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WASHINGTON When President Trump nominated William P. Barr as attorney general a year ago, establishment Republicans who had chafed at Mr. Trumps takeover of their party were relieved. Between Mr. Barrs work in the Reagan White House and his fast-track career under George Bush, he could be a bridge to the Republican Party they knew and preferred.

How wrong they were.

Mr. Barr has eagerly embraced the most divisive and disputed aspects of the Trump agenda, much to the delight of the partys hard-line conservatives who see him as an indispensable ally in their fight to push the country further to the right on issues like religious liberty, immigration and policing.

Other conservative attorneys general shared Mr. Barrs relish for political battle. But as he attacks the Democratic Party, assails liberal culture and defends the president against accusations of abusing his office, Mr. Barr has wielded a maximalist view of executive power and adopted a blithely antagonistic, no-apologies style that set him apart from his predecessors.

That makes him a natural fit in a Republican Party that Mr. Trump has remade in his mold. But it worries critics in both parties who fear that Mr. Barr is eroding the Justice Departments traditional independence in law enforcement. They point to his handling of the Mueller report, which he summarized in a letter widely seen as more favorable to Mr. Trump, and his appointment of a prosecutor to re-examine the opening of the Russia investigation, which Mr. Trump has long impugned.

To the conservatives who make up the most solid foundation of the presidents base a wing of the Republican Party that is generally more uncompromising on social issues and enthusiastic about political combat with the left Mr. Barr is the template of the public servant they envisioned when Mr. Trump promised to give them greater influence in his administration.

He is a devoted Catholic who has said he believes the nation needs a moral renaissance to restore Judeo-Christian values in American life. He has been unafraid to use his platform as the nations top law enforcement officer to fight the cultural changes they believe are making the country more inhospitable and unrecognizable, like rising immigration and secularism or new legal protections for L.G.B.T. people.

Attorney General Barr represents an important conservative point of view that is really the heart of the Trump presidency, said Frank Cannon, the president of the American Principles Project, a social conservative organization.

A series of assertive public appearances in recent weeks, laced with biting sarcasm aimed at adversaries on the left, have brought a sharper focus on Mr. Barrs style and worldview, both of which share aspects with the presidents.

He has painted a picture of a country divided into camps of secularists those who, he said recently, seem to take a delight in compelling people to violate their conscience and people of faith. The depiction echoes Mr. Trumps worldview, with the us versus them divisions that the president often stokes when he tells crowds at his rallies that Democrats dont like you.

His politicization of the office is unorthodox and a departure from previous attorneys general in a way that feels uncomfortably close to authoritarianism, critics said.

Barr has believed for a long time that the country would benefit from more authoritarianism. It would inject a stronger moral note into government, said Stuart M. Gerson, who worked in the Bush Justice Department under Mr. Barr and is a member of Checks & Balances, a legal group that is among the attorney generals leading conservative detractors. I disagree with his analysis of power. We would be less free in the end.

Mr. Barr swats away those critics. Generally, no one really cares what they think, he said of Checks & Balances in a recent interview with New York magazine. An accompanying picture showed him grinning ear to ear with his feet propped up on his desk.

That defiance is one reason he has attained an almost heroic status among some on the right, particularly the religious conservatives.

Hes offering a fairly unabashed, crisp and candid assessment of the nature of our culture right now, said Leonard A. Leo, the executive vice president of the Federalist Society and a prominent advocate for socially conservative causes. Theres certainly a movement in our country to dial back the role that religion plays in civil society and public life. Its been going on for some time, Mr. Leo added. Thats not an observation that public officials make very often, so it is refreshing.

Mr. Barr helped make the case for conservatives to shift to war footing against the left during a speech at Notre Dame Law School in October that was strikingly partisan. He accused the forces of secularism of orchestrating the organized destruction of religion. He mocked progressives, asking sardonically, But where is the progress?

And while other members of the Catholic Church and Pope Francis have acknowledged that the sexual abuse crisis has devastated the moral authority of the church in the United States and is in part to blame for decreasing attendance, Mr. Barr outlined what he saw as a larger plot by the left and others. He said they have marshaled all the force of mass communications, popular culture, the entertainment industry and academia in an unremitting assault on religion and traditional values.

At one point, he compared the denial of religious liberty protections for people of faith to Roman emperors who forced their Christian subjects to engage in pagan sacrifices. We cannot sit back and just hope the pendulum is going to swing back toward sanity, Mr. Barr warned.

Delivered on a Friday before a holiday weekend to a small, invitation-only crowd, the speech initially drew little attention in mainstream circles. But among politically active Christians, Mr. Barrs remarks lit a brush fire.

At a dinner with anti-abortion activists shortly after the speech, Secretary of State Mike Pompeo told guests how striking and clarifying he found Mr. Barrs comments, according to two people who spoke with him.

It was one of the best speeches any attorney general has ever given, said Edwin Meese III, the attorney general under Ronald Reagan, who said that he not only liked Mr. Barrs style but also agreed with his diagnosis of the problems facing the country. Todays culture, Mr. Meese said, is more hostile than it was for conservative values when he was attorney general in the 1980s. And Mr. Barr is giving voice to those on the right who believe they cannot cede any more ground in the culture wars.

If you look back in history, there have been various points of renewal, Mr. Meese added. And I think his concern, which I would share, is were facing a time when the pendulum is not going to swing back.

Mr. Barr, who personally covers tuition for underprivileged New York City students who wish to attend Catholic school, has prioritized Justice Department cases involving religious institutions. In October, the department filed a brief in support of parents suing over a Maine law that bans religious schools from the states school tuition program. It has also argued recently that the Maryland State Education Department discriminated against a Christian academy that said same-sex marriage was wrong.

For the better part of three decades, Mr. Barr has been known in conservative legal circles as a sharp, tight-lipped lawyer who embodied the Reagan and Bush eras. A fair number of people who were more or less conservative said publicly that it was good that he was coming in because he was a real lawyer who would bring respectability to this administration, said Donald Ayer, who served in the Justice Department under Reagan and Mr. Bush.

But his longstanding relationships with Trump allies like Pat A. Cipollone, the White House counsel who is a founder of the National Prayer Breakfast and takes part in the anti-abortion March for Life, and Laura Ingraham, the Fox News host whom Mr. Cipollone introduced to Catholicism, suggest that he was always at ease in the world of social conservatives who have lined up behind Mr. Trump to take on liberals.

In a speech on executive power delivered at a Federalist Society conference last month, Mr. Barr argued that the lefts opposition to the president was a dangerous attempt to overturn the results of the 2016 election and weaken the power of the presidency.

Delivering such a speech amid impeachment proceedings was unusual. During the Clinton impeachment, Janet Reno, then the attorney general, did not castigate Republicans and defend the presidents behavior as Mr. Barr has with Mr. Trump.

Barrs language against the left and against progressives was not something wed normally hear in a speech by the attorney general, said Carrie F. Cordero, a national security expert and a co-founder of Checks & Balances who served as a top legal adviser to the director of national intelligence and in the Justice Department.

Its embedded in department culture to set those partisan views aside when doing your work and applying the law, Ms. Cordero said.

Defenders say Mr. Barr feels emboldened to criticize Democrats because he believes they crossed a line during his confirmation hearings when they accused him of being blindly deferential to Mr. Trump. The same general sentiment is one shared by the president, who also believes he is the victim of unfair attacks from the left.

Their critics went too far too fast, said Kellyanne Conway, the White House counselor who first met Mr. Barr years ago through Ms. Ingraham. And you reap what you sow.

Mr. Barr and Mr. Trump have both staked out far-right positions on issues like aggressive policing, with the attorney general serving as the polished ego to the presidents unbridled id.

Last week, for instance, Mr. Barr said that communities who criticized policing needed to show more respect or they may find themselves without the police protection they need.

Both conservative supporters and critics of Mr. Barr insist that he is not doing the presidents bidding, as many on the left suggest. Rather, they say, he is empowered by Mr. Trump, who has not interfered with an attorney general who provides him the legal justification for his instinct-driven approach to the presidency. That leaves room for Mr. Barr to carry out Mr. Trumps agenda through the prism of his own sweeping views of executive power.

Barr has an opportunity to test legal theories that no other president would give Barr the opportunity to test, Mr. Ayer said.

Continued here:
Barr Dives Into the Culture Wars, and Social Conservatives Rejoice - The New York Times

Liberals frequently wonder how evangelicals and other conservative Christians can possibly justify supporting President Donald Trump, given his flagrant personal immorality and dangerously unfit temperament. Why cant they get over their culture war, the argument goes, and vote for a Democrat to save the republic?

In a provocative piece in National Review published Wednesday, Michael Brendan Dougherty turns the question on its head asking people on the left why they wont give up on their culture war, moderating on issues like abortion and religious freedom exemptions to anti-discrimination law in the name of stopping Trump.

Democrats are no more willing than social-conservative Trump supporters to lay down their culture-war objectives and enmities in order to save the constitution from the president, he writes.

Dougherty believes that both groups are, when you get down to it, pretty much the same on these issues: Both care much more about issues relating to social justice and religion in public life than they do Trump.

Progressives believe they are just vindicating human rights when they pursue their culture-war goals relentlessly, he writes. Like Evangelicals, they dont think Donald Trumps depredations however appalling are a reason to lay down their arms.

But heres the thing: Doughertys analysis only makes sense if you think evangelicals are holding their nose and voting for Trump despite disliking him. But thats not what polling suggests. Evangelicals like this president they dont think hes a threat to the republic at all. 77 percent of white evangelicals approved of Trumps job performance in an October PRRI survey; they were the only religious group in the survey with a majority believing Trump has not damaged the dignity of the presidency.

Theres no solid reason to think evangelicals and other Christian conservatives are Trump waverers, wringing their hands and hoping for a moderate Democratic turn like, say, the nomination of Joe Biden for president who could give them a pretext to abandon the president. It would be political malpractice for a Democratic campaign to betray their base in order to tilt after evangelical windmills.

This speaks to a deeper problem with Doughertys analysis. His argument is premised on the idea that religious conservatives are primarily concerned about LGBTQ issues and insurance coverage of birth control. But the polling data suggests that simply is not true: They have conservative views on a whole swath of issues, including ones about race and identity that are so central to Trumps appeal. You cannot disentangle their support for Trumps policies on religious freedom from their support for his border wall and racial demagoguery.

The American public is not divided exclusively by their views of religion: They are divided by their view of what America should look like as a whole. Our various culture wars have become a giant culture war, and its hard to disentangle one component from the rest of it.

Earlier this year, Trinity Evangelical Divinity Schools Craig Ott and Juan Carlos Tllez published a survey of the academic and statistical literature on evangelical opinions on immigration. They found that white evangelicals have the most negative views regarding immigration as compared to compared to all other religious groups.

Interestingly, these grassroots opinions seem to arise in spite of more moderate statements from evangelical leaders and organizations. In Ott and Tllezs view, their attitudes and the manner in which they form their opinions appear inconsistent with evangelical convictions. Sheer religious conviction isnt driving these voters behavior, at least according to these scholars read of the available research.

Their analysis is borne out by recent polling on policy. Sixty-one percent of white evangelicals support Trumps travel ban, per one 2019 survey. A Pew report found that 68 percent did not believe the US had an obligation to take in refugees more than any other religious group surveyed. About 75 percent of white evangelicals support Trumps proposal for a US-Mexico border wall.

These restrictive attitudes reflect deeper negative attitudes toward diversity. In one study, white evangelicals were the only religious group surveyed where a plurality (44 percent) had a negative view of Muslims. A data analysis by Denison Universitys Paul Djupe found that white evangelicals have considerably more racial resentment toward African-Americans than the general white population. A 2018 PRRI survey found that a majority of white evangelicals believed that a majority-minority America would have a mostly negative effect on the country again, alone among religious groups in the sample.

Perhaps this seems obvious. Doesnt all this data merely show that a conservative demographic group is, in fact, conservative?

But thats precisely my point. Today, partisan identity forms what political scientist Liliana Mason calls a mega-identity a category that encompasses various different ways we think about ourselves into one giant bundle. Voting Republican isnt just a way for white religious conservatives to protect themselves from secular attacks on their institutions; its also an expression of their deep anxiety created by demographic change and the upending of historic racial hierarchies. Their fear is not just one of religious persecution or racial progress, but of both combining into a unified whole of a country that is no longer there.

Under these circumstances, the outcome of an election then feels so much more consequential for our own broader sense of who we are, as Mason put it in an interview. We cant just say: Well one part of me lost, but the rest of me is still doing great (or vice versa). Instead, we feel devastated when we lose and really really great when we win.

That sense of so much being on the line, of an entire way of life being under threat, means that partisan identification becomes an irresistibly powerful lure for voters. No amount of Democratic policy moderation on narrow issues of religious liberty is going to overcome this amount of deep partisan polarization. Dougherty is preoccupied by the case of the Little Sisters of the Poor, a small Catholic charity that sought exemption from Obamacares birth control mandate. But Ill guarantee you that case is a lot less important to Trumps evangelical voter base than the Wall.

You can see the profound shaping effect in another religious group: Catholics. American Catholics are split into two roughly equally sized partisan camps and have sharply polarized attitudes as a result. Pew asked Catholics in January whether they supported substantially expanding the border wall with Mexico; 91 percent of Catholic Democrats opposed it, while 81 percent of Catholic Republicans supported it. You can see similar partisan splits on other issues Pew polled, even ones of doctrinal relevance like abortion and climate change. It doesnt make sense to speak of a Catholic vote; it makes sense to speak of two Catholic votes, a Democratic and a Republican one.

In a world where extreme polarization and social anxieties play a central role in politics, simple policy moderation is not enough to change the way that polarized groups vote.

The truth is were locked in not several culture wars, but one giant one: a battle over the countrys future about which partisan camps have very, very different ideas.

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There is no culture war peace treaty - Vox.com

On Tuesdays episode of The Ben Shapiro Show, the Daily Wire editor-in-chief talks about a New York Times article that raises the issue of self-coupling. Video and partial transcript below:

This is why the culture wars matter so much I present to you, as Exhibit A in the pitch that the Left is making, this article from yesterday in The New York Times by an associate professor of religious studies at Skidmore College, Bradley Onishi, [who asks], Could I be my own soulmate?

Are you your own soulmate? The article describes Emma Watson, the actress, and Lizzo, the rapper and flautist, who are both saying that they are their own One that they are self-coupling. This religion, Professor Onishi, he says:

For most people, the idea of self-coupling may be jarring, but a closer look might reveal it to be more of an end point of a trend. Marriage rates have been declining steadily since the 1970s. Many of us are dating more, but somehow going on fewer dates. Sex is safer and less burdened with shame than in the past, and seemingly more available, but were having less of it than we were a generation ago. And despite all these mixed signals, most of us are still looking for The One

According to Stephanie Coontz, the author of the 2005 book Marriage: A History, finding The One used to be about completion. In the 19th century, the rise of the market economy divided the sexes men into the world of bread-winning work and women into that of unpaid domestic labor. When these two spheres were brought together in marriage, Ms. Coontz wrote, they produced a perfect well-rounded hole.

Thats ignoring the several thousand years before that, where marriage was actually a pretty congenial relationship.

This approach to partnership, wherein two members of opposite sex complete each other, was essentially religious in origin complementarianism, for the theologians out there a well-known example being the biblical adage that two shall become one. It also recalls Platos Symposium one of the earliest purveyors of the soul mate myth where the comic poet Aristophanes explains that humans were once united in pairs, but were then split into unhappy halves by Zeus

The ideal of completion hearkens to a time when women were economically and socially dependent on men and marriage was reserved for heterosexual couples. Today, instead of a life-defining relationship, many of us now see partnership as one part of a puzzle that includes a career (which often demands geographic mobility), family, a social life, personal wellness, volunteer work and creative or recreational outlets. A relationship is not the foundation of selfhood, but only a piece.

The redefinition of marriage into one choice among many, just something that you do if you feel like it the problem is that that may work for a very, I would say very, very limited coterie of people who read The New York Times. It does not work broadly across the United States. But our cultural institutions are all nationalized: Hollywood is nationalized, Netflix is nationalized, The New York Times is nationalized, Facebook is nationalized, and that means that the social bleed over effect, the social trickle-down effect of leftist social policy, which, by the way, is not even engaged in by people at the upper echelons in places like New York and California.

One of the peculiar things youll find about Hollywood is the same people who are routinely preaching the virtues of bleeding-edge social leftism get rid of marriage, have any relationship you want, open marriages, polyamory those same people tend to get married at higher rates than a lot of people who are actually not living in those areas. They tend not to have kids out of wedlock, particularly a lot, and if they do have kids out of wedlock, they can afford it because theyre very wealthy. Those social messages do not apply equally to everyone.

In other words, just as with every other policy in human life, not all policies affect everybody equally. The fact that folks on the Left seem to think that policies undertaken by liberal elites over at The New York Times or in Hollywood, that those policies affect people in downtrodden economic areas the same way that they do in upper/elite establishments that discarded religion as a social fabric decades ago, just demonstrates a tremendous level of ignorance. Trying to re-shift these definitions of fundamental institutions that is indeed creating a phenomenon in which the United States is dividing. These [three] phenomena income inequality rising, the changes in the economy, and the bleed over of social liberalism this is leading to a toxic brew.

Now, there are people on the Right and the Left who think that the way to fix this is to fix the economic side. The way were gonna do this with redistributionism! Youve got Andrew Yang proposing universal basic income on the Democratic side, or you have people like as Ive said Tucker Carlson talking about regulating out of existence self-driving cars, stopping economic progress, limiting trade, bringing back all these jobs to manufacturing areas, as though thats ever really going to happen. I have serious doubts about that, considering the technology has basically put a lot of these jobs out of commission.

Then, there is the stuff that is actually in the control of the people who are living today, and that is making the next right decision. The fact is that there are certain factors in your life that are fundamentally going to guarantee [that you] have a better shot at life finishing high school, not having kids out of wedlock, getting married. These things actually change your life in ways for the better, and the fact that our culture is so focused in on a sort of Marxist materialism, in which if we solve your economic circumstance, that this will solve all of your other problems this is not right.

Solving the problem of making right and moral decisions that better your life that is how your life gets better. That means taking seriously the fundamental social institutions that [have] been broken by the Left since the 1960s, focusing on restoring those because those are things you can do. Not things that you have to wait for some government savior to do and, by the way, those government saviors aint showing up.

Income inequality is breaking out in major blue cities, where theyve gotten rid of the social institutions and where the ladder to success doesnt exist even for the underclass in those cities themselves. Forget about red areas versus blue areas in the cities themselves. You need a restoration of personal responsibility in order to lead to a restoration of the ladder to success that does exist for people who make the best possible decision.

Listen to full episodes of The Ben Shapiro Show on iTunes. Watch The Ben Shapiro Show on-demand!

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SHAPIRO: 'Self-Coupling': The Newest Frontier On The Culture War - The Daily Wire

War (noun) 1. a state of open and declared armed hostile conflict between states or nations

2. a state of hostility, conflict, or antagonism Merriam-Webster Dictionary

I give up. I surrender. Better yet, can we just declare a truce in the so-called War on Christmas?

Yes, its back, like that ugly Christmas sweater Uncle Jack always wears to the party. Like the 24-hour Christmas movie marathon thats been running on the Hallmark TV channel since July 5th. Like the Christmas decorations that show up on the shelves at the local CVS the day after Halloween. I hope and pray every December that this yearly chapter in the culture wars might just fade away, but no such luck.

This war stubbornly and annoyingly returns every December.

Politicians from the President on down declare that the war is on, that we fight because some want to threaten treasured holiday traditions. We cant say Merry Christmas anymore! We cant sing Christmas carols in school anymore! We cant go to Macys or JC Penney for a Christmas sale anymore because they now have the gall call it a holiday sale! We go to Starbucks and their annual holiday cup says Merry Coffee! We have to call the Christmas parade the Holiday parade!?

Forgive me for not getting all huffed and puffed up about this attack on Christmas. I mean, I kind of know Christmas, and really well. I have been in the business of Christmas, of preaching Christmas and teaching Christmas and declaring Christmas for more than 30 years as a local church pastor. Id like to think that if there was an actual war on the sacred traditions of my faith or on the birth story we so love or the hymns we so enjoy singing in December: Id know it.

In three-plus decades, not once have my religious freedoms around Christmas been threatened or taken away, not for me, not for my church, not for one person of my faith that I know. Not once have folks complained to me that they cant put a candle in the window or sing Silent Night or set up a home nativity set or light Advent candles or serve the poor on behalf of a poor little boy born some 2,000 years ago.

Yet still the war rages on in places like Charleston, West Va. The mayor of that city recently decided to rename the Christmas Parade down there the Holiday Parade, in her words, to make it more inclusive and reflective of the religious diversity in that place. Not everyone celebrates Christmas as a holy day or even a holiday, right? Is it really such a bad thing to recognize this truth?

Apparently, yes, at least according to the aggrieved and angry and rage-filled folks who overwhelmed the mayors office with nasty phone calls and filled up her Facebook page with diatribes and threats of recall, who so overwhelmed her with fierce opposition that she relented and went back to the old name for the parade.

As one group of red-hot righteous state senators wrote in a press release protesting the mayors decision, Radical liberals in Charleston want to eliminate Christ from our Capitol Citys annual Christmas Parade [they] renamed the longtime Christmas Parade to Winter Parade and banned the Freedom of Religion for parade participants in an outright assault on our Constitution. We are calling on Mayor Goodwin and her liberal allies to end this madness and allow our citizens to freely and fully exercise their Freedom of Religion with a CHRISTMAS PARADE.

Wow. Its hard to know how to respond to such a harsh screed. I can see why the Mayor finally gave up and surrendered.

Heres the irony of this whole war. Its being waged on behalf of one who is called the prince of peace by those who embrace that religious tradition. One whose birth was heralded by a choir of angels, who sung for all to hear, of Peace on earth and goodwill to all people. The war is being fought in the name of one, whom some believe, came not for the kings or the politicians or the power brokers but instead to love the least of these: the poor and the lonely and the war torn and the orphans and the widows and the lost.

If you think about it, a war on Christmas is actually against everything Christmas is supposed to mean. So, my advice: ignore the war. Its more heat than flame, more smoke than fire, and more bluster than truth.

A war? No. But peace? Yes.

I surrender.

The Rev. John F. Hudson is senior pastor of the Pilgrim Church, United Church of Christ, in Sherborn (pilgrimsherborn.org). If you have a word or idea youd like defined in a future column or have comments, please send them to pastorjohn@pilgrimsherborn.org or in care of the Dover-Sherborn Press (Dover-Sherborn@wickedlocal.com).

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Spiritually Speaking: Surrender to peace in this war on Christmas - Wicked Local Sharon

Opposition leader Anthony Albanese is sharply critical of Facebook for failing to remove false material, in a speech on democracy in which he condemns the echo chambers created by social media.

Albanese recounts his own recent experience to highlight Facebooks intransigence, saying when he complained about an image altered from his page they shrugged, saying it wasnt a breach of community guidelines.

The speech, Albaneses third vision statement, was released ahead of its Saturday delivery.

Condemning online platforms for being unwilling to filter out false information, he rejects the arguments they use.

[Facebook chief executive] Mark Zuckerberg says he thinks people should be able to see what politicians are saying. But what happens when it turns out that what politicians are saying isnt real at all?

"Facebook usually wont do anything at all. That happened to me just last week, when self-described mens rights activist Leith Erikson doctored a social media image from my Facebook page.

"What was originally a graphic supporting Australians right to protest became a graphic pushing Mr Eriksons loopy campaign against the Family Court.

But Facebook was dismissive when the matter was raised.

This is a far-right candidate, creating a fake graphic fraudulently purporting to be from a progressive party, and Facebook sees no issue. Well, I do.

"And it begs the question: if this doesnt breach community standards, then what does?

"And perhaps more importantly why do Facebooks laws of the jungle trump Australias laws of the land?

"What then happens when platforms become so complacent with misinformation that they become unable to filter it out?

In his address Albanese declares war on the culture wars, calls for more constructive national conversations about the big issues such as climate change, and urges a toning down of the anger and outrage in public debate.

This increased volume of anger and misinformation is robbing our political debates of civility and making the publics poor opinion of our political system much, much worse.

"Its something we cant afford. Surveys are finding that fewer and fewer people are satisfied with the way our democracy works and that some are losing faith in democracy altogether.

"The University of Canberra has found that satisfaction with our democracy has more than halved in the last decade, down from 86% to 41%.

Albanese criticises the government for attacking freedom of the press and the right to protest, calling for changes to protect press freedom to be enshrined in a bipartisan way.

He also says there should be a requirement for a parliamentary debate when Australia is committing to participate in a war, although he does not argue parliamentary approval should be required.

I understand there are those who passionately believe that a parliamentary vote should precede the deployment of our troops in conflict overseas. I also understand there is a long tradition of the executive making these decisions alone.

"Our parliamentarians should, at the very least, be given the chance to express their view following a cabinet decision to go to war.

He points to the two days of parliamentary debate the Hawke government allowed after its cabinet decided to join the first Gulf War.

At their best these debates in parliament are an exercise in transparency and accountability. And this is a practice that should continue.

"Many democratic nations have parliamentary debate and transparency around their deployments. Including in the United Kingdom, where there is now a higher parliamentary threshold for decisions to go to war.

"And after all, our greatest ally, the United States, has a war powers act.

"We cant ask people to put their lives on the line if we as legislators are too afraid to put our arguments on the line.

Canvassing reforms to parliament, he suggests an independent speaker and a parliamentary integrity commissioner to align the conduct of our parliamentarians with community expectations.

On indigenous recognition, Albanese reasserts Labors view that the indigenous voice to parliament should be enshrined in the constitution, a position rejected by Scott Morrison.

The government has ruled out constitutional enshrinement from the beginning and deliberately misrepresented the concept to turn Australians against each other. Thats incredibly disappointing.

"But the best way to proceed, as in most circumstances, is to

keep talking, keep working, keep progressing. Thats what we intend to do until a voice that can heal and unify is finally achieved, he says.

Next week Albanese will tour regional Queensland where he will visit mining and aluminium smelting enterprises, underlining the contrast between him and his predecessor Bill Shorten. In his speech he stresses that advocates of change need to understand the viewpoints of those who will feel insecure by that change. He says the anti-Adani convoy into the coal mining town of Clermont was not helpful.

The rest is here:
Albanese accuses Facebook of shrugging off fakery - The Conversation AU