States in a ground war in Iraq and Syria, which would serve the group’s end-of-days narrative that the fight is the prophesied apocalyptic battle of Dabiq, a clash between Islamic armies and “Romans,” or Westerners, in northern Syria that will prompt the beginning of judgment day, says the CSM.

Obama’s takedown of Trump’s Muslim rhetoric

“While the president has frequently dismissed Trump as a buffoon or a huckster,” on Tuesday he challenged the former reality television star as a “dangerous” threat to the nation’s safety, religious freedom and diversity, says The Associated Press.

"Where does this stop?" Obama said. "Are we going to start treating all Muslim-Americans differently? Are we going to start subjecting them to special surveillance? Are we going to start discriminating against them because of their faith? ... Do Republican officials actually agree with this?”

Trump responded that Obama was “more angry at me than he was at the shooter."

Obama’s message of unity at mosque, GOP candidates’ responses

President Obama on Wednesday embraced Muslims in the United States as part of “one American family” and implicitly criticized the GOP presidential candidates in a warning to citizens to not be “bystanders to bigotry,” The New York Times reports.

In the visit to the Islamic Society of Baltimore, his first to a mosque in the United States as president, Obama recited phrases from the Koran and praised American Muslims as a crucial part of America’s history and vital to the nation’s future.

Meanwhile, Marco Rubio said at a town hall meeting in New Hampshire that Obama’s decision to give a speech at a mosque was another example of him dividing the country.

Donald Trump said in response to a Fox News question about Obama’s visit to the mosque, “maybe he feels comfortable there.”

Trump’s call to ban Muslims from coming to United States

As you know, rather than clog this blog with the pronouncements of the many presidential candidates, I’m trying to help make sense of the political dynamics and trends behind those pronouncements.

And as everybody must have heard by now, Donald Trump on Monday called for “a total and complete shutdown of Muslims entering the United States until our country’s representatives can figure out what is going on.”

Other presidential candidates and politicians from both parties are condemning his comments.

Former Vice President Dick Cheney, speaking to the conservative radio host Hugh Hewitt, summarized the disconnect with American values: “I think this whole notion that somehow we need to say no more Muslims and just ban a whole religion goes against everything we stand for and believe in. I mean religious freedom’s been a very important part of our, our history.”

But at a rally at the USS Yorktown in South Carolina on Monday night, Trump drew “sustained cheers” from the audience as he outlined his idea for the ban, says The New York Times.

Trump’s success stems from the unmistakable stylistic contrast he strikes with President Obama, Politico says. While the president has projected cool calm in response to recent attacks, “Trump has mirrored the two-fisted anger and anxiety felt by many voters,” says Politico.

Bruce Haynes, president of bipartisan political communications firm Purple Strategies, says: “The power in politics lies in contrast, and when there’s a perception in politics that things are not going very well, people tend to want the opposite. The campaign and the persona of Trump is the polar opposite of Barack Obama.”

“What’s driving the ballot in the Republican primary is desire amongst Republican voters for a strong leader. The next president is almost always a reaction to the last president,” says Republican strategist Steve Schmidt, a former adviser to John McCain. “When Republican voters look at Obama they see weakness, fecklessness and indecisiveness, and Trump is, in their estimation, the antidote to that.”

The New York Times notes that Trump has a track record of “making surprising and even extreme comments whenever he is overtaken in opinion polls by other Republican candidates,” as happened on Monday just hours before he issued his statement about Muslims.

Pope Francis arrives in Washington

The pontiff received a red-carpet welcome Tuesday from President Obama, Vice President Biden and their families as he opened his first visit to the United States.

The six-day visit will take the pope from Washington to New York and Philadelphia and feature several Masses celebrated before huge crowds, the first canonization on American soil, an address to Congress and “not a small degree of tension over his message,” says The New York Times.

Even as Newsweek asked on its cover, “Is the Pope Catholic?” Francis, in comments to reporters on the flight to the United States, rejected the idea that he is an anticapitalist leftist not committed enough to church teachings.

“I have never said anything that is not in the social doctrine of the church,” he said, alluding to speeches about the excesses of capitalism. “Maybe some things sounded slightly leftish, but that would be the wrong interpretation.”

The centerpiece of the pope’s Washington visit will be his address to a joint meeting of Congress — a first in American history — on Thursday morning at the invitation of Speaker John Boehner, a Catholic Republican from Ohio.

About 50,000 people have been invited to the West Lawn of the Capitol to watch the pope’s address on large television screens and maybe catch a glimpse of him waving from the speaker’s balcony.

Federal workers have been advised to telework during the pope’s visit, given expected congestion and road closures.

For locals still trying to figure out how to get around, here is the D.C. government’s website on the papal visit.

And here is the advice from D.C.’s troubled metro system. Among its travel tips: “Consider walking.”