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To the editor: Please add Rep. Steve Knight (R-Palmdale) to your list of GOP legislators who are ducking their constituents during the current home district work week. (Congress shouldn't duck the public, Feb. 22)

Staff in his Santa Clarita and Simi Valley offices have not picked up the phone when I have called, nor have they responded to messages. I have tried repeatedly for days to get through.

When I spoke to a staffer in his Washington office, she provided a town hall meeting date of March 4 not this week during the break and couldnt tell us if the meeting is in person or a phone-in session. If its the latter, we know from experience that he will screen callers and allow questions from supporters only.

This is not democracy. It is not representative government. It is cowardice.

Marcy Rothenberg, Porter Ranch

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Another L.A.-area Republican ducking his constituents - LA Times - Los Angeles Times

Pakistans new Hindu Marriage Act prohibits polygamy among Hindus, but can it reel the big fish in? There is no parallel law yet, nor is there one in the making, that would restrain Muslim men to monogamy in Pakistan. Paradoxically then, while the majority of Pakistanis is still bound by undemocratic norms, the minority there is relatively liberated. In Pakistan, Hindu men can have only one lawfully wedded wife while Muslims can have as many as four at a time, though only a fraction of the population is willing to chance it.

This has often promoted the belief that Hinduism is democracy friendly and citizenship enabling. While it is true that both the Hindu Marriage Act (1955) and the Hindu Succession Act(1956) were great achievements of independent India, it is also true that their passage through Parliament was heavily contested, with not a wishbone at work. Traditionalists, inside and outside Congress, strongly opposed these bills and it required a huge effort by Nehru and Ambedkar, among others, to see them through.

Illustration: Chad Crowe

This much is well known. What is, however, not equally appreciated, and fully baked into our brains, is that the Hindu majority, such as we know it to be, is actually a creation of these post-Independence laws. Before they came into being, not just marriage, even inheritance and guardianship norms differed from place to place, from community to community in India. In some cases, succession was governed by the Mitakshara system, in others the Dayabhaga; and each had dashboards flashing different schools.

Nor could one ignore the many matrilineal communities that had to also conform to this newly minted uniform standard. The Delhi high court in two recent judgments, one in 2015 and the other in 2016, overturned Hindu tradition yet again and brought about a greater consolidation of the majority. It first decreed that a Hindu mother could be the single guardian of her child and later also allowed a woman to be karta in a Hindu Undivided Family unit.

Where then were the Hindus before the mid 1950s, other than a scattered lot with diverse customs? The community we consider to be in overwhelming majority today is an outcome of these laws and did not predate them. The majority, in other words, is a creation of liberal democracy from the many came one, under the watchful eye of the Constitution. Therefore, the first government of independent India deserves a further credit: it not only created a majority, but also tamed it. This is an enormous task that easily frightens many new nations, but India was different.

The first job then in democracy and citizenship making is the creation of just such a majority, and this is rarely ever a gift bequeathed by tradition. Instead of being shamefaced about this majority, we should celebrate it as a laser-focussed republican moment. The Hindu of independent India is a new creature and, in strictly legal terms, its personal code is a creation of the present. A good democracy alters many aspects of tradition to create a majority, and there is nothing so unusual about this.

Just as Hindus had to be disciplined before they could become a majority, so also were Christians in the Western world. There is simply no majority culture that emerged out of any democracy that has not been burnished and moulded by the concerns of citizenship. What we know as Italy today was a powder keg of viciously divisive forces; the Sardinians against Bourbons against Sicilians, and all of them against a unified nation-state. Yet, for a long time now they have all been Italians.

Likewise, Quakers, Presbyterians and Methodists are presently part of the Christian majority in Britain, but a little over a hundred years ago they were classified as dissenters. Consequently, they were denied government jobs; they could not even earn degrees from Oxford or Cambridge. All of this sounds unreal today as these sects are now chartered members of the Protestant majority in the United Kingdom. Since then there has been further progress. In 2013 a new law was passed that even allows a British monarch to marry a Catholic. This enlarged the Christian majority from just being a Protestant one, erasing completely the memory of the 1780 massacre of Catholics.

A similar process took place in America when, post World War II, Jewish people began to be considered as white folks. Till the 1920s, Jewish students were discouraged from entering elite educational institutions in the United States. Perhaps, World War II brought home the wisdom to conservative Christian establishments that Jewish talent would be hugely beneficial to Americas well-being.

Taken together this should easily expose the myth of a pre-existing majority in a democracy. If, at times, it appears as if the majority has to do little adjusting, leaving the burden on minorities alone, then that is an optical illusion. This conclusion overlooks how a good and vibrant democracy has long been at work to merge hitherto disparate groups and sects, to form a majority. If democracies, step by step, by incessant crafting and cajoling, create majorities, the same methods must be put to work to merge those who still see themselves as outliers and minorities.

After all, a majority is known by the minorities it embraces.

DISCLAIMER : Views expressed above are the author's own.

Originally posted here:
Democracy makes majorities: How India's Hindu majority is an outcome of Independence and constitutional process - Times of India (blog)

Democracy dies when the people remain mired in ignorance, breeding tyrants who promise solutions to all their problems.

Constitutionalist Christian Monsod issued this warning on the eve of the 31st anniversary of Edsa Revolution, echoing the words of a former US Supreme Court Justice, whose remarks in 2012 seemed to portend the rise of leaders like Donald Trump and Rodrigo Duterte.

We are told that an ignorant people can never remain a free people because democracy cannot survive for long with civic ignorance, he said on Friday.

And if we do not do anything about it and prefer to live with our frustrations about who is accountable for things that go wrong, someone will eventually come and say I will solve all your problems if you give me total power.

And we will give it to him. Thats when democracy dies, Monsod said, paraphrasing the words of David Souter five years before Trump came into power.

Souters warning resounds in our situation today, said the former chair of the Commission on Elections.

Speaking at a forum at the University of the Philippines School of Economics, Monsod lamented that about 73 percent of the Filipino people admitted to knowing little or nothing about the 1987 Constitution, based on a Pulse Asia survey in July last year.

Such ignorance now fuels attempts by the Duterte administration to revise the Constitution, which was framed during a constitutional convention, of which Monsod was a member, in 1987, a year after the peaceful Edsa uprising toppled the dictatorship of the late Ferdinand Marcos.

We are told by the present government that the problem of our country is Imperial Manila, hence the need to shift to federalism, Monsod said.

But I submit that we have failed in development not because of the Constitution, but because we have not fully implemented it, especially its provisions on social justice and on local autonomy. The Constitution is not the problem, it is part of the solution, he said.

Monsod described Duterte as an enigma because of inconsistent messages and behavior, language that the civil society does not accept, inability to dialogue because he is not a good listener and muddled governance because of ad hoc or case-to-case decisions.

Even so, he said he was convinced that the Presidents heart is with the poor.

And given his high trust rating, it is neither feasible nor desirable to try to bring him down. But he is an enigma because his pro-poor agenda is correct, but the means he wants to use are wrong, Monsod said, citing Dutertes bloody war on drugs and encouragement of extrajudicial killings of suspects.

He said it was not only the President who was an enigma but the Filipino people themselves.

And until we have both a transformational leader and a transformational people, we can never fulfill the vision of the Constitution of a new social order, he said.

For all the promise of a new social order that the 1986 Edsa Revolution represented, Monsod said it ended in failure.

We folded our banners, we put away the t-shirts with the imaginative slogans that brought humor to the seriousness of the times, and we went back to our previous lives focusing on our narrow purposes and advocacies. And as we went our separate ways with our separate causes, we lost something of the dream of a nation and the significance of interconnected lives, he said.

You may askhave we failed Edsa? My answer is yes, Monsod said.

Thirty-one years after Edsa, we still have the twin problems of mass poverty and one of the highest [inequalities] among our peers in our part of the world, he said. The social reform programs are underperforming and the social divides have not changed.

And I submit that the biggest divide among our people is not culture or identity or territory but the divide between the rich and the poor, whether within a Christian community, a Muslim community, and indigenous peoples community, or within our nation as a whole. CDG

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Democracy won't thrive with civic ignorance, warns constitutionalist ... - Inquirer.net

Former UKIP leader Nigel Farage spoke at CPAC today. He declared that the U.K.s Brexit vote and the election of Donald Trump both represent a move away from globalism. When, in years to come, the generations that follow us study the history of this period, he said, there is one year that will stand out there is one year that every schoolchild will know and that year is the year of 2016.

In 2016 we witnessed the beginning of a global political revolution, and its one that is not going to stop, its one that is going to roll out across the rest of the free world, he said

Farage equated the Brexit victory that he championed with the election of Donald Trump, and he said that, since it happened, he feels more American every time he visits America. Trump himself has not shied away from comparing the two elections in which populists scored major victories and has called himself Mr. Brexit.

Farage defended his decision to campaign for Donald Trump as a foreign political leader, and said that he is amazed by Trumps determination to put in place the platform on which he was elected how about that?

He said that Trump is ultimately restoring faith in the Democratic process.

He said, 2016 was the year that the nation-state democracy made a comeback against the globalists, and those who would wish to destroy everything that we have ever been.

Like Trump, Farage also slammed the media, saying that it is in deep denial about Trump. Moreover, Farage predicted that Trump will become more popular over time, just as Brexit has since the vote occurred. What happened in 2016, he predicted, is not the end of this great global revolution, what happened in 2016 is the beginning.

He said that this will continue, with very exciting elections coming up, in the Netherlands, in France, in Germany, possibly even in Italy. Whatever happens, he said, the center of gravity has moved away from supranational government.

He finished with a rousing call for nationalism all over the West:

Were not against anybody based on religion or ethnicity. Were not against anybody, but were for ourselves, were for our country, were for our communities, were for making our people safe and with less risk from global terror! That is what were for! And were for our country and were for our people and we are winning!

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Nigel Farage at CPAC: '2016 Was the Year that the Nation-State Democracy Made a Comeback' - National Review

FRIDAY, FEB. 24, 2017, 5:30 A.M.

You mad?

I know I am. And I know that a lot of people who lean my way are mad. And I know that a lot of people who lean the other way are mad. The people in the streets are mad, and the people holding town halls when their representatives wont are mad, and the people who dont like the people in the streets or at the town halls are mad, and the president is utterly mad in every sense as are his enablers in Congress and the times themselves.

Mad. Its a tense, anxious, angry time. Ive butted heads with family and friends over politics, to say nothing of the head-butting with people who are neither. Ive seen more insults slung, more names called, more ad hominems added than I can remember and I have slung, called and added more, myself.

Usually, somewhere in the slinging, questions of civility are raised. What has happened to our ability to listen to one another?

What Im wondering lately, though, is how much civility matters. So I called Cornell Clayton, who literally edited a book on civility and politics: Civility and Democracy in America: A Reasonable Understanding.

Clayton, the director of the Thomas S. Foley Institute for Public Policy and Public Service at Washington State University, said that civility, while important to a smooth-running society, is not necessarily a problem in terms of democracy.

Behavior can be both uncivil and democratic at the same time, and thats the way I would characterize some of the spontaneous demonstrations were seeing right now, Clayton said. Theres a lot at stake in our politics and people feel that and theyre going to feel passionately about it. The answer is not to say, lets just be nicer to each other.

Clayton has often made the case that incivility is a normal and even necessary part of times like these times of dramatic social, economic and political change and that by historical standards things have been worse. Nobody settles political arguments with duels these days. He notes that Americans were similarly divided in the 1960s, an era marked by violence and assassinations, as well as major social change.

We were not only deeply divided as a country, but we were much, much, much less civil than we are today, he said.

Our divisions are unmistakably deep. Clayton has noted that decades ago there were conservative and liberal members of both parties. Voting records in Congress show those days are long gone lawmakers of both parties have moved away from the middle, and those on the right have moved farther, he said.

Citizens have become similarly split. Clayton cites statistics about gaps in attitudes among Americans across gender, economic, social and political lines. Between 1987 and 2012, he said, differences between men and women, say, or between rich and poor have essentially stayed stable.

The only place where the gap has grown is with respect to partisanship, Clayton said in a lecture he gave at Boise State University in 2014. What this tells us is our partisan identities, our social identities, are whats driving this divide.

Lots of folks suggest that civility, in and of itself, can be an answer to the problem of divisiveness that by merely listening more, by sitting down together, by granting good faith to your opponent, the divide can be dissolved.

Clayton argues that incivility is a symptom, not the disease, and it does not play only a negative role. When groups are powerless, or perceive themselves to be, the norms of civility can be an obstacle to justice. Both the womens suffrage and civil rights movements grew out of such tension.

Its really part of the democratic process, he said. Its part of the way democracy resolves deep divisions.

Clayton compares the current moment to the 1880s and 1890s another period of intense disruption and disagreement about the future of the country, marked by economic, social and demographic changes. But there have been similar periods throughout history where people were closely and deeply divided when things matter most, when people care most, thats when people get mad.

For better or worse, its a mad time. Clayton said that throughout history, times like these give way to more peaceful political periods but it doesnt usually happen via bipartisanship and peace talks. Typically, one party or the other claims the middle.

The way polarization has always ended in the past is one side wins, he said. Eventually.

Continued here:
Shawn Vestal: It's a mad time, and that's democracy | The ... - The Spokesman-Review