Community Building: Mosque welcomes visitors

Published in the Portland Phoenix

Don't believe what you read or hear in the news about Muslims. "Instead of taking it from the media, it's better to take it from people who are educated in the religion," said imam Mohamed Ibrahim, speaking in Somali and using a translator, at an iftar gathering Monday night at the Maine Muslim Community Center in Portland.

Attending were not just the community center's regular congregants, but community members, neighborhood residents, and city officials (whose ranking member was Police Chief Mike Sauschuck).

The iftar breaks the fast that observant Muslims keep between sunup and sundown during the Muslim holy month of Ramadan (when the Quran was first revealed to the Prophet Mohammed). The community center, which includes a mosque, has been in its location at the corner of Fox and Anderson streets since 2007; it was in May 2011 that the members were able to buy the building, and renovations finished last August. So the gathering marked an anniversary of sorts — as well as an opportunity for further engagement between the Muslim community and the wider population of Portland.

Recalling the support the group found when, shortly after the building was purchased, it was defaced with graffiti in the wake of the killing of Osama bin Laden by American troops, board president Mohamud Mohamed said the center wants to welcome neighbors all the time, not just in crises. "We don't need the people only the difficulty day," he said.

The solution, he proposed, was one laid out in a proverb he translated as: "The animal they understand each other when they sniff each other. The people understand each other when they talk together."

The gratitude to those who attended from among the Muslim leaders was palpable — and oft-repeated in remarks from several of them — and the welcome was genuine, filled with smiles and excellent food. (A surprise: lasagna, which entered Somali cuisine through Italian colonizers.)

But there was an element of defensiveness as well. While inviting attendees to return, and noting that any community members who are interested may visit at any time, Imam Ibrahim cautioned against believing stereotypes and fear-mongering. "Islam is a religion of peace," he said.

This was perhaps most vividly represented when, partway through the meal, the muezzin's call resounded through the building, and worshipers stood up from their plates or came in from outside. Lining up on the carpet, facing the mihrab (the niche in the wall indicating the direction of Mecca), roughly 70 men and boys (women pray separately) bowed and knelt, pressing their foreheads to the ground while whispering prayers.

This weekend will see the observance of Eid al-Fitr, the really big feast and community gathering marking the end of Ramadan; the exact timing depends on when the crescent moon is first sighted here in Portland, and the location of the observance is still being determined because of scheduling conflicts at the Portland Expo, where celebrations have been held in the past.

Press Releases: Avoiding the issues

Published in the Portland Phoenix

Governor Paul LePage's "Gestapo" mess has largely subsided, but ripples remain — among them key insights into the squeamishness of Maine journalists, and the information thereby denied to the people of the Pine Tree State.

By now, we've all heard that the guv's July 7 radio address equated the IRS with the Nazis' secret police. He got thrown under the bus by his own press aide for personally changing his scripted radio address, failed to apologize by expressing regret for others' offense (rather than for his own misstep), repeated and embellished the comparison when approached by a Vermont reporter, and then ultimately issued an actual apology in his July 14 radio address — as well as, we're told, private ones to members of Maine's Jewish community.

The first remarkable thing was the conduct of the reporter, Paul Heintz of the Burlington alt-weekly Seven Days. When LePage said the IRS was "heading in the direction" of becoming an agency dealing death (during a July 12 fundraiser for a Republican gubernatorial candidate in Vermont), Heintz asked the question so many of us here in Maine — LePage fans and haters alike — wanted to ask: "Are you serious?" (LePage was, and kept digging his hole deeper.)

Maine reporters aren't really known for asking uppity questions of this — or any — governor. It's not just a LePage thing, though the guv has regularly bullied journalists to a degree unheard of in prior administrations. We all remember his campaign-trail threat to punch a reporter in the face, and telling another her question was "bullshit." But reporters are generally known for standing up to bullies — even at risk of their own lives. Not here.

And of course LePage's communications staff shields him from the press pretty completely. Can you think of the last time LePage held a press conference with questions from the media — or even a public question-and-answer session where his staff didn't filter the inquiries? And his performance on transparency is abysmal — he and top administration officials don't even take notes in meetings any more, concerned that those documents would be available to the world under public-records laws.

But then again, LePage appears at all kinds of public events, announced in advance by press releases from his office, no doubt hoping for positive coverage highlighting whatever it is that he's doing. If Maine's reporters really wanted an answer from the governor, they know how to find him, on schedule and in person.

The second remarkable thing was the fruit that reporter's questioning bore for a public interested to know what their governor thinks on key issues of the day.

As was revealed under Heintz's questioning, the Gestapo comparison is clear evidence of LePage's deep misunderstanding of the provisions of the Affordable Care Act. Sure, LePage knew what the Gestapo did ("they killed a lot of people"), but more to the point, he thought the IRS was going to end up doing something similar by somehow forcing health-care "rationing" on Americans. (Side note: He appears either to approve or be unaware of the rationing we now experience, in favor of the rich.)

Heintz's interview broke the news that LePage subscribes to a much-discredited right-wing claim that failure to comply with the ACA's requirement to get insurance or pay a fine could land a person in jail — though the ACA itself expressly prohibits any criminal penalty.

If you add that to LePage's previously reported belief, shared by only a select few Republican governors elsewhere, that the Supreme Court's ACA ruling allows him to throw tens of thousands of Mainers off MaineCare, we begin to see a picture of the width and depth of the policy confusion experienced by His Excellency the Governor of Maine.

That's the kind of insight into our governor's thinking local audiences expect from our own media. Sadly, we're more successful seeking it in sources from away.

ACA ruling proves Roberts #SCOTUS most politicized in history

Published at thePhoenix.com

The Roberts Court is — it can now be said most confidently — the most political in American history. Today’s surprising — to almost everyone — upholding of the Affordable Care Act is proof that it’s even more politicized than we thought.

If the decision had gone the way most people expected — with Chief Justice John Roberts Jr. siding with the majority to overturn large portions of ACA (or the whole thing entirely), Democrats and Republicans would have (rightly) viewed the Roberts Court as an arm of the Republican Party’s ultra-conservative wing.

The Court’s standing in public opinion, and the respect for the institution across America, would have collapsed. Its impotence might have echoed the darkest days of the Marshall Court, when President Andrew Jackson apocryphally said of the 1832 Worcester v Georgia decision, “John Marshall has made his decision; now let him enforce it.” (That’s not actually what Jackson said, but it’s close.)

Roberts is a scholar of Court history, and knows well the perilous ground on which he treads. So in a startling move that landed him far to the political left of Justice Anthony Kennedy (who uncharacteristically took up an absolutist right-wing opinion), Roberts moved to save his Court — and his reputation — from certain denigration with the epithet “politicized.”

Unfortunately, the nature of his decision — because it was based not on Constitutional scholarship nor case law nor even the arguments in the case before the Court — was political, and most cravenly so. He ruled on a major issue of law and principle for reasons of reputational and political ends.

So in seeking to protect the Court from allegations that it was overly political, Roberts has in fact confirmed what he sought to disprove.

Press Releases: Back to the polls

Published in the Portland Phoenix

The debate about how to phrase the same-sex marriage question on November's ballot has just begun, with Maine Secretary of State Charlie Summers proposing a very simple option: "Do you want to allow same-sex couples to marry?"

Of course opponents have objected, saying those words don't say anything about the societal catastrophe they are sure will follow its passage. But more oddly — and, it turns out, potentially against their self-interest — supporters of same-sex marriage also want the question revised. Specifically, according to Mainers United for Marriage leader Matt McTighe, they want it to ask: "Do you favor a law allowing marriage licenses for same-sex couples that protects religious freedom by ensuring no religion or clergy be required to perform such a marriage in violation of their religious beliefs?"

The polling to date suggests Summers's version of the question is (perhaps unintentionally, given his open opposition) better for marriage proponents. In March, Public Policy Polling asked, "In general, do you think same-sex marriage should be legal or illegal?" Results were 54 percent in favor, 41 opposed, and 5 percent unsure (with a 2.8-percent margin of error). In April the Maine People's Resource Center asked people's opinion on "allowing same-sex couples to be legally married in Maine" and found 58 percent for, and 40 percent against (with an error margin of 3.1 percent).

The March PPP poll also asked the question McTighe's way, and found less support (as well as less opposition and more undecideds): 47 percent for, 32 percent against, and 21 percent not sure. The WBUR poll earlier this month also asked McTighe's question, and also found support weaker than Summers's more straightforward version: 55 percent in favor, 36 opposed, and 9 percent declining to answer (with a margin of error there of 4.4 percent).

So advocates appear, at the moment, to be requesting a ballot wording that gives them less support, in hopes that the lower opposition and greater undecided pool will allow them to prevail over the religious opposition. Maine media, so far, have treated the two questions — in poll terms, at least — as functionally the same. They're not. McTighe knows it, Summers knows it, and most importantly, the people facing the questions know it — that's why they answered differently to the different questions. Sadly, it's journalists who appear last to find out.

Maine political writers are also overlooking a major flaw in the WBUR poll (which has gotten criticism for other reasons, but not this one): Andrew Ian Dodge isn't one of the options. In a different question, pollsters asked: in the Senate election, "if the candidates were Independent Angus King, Republican Charlie Summers, or Democrat Cynthia Dill, for whom would you vote?"

The name order was rotated in the actual questioning. But Dodge should have been there. He's the Tea Party-backed candidate who dropped out of the Republican Party to run as an independent, and was first into the race, setting up to challenge Olympia Snowe before she announced her retirement.

While he's widely believed to have little chance of winning, the Tea Party vote is least likely to migrate to any of the other three, and shows an element of the Maine electorate that — whether you agree with it or not — holds sway in some areas.

By the way, the WBUR poll also neglected two other independents: Steve Woods, who has already capitulated to King, and Danny Dalton, only recently located for an interview with the Associated Press — his official address on file with the Maine Secretary of State's office is a Mail It 4U store in Bath.

Their absence was technically incorrect — their names will appear on the November ballot — but had negligible effect on the survey, as they will in the election itself.

Human Relations: Encounter with a racist

Published in the Portland Phoenix

I've never really liked racists. Today, I see a little value in them after all.

Last week, Shay Stewart-Bouley wrote a column called "Let Them Talk," which began, "I have often joked as a Black woman that I kind of like white racists. Well, perhaps it's more that I appreciate white people who are open and honest about racist views they harbor. I don't want to hang out with them, but I want to know about them. When someone is openly racist and drops racist epithets, it saves me the time of wondering what is really on their mind when they deal with me."

When I first read that, it made some sense to me — as a sort of "truth in advertising" concept. I got a chance to explore that idea further this afternoon, when an extremely upset woman called the office, starting right out of the gate by complaining about that latest column.

In a breathless, near-hysterics tirade, this woman — who refused to give her name, so I'll call her Blanche — claimed to have deep roots in Maine and to have never seen "those people" unless she "went out of state." She would not say the words "black" or "African American" for nearly the entire call — saying only vague terms like "they" or "them." I kept pressing her on whom she was referring to with those vague terms, even going so far as to ask if she meant black people or African Americans (or Asian Americans or Hispanic Americans, I wondered). Blanche assured me I "wouldn't like it" if she said who she meant. (At one point she did spell out "b-l-a-c-k," though.)

She spouted several old canards used by racists, including complaining that "those people" have access to housing, health care, and food, when so many "real Americans" are poor, hungry, and homeless. She complained that "they keep having them" — exactly the sort of vagueness that characterized her sustained outburst. A clarifying question from me got the answer "pickaninnies." (If you're lucky enough not to know that word, it's an offensively derogatory term for African American children.)

I clarified a couple of times with Blanche that she was calling to complain about a column discussing the existence of overt, unapologetic racism. And then I told her I believed she was in fact living confirmation of this very point.

In fact, I called her a racist several times during the conversation, and not once did she dispute my assertion. Rather, much as the column that inspired the outburst suggested, it prompted further disclosure of Blanche's prejudices, as she inveighed against treating "those people" like the human beings they are: "It's not right — you know it isn't right."

Blanche asked why Stewart-Bouley "had to write about" racism and discrimination; I explained that the column is about diversity, and she's free to write on any angle of that broad topic, whether positive or negative.

She also attempted to attack Stewart-Bouley personally, saying she "isn't from here. We don't have those people here. We never had those people here." She asked why Stewart-Bouley would live here and choose to raise a child here, as if Blanche's prejudice was not only justifiable but also should somehow act as a black-person repellent.

When Blanche complained about things not being "right," she has a point, though what's wrong is not on Stewart-Bouley's end of things. After spending 18 minutes getting increasingly apoplectic, the rant came to a head with this line: "You tell that woman to get her black ass back to Africa." I told her: "Get your white ass the fuck out of the Dark Ages." I'm not sure how much of that she heard, though, because she hung up on me. Perhaps I should have said what Stewart-Bouley might have in a more philosophical moment: "Thanks for being a senseless relic — and an example of how far Maine still must progress before joining this millennium."