Life in the Third Layer

By way of Thudfactor in a piece titled “Our own party”, The Wild Hunt’s “Pagan Square Pegs, Religious Liberal Round Holes” came to my attention. At least one modern pagan is upset at not being given proper recognition by numbers gatherers and being “lumped together” with other small but identifiable religious demographic groups:

So Pagans are “ethnic churchgoers”? “Religious feminists”?
“Spiritual but not religious” voters? Do Pagan pacifists belong with the “pious peaceniks”, while a pro-gun Asatruar who voted Kerry out of disgust with Bush is an “ethnic” vote? The confusion stems from the political (and religious) punditry’s almost total ignorance of any religion that doesn’t sport a cross on the door. Since Pagans and Hindus and Buddhists didn’t decide the vote in 2004, we don’t matter to the opinion makers.

Religion is a big issue in the United States at the present time, and that is why we are paying attention to religious demographics. The fact that the GWB campaigns from the beginning manipulated the religious right and all who identify themselves as Christians is no secret. He said he spoke with God daily. He brought God back into government, and we can all see how much better that has made government. We feel the love in bombs over Baghdad, and here at home in the absence of young men and women sent to war, increased rates of child poverty, rising costs of medical insurance, larger numbers of people without access to proper medical care, cronies in responsible posts who cannot carry on the basic functions of government, and schools that can’t teach music or art because they are struggling without enough funding to meet ill-conceived federal mandates.
When government and religion are bedfellows, the result is never good. Religion cannot solve its own disputes, much less the problems of society. For the faithful, religion deals with truths that are not in the human arena and cannot be called into question or placed on the negotiating table. Because of this, religion cannot use the most basic tactic of problem-solving in the social context, compromise. Government, however, at least in the modern understanding of democracy, continually negotiates and balances one interest against another in order to achieve what democratic government — and any other responsible government — holds as a goal, the “common good.”
The current administration has used religion to manipulate people in ways that have not been used by a western government since the 18th century:

• Many Americans believe — and Bush rhetoric implies — that the Iraq war is a holy war of Christians against Muslims.
• Remaining popular support for Republicans rests upon two issues, gay marriage and abortion rights. These are not the big problems in the United States. They do not relate to the common good except that they are areas in which the civil rights to privacy and participation of people are being abridged because they do not hold the same religious persuasion as the Christian government. These questions are important in a religious sense, where people are searching for answers to the questions of how an individual ought to live. And whatever side of whichever issue you come down upon as an individual, that is an emotional and sensitive issue for you. But for the common good, it is not that complicated. Women are citizens who are female. Gays are citizens who are homosexual. There is no rational, civil, social, or economic reason to restrict the civil rights of individual citizens just because they are female or homosexual.
• The rational scientific approach to problems and questions has been discouraged. “Faith-based initiatives” have been substituted for social research and reasonable address to difficult problems like poverty. The “faith-based initiative” permits government to give large chunks of public money to churches to purchase favor. Social problems in education have been blamed on the absence of prayer in schools, and academic problems have been addressed by applying methods that an hour’s research would reveal had already failed. And despite its potential, stem cell research has been stalled for religious reasons. The advances and understandings of biological science and earth science have been called false based upon the necessary religious truth of the Genesis story.
• The focus upon “evil” from religious and government leaders has returned to the medieval period. There is a resurgence of actual services to “exorcise” the “devil” from possessed people. Belief in the devil as the ruler of a kingdom of demons that can possess people when they aren’t properly protected by the church is the most irrational of Christian constructs. Its history is clearly traceable in written record. Its basis in the Bible is shaky and inconsistent. And if the threat of a devil that would overpower us if we didn’t hold fast to the cross and keep the garlic by the door and salt the window sill would make us better people, humanity would have been perfect with no need for improvement by the dawn of the 19th century.

I don’t want any religion to have recognition in government except recognition of the rights of citizens to practice their religion in freedom. That is all that Christians or any other group should have. The only restrictions upon religious practice should be those that protect other people from coercion and forced participation, either as members or as victims. People can be — and most people are — religious. Governments need to be democratic, civil, and rational.

If you think you have been watching the fake news on The Daily Show, read this report:
Fake TV News: Widespread and Undisclosed by Diane Farsetta and Daniel Price, Center for Media and Democracy. In this report they offer videos of 36 “video news releases,” the term for advertising that is conveyed to the consumer as “news.” There is also a map showing where the 77 TV stations that aired the fake news are located.
Brief of the report:

Over a ten-month period, the Center for Media and Democracy (CMD) documented television newsrooms’ use of 36 video news releases … (VNRs) —a small sample of the thousands produced each year. CMD identified 77 television stations, from those in the largest to the smallest markets, that aired these VNRs or related satellite media tours … (SMTs) in 98 separate instances, without disclosure to viewers. Collectively, these 77 stations reach more than half of the U.S. population. The VNRs and SMTs whose broadcast CMD documented were produced by three broadcast PR firms for 49 different clients, including General Motors, Intel, Pfizer and Capital One. In each case, these 77 television stations actively disguised the sponsored content to make it appear to be their own reporting. In almost all cases, stations failed to balance the clients’ messages with independently-gathered footage or basic journalistic research. More than one-third of the time, stations aired the pre-packaged VNR in its entirety.

A story in Education Guardian Weekly on February 28 titled It’s official: class matters tells about a study that measured academic success of students based upon the socio-economic status of their parents:

This unprecedented project has revealed that a child’s social background is the crucial factor in academic performance, and that a school’s success is based not on its teachers, the way it is run, or what type of school it is, but, overwhelmingly, on the class background of its pupils.

The study looked at large numbers of students at two age/grade levels:

The study looked at 476,000 11-year olds and 482,000 15-year-olds. The data was analysed through Mosaic, a programme devised by the information company Experian, which divides the UK population by postcode into 11 main groups and 61 types, providing detailed insight into the socio-demographics, lifestyles, culture and behaviour of UK citizens. It is being used in key policy areas, such as health and crime, but this is the first time it has been used to assess the link between education performance and social class.

For Americans reading this article, it is important to understand the UK reference to social class. Middle class families are those in which parents are professional people “whose homes are in high-status neighbourhoods.” The schools are composed of two classes, middle class and working class. This is somewhat different from the American terminology. In the United States our aristocracy is corporate. Below the corporate owners and CEO’s we have professional people and managers who are upper class or upper middle class (belong to a country club). Then there are people who earn above the median hourly wage who are sometimes called upper middle but more often middle class. People who can afford medical insurance but not vacations are called middle or lower middle class. Then we have lower class, which is composed of wage earners who can’t afford medical insurance. Class is a thing Americans don’t deal with well, so we keep it fuzzy, with a little garnish of denial.
Anyway, the story:

The findings come at a pivotal time in education with the government determined to push through its education reforms in a new schools bill, expected to be published today. If it is successful, all primary and secondary schools will be encouraged to become independent trusts with control over their own admissions. But many critics have argued that the government should be introducing more rigorous controls over admissions – to ensure as many schools as possible have a balanced intake of middle- and working-class children.

The study found that, whatever their background, children do better the more “middle-class” the school they attend, and also that more than 50% of a school’s performance is accounted for by the social make-up of its pupils.

This whole article is worth the reading time, especially for those interested in how schools are rated. The study has generated a weighted method of measuring school success which takes into account the class of student received into the school, and, while the top affluent schools still do well in this ranking, the largest effect seems to be that some schools that were ranked very low on the unweighted scale were actually having a high degree of success within the context of the economic class of the students in the school. This recognition is inspiring to hard-working teachers and administrators in poor schools, and will, if carefully observed, perhaps result in an understanding of best practices for schools in deprived areas.
This study as reported in The Guardian underscores what a few of us have been saying for a long time. We are spending our money unwisely in education. We are assessing our schools to death with more tests than they have time to give and distracting them with more initiatives and requirements for teacher quality than can be readily accommodated. To raise the level of educational achievement across the board, we need to raise the standard of living for the American working family. We could, for example, take that bucket of money we are dumping on useless assessments and raise the minimum wage. We could lower the cost of health insurance. We could help people live better, and the success of children in schools would follow.

I thought that Tim Kaine had a little more substance than Marc Fisher in the Washington Post on January 31 gave him credit for, but hey, you saw the Kaine sign in my yard and me out there handing out literature in October and November. And you heard or later read the Kaine speech for yourself hopefully, so make your own decision. There was plenty of substance if you know the programs and initiatives in Virginia and in other states that Kaine referenced. And a broad plan for getting out of Iraq with our faces still on and other body parts intact surely does not belong or fit into a response to the State of the Union address.
However, speaking of the Democratic victories in Virginia, Fisher summed up:

…there is a majority that either leans Democratic or holds independent views and favors curbs on development and has little patience for kneejerk, hard-right stands on social issues.

I believe we were in the majority all along, in Virginia and elsewhere, and I hope it continues to show in elections.