Slate Articles

Out of Air in Arizona

John Dickerson — Thu, 23 Feb 2012 06:17:41 GMT

The 20^th and perhaps final Republican presidential debate wheezed across the finish line and collapsed. At times it felt like the candidates had already talked themselves out on the big themes and could only bicker over table scraps. There was a long symposium on how earmarks and the congressional appropriating process work. Then, there was a confusing discussion of Arlen Specter, his re-election, and the judiciary committee.

Who won? Ask the undecided Republicans in Michigan. They count the most tonight. Though the debate was held in Arizona, and there were some sturdy local panders to the state's immigration law, the most important audience was in a state 50 degrees cooler. In Michigan, Mitt Romney and Rick Santorum are neck and neck in the polls. If Romney wins that state next Tuesday, his campaign will remain alive. If he doesn't, his campaign will slip into critical condition. Going into tonight's debate Romney was inching ahead of Santorum and on his way to a narrow win. Nothing in the debate would suggest a change in that trajectory. A decline in Santorum's standing may give Romney a bigger margin.

Rick Santorum used to complain about being left out of debates. He was in the center of this one and he missed his moment to shine. He fared better when he was on the periphery, jockeying for position and demanding attention. He was in a defensive crouch for much of tonight’s debate, fending off attacks on his tenure in Washington and his conservative credentials. Depending on how voters process the debate, it was either a middling night for Santorum or a bad one.

If you believe that all you need in a debate is one good moment, Rick Santorum arguably had two of them. He defended his comments about contraception effectively and passionately, citing the instability of the American family in which “children are being raised by children.” This is Santorum on social issues at his best for Republican audiences: from the heart, trying to help and not sounding like an intruder in the bedroom. He also clobbered Mitt Romney on his health care plan again. Though, at this point, it's hard to see how there's any new advantage to gain on that well-trod ground.

The problem with these good moments is that it's hard to see how they help Santorum build a coalition outside of the evangelicals or those who identify themselves in exit polls as strongly conservative. In his opening remarks, he talked about offering a "positive vision," but there was nothing positive from Santorum tonight. In fairness, none of the other candidates offered the lift of a driving dream either, but the other candidates didn't need to as much as Santorum did.

The darker view of Santorum's night is that he fully inhabited the Washington insider caricature that Mitt Romney has been trying to paint. He was every inch a senator. It's surprising he didn’t bring a spittoon on stage. First, he got stuck in the swamp of defending earmarks. The crowd seemed like it would applaud anything, but when Santorum explained his support of earmarks the hall remained silent. At one point, in trying to explain away how he had voted for funding Planned Parenthood—it was part of a much larger spending bill—he said meekly, "I had to vote for some big appropriations bills." That does not sound good coming from a man who has built his campaign on conviction.

Later, Santorum explained how his support for moderate Republican Arlen Specter was part of a negotiated deal to support conservative nominees. It made sense if you were listening and had covered Congress. But to anyone else—including those independent voters in Michigan—it sounded like a classic backroom deal. Then, to apply superglue to the insider flight suit he'd zipped up, he described his support for No Child Left Behind as being a team player with a Republican president. "I have to admit I voted for that. It was against the principles I believed in. But, you know, when you're part of the team sometimes you take one for the team, for the leader."

Honest! So is saying, “I have a personal moral objection (to contraception), but I’ve voted for bills that included it, too.” But this is very confusing coming from the candidate running as the principled man who will not bend. You can imagine the Romney team stringing together some of these rationalizations to make a devastating ad.

Ron Paul, the lively elfin conscience of the Constitution, scolded Santorum after each one of these moments. Mirthful and full of delight, Paul answered the question about why he was running an ad saying Santorum was a fake by saying with a wide smile, “Because he is a fake.” Most devastating, though, was this Paul line: "He calls this a team sport. He has to go along to get along. That's the problem with Washington," said Paul. "That's been going on for so long. So I don't accept that form of government. I understand it. That is the way it works. You were with the majority. You were the whip and you organized and got these votes all passed. But I think the obligation of all of us should be the oath of office. It shouldn't be the oath to the party."

If Santorum had highs and lows, Mitt Romney was steady, if unspectacular. As in previous debates, he came schooled on his opposition research. He is a precise debater. The formula is: attack, explain past position, explain current proposal. He got his licks in, pegging Santorum as a creature of Washington. “While I was fighting to save the Olympics, you were fighting to save the ‘Bridge to Nowhere,’ ” he said, referring to the single most infamous pork-barrel project.

His defense of his position on the auto bailout sounded plausible, though it wouldn't pass muster in a general election. He tied it off with an attack on the United Auto Workers, which will be a hit with the base. He defended women in combat (probably helpful in a debate where four white men were debating contraception). He sounded like a man in control of his brief when talking about Iran and Syria, which helps his pitch that he is the best leader of the bunch. "If I'm president that will not happen," he said of Iran getting a nuclear weapon. "If we elect Barack Obama it will."

Newt Gingrich was a man in repose. He was relaxed in his chair. He's gotten some sleep since Florida. Asked to pick a word that described him, Gingrich said “cheerful,” and he seemed it. He didn't seem hunted, but he also didn't seem particularly hungry. He said some amusing things. He has plans. But he wasn't forceful, except when he swiped at the media for not asking candidate Obama about an infanticide bill. (He was wrong.) He sounded like a man who will make mountains of money on the lecture circuit.

The Republican debates have played such an important role in the primaries, but it was hard to see a clear storyline emerging from this one. Santorum may have blown his moment to grow, but the weaknesses that have dogged Romney remain. Gov. Romney is no more compelling than before the evening began. There are no more debates scheduled, which is a little unsettling. They’ve dotted the race like fence posts. But if they’re like the candidates in this campaign, just when you think they’re gone, they’ll come back.

Santorum’s Martyr Complex

John Dickerson — Thu, 23 Feb 2012 01:20:48 GMT

Is Rick Santorum suffering for his faith? One of his advisers suggested to the Washington Examiner's Byron York that he is, and that Mitt Romney is getting absolution. "Why is Mormonism off limits?" York quotes the adviser as asking. "We're having to spend days answering questions about Rick's faith, which he has been open about. Romney will turn on a dime when you talk about religion. We're getting asked about specific tenets of Rick's faith, and when Romney says, 'I want to focus on the economy,' [the press says,] ‘OK, we'll focus on the economy.’ "

In this Lenten season we are called upon to be generous of spirit, so let's start there. The Santorum campaign is under siege. Mitt Romney and his backers are dropping millions of dollars in ads on his head. He's being called to account for everything he's said for his entire career in an atmosphere that doesn't allow for reasoned discussion. The press accounts of some of his recent comments, like his remark about Obama's phony theology, have cast him in the worst possible light before letting him clarify.

Now, this claim is nuts. Rick Santorum isn't being asked about his faith. He's being asked about statements that have come out of his own mouth about contraception, prenatal screening, and man's dominion over earth. Even if we stipulate that the press is asking a disproportionate number of questions about these issues—instead of, say, his manufacturing plan or position on Syria—the questions I've heard haven't been about papal infallibility or the Catechism. When the press want to ask gotcha questions about doctrinal matters, they ignore everything the candidate actually talks about and ask about evolution—as they regularly did with Mike Huckabee during the 2008 race.

This is a dodge. And when you make a dodge of faith, you cheapen it—not the least because you make the plea seem like just another political move. It's not the first time in this election season. While in South Carolina, Anita Perry said of her husband’s suffering campaign: “We are being brutalized by our opponents and our own party. So much of that is, I think … because of his faith.” Forgive me Father: hogwash. Perry had rough treatment not because of his faith but because he was a bad presidential candidate. It was particularly striking that Mrs. Perry used this shield because it was Robert Jeffress, one of her husband’s supporters, who threw the dirtiest religious barb in the campaign. He accused Romney of being a member of a "cult," who should be shunned by Christians.

That's what makes the Santorum adviser's claim about Romney's faith so preposterous. Again, in the spirit of Lent, we'll assume the adviser wasn't bringing up Romney's faith in order to unsettle voters by reminding them of it. Mitt Romney has not tied his personal faith to his public policy positions the way Santorum has, yet he has been asked repeatedly about his faith during his presidential campaigns. It was such an issue in 2008 that he had to give a special speech on the topic to address the issue.

It is true, as the Santorum adviser claims, that Romney pivots back to talking about the economy when asked about his religion. But that’s just campaign discipline. Romney switches back to the economy when asked what breakfast cereal he prefers. Santorum doesn't pivot because he can't: The questions he gets aren't about his faith. They're about things he says. Why? Because, in part, Santorum is appealing to evangelical voters. It's hard to pivot away from answering for your own remarks by saying they're not germane.

That brings us to Satan. Rick Santorum's comments about the Father of Lies from 2008 are in the news. Is it unfair to ask Santorum about these remarks? No. If Rick Santorum would like Mitt Romney to answer for remarks he made about abortion long ago, it’s fair for Santorum to have to answer about more recent remarks about Lucifer’s dominion over America. Maybe he was asked too many questions about Satan, but that’s a sin of excess, not a fixation on faith.

It's dangerous to make too much of one unnamed adviser's remarks, but this claim is not dissimilar from the wider complaint within the Santorum camp that he is being unfairly targeted because of his socially conservative views. Rich Lowry of the National Journal defended this perspective in a recent column, arguing that the excessive scrutiny was due to the fact that Santorum "is a standing affront to the sensibilities and assumptions of the media and political elite."

That is firmer ground. Calling Santorum a "standing affront" overstates the case, but the newsrooms on the coasts are not filled with people who share his worldview. But the idea of a left-wing conspiracy loses steam when you recognize how many conservatives are pointing out the shortcomings of Santorum's campaign and his handling of social issues. Jennifer Rubin of the Washington Post, who was a Santorum booster before it was cool, precisely identifies his excesses; John Podhoretz in the New York Post explains why Santorum's moralism will be unattractive in a general election; and Peter Wehner in Commentary makes a similar case.

With so many conservatives making astute political observations about Santorum and his socially conservative views, either the liberals have had a recruiting boon or there's something to the scrutiny Santorum is getting that goes beyond ideology or religious bigotry. Santorum isn’t suffering for his faith. He’s being held accountable for what he says.

Heavy Medals

Dahlia Lithwick — Thu, 23 Feb 2012 01:13:00 GMT

So, on the way to oral argument this morning in U.S. v. Alvarez, I was kidnapped by a tribe of angry space aliens. They beamed me up to a ship where they forced me to perform exotic anaerobic dance routines to old Leif Garrett songs. Later, they beamed me back onto the Supreme Court Plaza, but not before stealing my Medal of Honor.*

The preceding statement was a parody. Or it wasn’t. It may or may not have been political. In any event, that last bit about the Medal of Honor could send me to jail for a year.

In 2007, Xavier Alvarez of Pomona, Calif., was elected to the board of the Three Valleys Water District. At a board meeting, Alvarez introduced himself by saying: “I’m a retired Marine of 25 years. I retired in the year 2001. Back in 1987, I was awarded the Congressional Medal of Honor. I got wounded many times by the same guy. I’m still around.” Alvarez did not just lie about being a war hero; he lied about many things. His catalog of untruths include playing hockey for the Detroit Red Wings, marrying a Mexican starlet, and rescuing an American ambassador during the Iranian hostage crisis. Xavier Alvarez isn’t just a compulsive liar. He’s a ridiculously bad one. That’s why within days of his statement at the board meeting he was discovered by community newspapers, who decried him as a “jerk,” “cretinous,” and the “ultimate slime.”

The story would have ended there were it not for a 2006 congressional law called the Stolen Valor Act. This law makes it a misdemeanor to “falsely represent … verbally or in writing, to have been awarded any decoration or medal authorized by Congress for the armed forces of the United States.” Conviction can result in a prison term of up to six months. Unless, of course, you lie about having received the Medal of Honor, which can send you to prison for a year. Charged with two counts of violating the act, Alvarez pleaded guilty, challenged the law on First Amendment grounds, and won at the 9^th Circuit Court of Appeals, which found the Stolen Valor Act violated the First Amendment because “false factual speech” isn’t a distinct class of speech (unlike, say, defamation or perjury) that gets no constitutional protection. A few months later—after the Supreme Court agreed to hear that appeal—the 10^th Circuit Court of Appeals upheld the law.

Most interesting to me is what judges think people lie about. So, for instance, amid the flurry of opinions written as the 9^th Circuit tried to decide whether to review the Stolen Valor decision as a full court came this gem from Judge Alex Kozinski:

So what, exactly, does the dissenters’ ever-truthful utopia look like? In a word: terrifying. If false factual statements are unprotected, then the government can prosecute not only the man who tells tall tales of winning the Congressional Medal of Honor, but also the JDater who falsely claims he’s Jewish or the dentist who assures you it won’t hurt a bit. Phrases such as “I’m working late tonight, hunny [sic],” “I got stuck in traffic” and “I didn’t inhale” could all be made into crimes.

In so doing, Judge Kozinski launched a weird little judicial Rorschach test one might call Lies Federal Judges Worry About. Entries fly fast and furious this morning.

Solicitor General Donald B. Verrilli Jr. represents the U.S. government, and he has the unenviable task of persuading justices—who have, in recent years, protected vile animal crush videos, violent video games, and the contemptible Phelps family—that people who lie about military medals are worse than they are. He opens by explaining that “military honors play a vital role in inculcating and sustaining the core values of our nation's armed forces” and that the Stolen Valor Act “regulates a carefully limited and narrowly drawn category of calculated factual falsehoods.”

Justice Anthony Kennedy is the first to speak up for false speech, telling Verrilli: “You think there's no value to falsity. But … I think it's a sweeping proposition to say that there's no value to falsity.” He then adds—truthfully I suspect—that “[f]alsity is a way in which we contrast what is false and what is true.”

Meanwhile, Chief Justice John Roberts is worried about protecting other types of lies: “Well, where do you stop?” he asks Verrilli. “High school diploma? It is a crime to state that you have a high school diploma if you know that you don't?” Verrilli says, “Some states do have laws respecting false claims to have received a diploma from a public university,” but Kennedy interrupts him to say, “But that’s fraud.” In this case, there is no clear harm to the victims and no clear benefit to the liars. Congress is trying to fix that very problem by amending the statute to punish only lying done "with intent to obtain anything of value."

Justice Samuel Alito worries about people telling lies about other people, as opposed to themselves. “Suppose the statute also made it a crime to represent falsely that someone else was the recipient of a military medal?” But here, Justice Antonin Scalia proves himself an absolutist: “I believe that there is no First Amendment value in falsehood,” he announces. Absolutely.

Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg then ponders whether “I deny that the Holocaust ever occurred” isn’t also a false statement of fact. And Justice Elena Kagan is worried about state statutes that “prohibit demonstrable falsehoods by political candidates.” Scalia notes in response that “even in the commercial context we allow a decent amount of lying, don't we? It's called puffing. … You won't buy it cheaper anywhere else. … So maybe we allow a certain amount of puffing in political speech as well. …. Nobody believes all that stuff, right?”

Kennedy tells Verrilli that the government’s best argument is probably a trademark argument protecting military medals, noting that “we could carve out a narrow exception for that.” He says that he hates the idea that “the government is going to have a ministry of truth and then allow breathing space around it” but observes that, “on the other hand, I have to acknowledge that this does diminish the medal in many respects.”

Then, Justice Sonia Sotomayor ups the ante with a TMI—Too Much Information. “Outside of the emotional reaction, where's the harm?” she asks. “And I'm not minimizing it. I too take offense when people make these kinds of claims, but I take offense when someone I'm dating makes a claim that's not true.” Sotomayor’s suitors are lying to her? (Or merely puffing?)

Verrilli replies, saying, “The honor system is about identifying the attributes, the essence of what we want in our service men and women—courage, sacrifice, love of country, willingness to put your life on the line for your comrades. … And for the government to say this is a really big deal and then to stand idly by when one charlatan after another makes a false claim to have won the medal does debase the value of the medal in the eyes of the soldiers.”

And so, at the halftime, we have Kennedy worrying about the truth of falsity, the chief justice fretting about academic liars, Ginsburg anxious about Holocaust deniers, Kagan worrying about lying politicians, and Sotomayor panicked about the passel of deceptive bachelors she keeps meeting on eHarmony.

It falls to Jonathan Libby, the attorney representing Alvarez, to defend the congenital liar. As he begins to speak, the chief justice stops him with this epistemological stumper: “What is the First Amendment value in a pure lie?” Libby replies, “There is the value of personal autonomy."

"The value of what?" asks Roberts.

"Personal autonomy," Libby says.

"What does that mean?" retorts Roberts.

“Well, when we create our own persona, we're often making up things about ourselves that we want people to think about us, and that can be valuable. Samuel Clemens creating Mark Twain.” Roberts says that this was for “literary purposes.” So Libby says, mysteriously, that “the fact that people tell lies allows us to appreciate truth better.”

Alito can’t take much more of this, asking, “Do you really think that there is a First Amendment value in a bald-faced lie about a purely factual statement that a person makes about himself, because that person would like to create a particular persona? Gee, I won the Medal of Honor. I was a Rhodes scholar, I won the Nobel Prize. …”

Justice Breyer: “Obvious example. Are there Jews hiding in the cellar? No.”

Chief Justice Roberts: “That’s not a statement about one's self!”

Justice Breyer: “Are you hiding Jews in the cellar?”

Kennedy and Libby tussle over whether a statute that criminalizes the wearing of false medals also implicates speech. Then Kagan asks Libby what types of truthful speech the Stolen Valor Act might chill. (Libby: None, at which point he has conceded the main argument for his side.) Breyer asks if there are less restrictive ways for the government to protect the integrity of military medals and Libby can’t quite name them. Scalia suggests maybe “giving a Medal of Shame to those who have falsely claimed to have earned the Medal of Valor?”

By the time Verrilli stands to deliver his rebuttal, Justice Kennedy wants to know whether the government can criminalize lying about college degrees and Kagan wonders whether the government can prohibit lies about extramarital affairs. Sotomayor worries about men who lie about having college degrees in order to induce young women to date them. And by the end of the morning it looks like the court may just find a way to uphold a narrow version of the law by reading into the statute all the constitutional bells and whistles that aren’t in the text. Alvarez’s attorney shouldn’t have been able to lose a case about a law that makes lying about medals a crime. Not in a country where you can constitutionally protest military funerals and burn flags. But he may well have done it anyhow.

Seriously, though. I did win the Medal of Honor.

Disclosure: I am on the boards of both the Thomas Jefferson Center for the Protection of Free Expression and the Reporters Committee for Freedom of the Press, both of whom filed amicus briefs in this case on behalf of Alvarez.

Correction, Feb. 22. 2012: The article originally referred to the Congressional Medal of Honor. The award is issued by Congress but is referred to only as the Medal of Honor.

The Massacre in Mesa: Live Thread for the 20th, and Greatest, Republican Debate

David Weigel — Thu, 23 Feb 2012 00:59:33 GMT

MESA, Ariz. - Let's get ready to argue in alotted segments of time!

Here is what you are missing by not being in the debate hall itself, or not seeing the live feed inside the debate hall: A speech from Gov. Jan Brewer, making an impassioned case for using Arizona's natural resources. "America was built on copper," she said, "and we've got uranium. And we've got forests!" I'm informed that she was referring, cagily, to the debate over exploring for energy in state-protected parks.

8:03: Newt Gingrich's haircut is jarring; it's as if his head has reduced in size as his media coverage has waned.

8:08: Santorum says his debt plan will cut spending by $5 trillion. And by all accounts, it will. By all other accounts, the tax cuts he embeds in the plan (including some cuts for non-wealthy people) keep the long-term deficit problems humming along. I'm guessing no candidate will take a whack at this, because it's not kosher to suggest that tax cuts slash revenue.

8:12: Romney's description of his own fiscal conservative record mentions the Olympics... which, of course, benefited from federal funding, and are not quite an example of private industry creating gold out of lead.

8:17: Our first "whuh-huh?" moment occurs -- surprise! -- with a Ron Paul prompt. He reiterates his ad's claim that Rick Santorum is "a fake." Santorum tugs his sleeve and says "I'm real!" There is no cut to Romney, as he processes what it might mean to be real.

8:23: What Newt Gingrich will show up tonight? Our first answer: Conciliatory Newt. Given a chance to attack Romney's new-new tax cut plan, he says Romney "moved in the right direction." His sharpest criticism of his rivals is that "Ron [Paul] and I are close on the scale of change" they want, implying that the other guys are tinkerers.

8:29: This earmark discussion is fascinating. First of all: It's a pure meta-issue. No Republican Congress will allow earmarks, anyway, and if they did, they would not adding to the size of the overall budget. Second: It only helps Romney, who luckily missed out on ever serving in Congress, and can trap his rivals in a wonderland of pure theory and rhetoric. Third: It's actually pretty good look at how earmarks work. Romney accidentally delivered a master class on how the process should play out.

8:35: The return of "nice try," the "you're such an idiot" zinger that Romney deployed in Orlando to humiliate Rick Perry.

ROUND ONE: Give it to Romney, in full-on Dismiss My Opponents as Fools mode. He successfully baited Santorum, who can not give up on an argument, into talking about earmarks for longer than any human could stand.

8:43: I should have added a "what will the audience boo?" item to the debate pre-game. But "asking about birth control" is a bit predictable.

8:49: Santorum, so very ready for this question, makes one of those steps away from the culture wars that have become more common as he's done better. "Just because I'm talking about it doesn't mean I want a government program to fix it," he says. "That's what they do." They are liberals. But... no, hang on, hasn't Rick Santorum moved when he could to fix government policy when he sees morality being threatened?

8:58: The late career success of Pat Toomey disguises the fact that he really might have lost a general election in 2004, when John Kerry was carrying Pennsylvania. Still, Santorum is right -- the Specter mistake, as many hackles as it raises in the talk radio listener, says little to nothing about Santorum's own health care politics. Compare Specter's spending record to Santorum's, and you're going somewhere.

9:09: The big takeaway from the immigration round: Romney saying Arizona "could be a model." That plays well enough in Arizona. Among Hispanic groups in other states? Well...

ROUND TWO: Hard to say. Romney set up some bear traps for the future, but Santorum's culture war walkback was his finest moment, rhetorically.

9:19: For history's sake, here are the words the candidates used to define themselves.

Ron Paul: Consistent.
Rick Santorum: Courage.
Mitt Romney: Resolute.
Newt Gingrich: Cheerful.

I have asked Buddy Roemer to complete the set.

9:25: Take note: Nobody (especially Santorum!) wants to answer this question about women in combat. A whole lot of dodging ensues.

9:27: Roemer answers: "How could I possibly outdo Newt's 'cheerful'?" A fair answer.

9:35: ThinkProgress blasts out a response to the goings-on: "ARIZONA AUDIENCE BOOS BIRTH CONTROL DURING GOP DEBATE." Not true! The audience was booing an inconvenient question, not the existence of the product at the heart of the question.

9:38: All of this discussion of the ways America must confront and not contain our enemies reminds me: What happened to the whole budget-balancing thing?

9:43: Romney misses an opportunity. Santorum gives a weak, tortured answer on why he supported No Child Left Behind. "I took one for the team," he said. It's a mile-wide target for someone to hit. And no one hits it!

The Last Debate Drinking Game Ever (Until October)

David Weigel — Thu, 23 Feb 2012 00:52:23 GMT

MESA, Ariz. -- The media presence is greately reduced. Around half of the seats are full in the tent given over to reporters covering what will may be the final debate of the GOP primary season. The occasion requires a drinking game.

If the candidates are asked about immigration, sip.
If the immigration comes from an outraged Hispanic voter in the audience, drink.
If the Hispanic voter is actually a Tea Partier who wants to seal the border, take two swigs.

Raise your glass and toast when...

- Rick Santorum asks and answers his own strawman question. (X! Why? Z!)
- An outraged Ron Paul comments on how he's getting no questions.
- Mitt Romney dismisses a question by laughing mechanically.
- Newt Gingrich uses the word "frankly," "fundamentally," "profound," or "stupid."

If Gingrich uses two of these words in one sentence, seat the tallest person at your party in a wooden chair, lift it, and dance in a circle.

Ready several drinks for the inevitable Gingrich-moderator spat. If it's about Gingrich's personal life, drink 12-year single malt scotch. If it's because he's not getting any questions, drink bourbon. If it's in defense of another candidate, drink a dry gin martini.

Don’t Burn After Reading

Brian Palmer — Wed, 22 Feb 2012 23:15:00 GMT

Violent protests have raged outside Bagram Air Force Base in Afghanistan for two days after local workers found the burned remains of more than 100 Qurans in a pile of garbage from the base. What’s the proper way to dispose of a Quran?

Bury it, erase it, or store it indefinitely. The Quran does not include instructions for its own disposal, and Mohammed never appears to have addressed the issue. Islamic scholars, however, offer several options. According to a recent essay by Jonas Svensson, a Swedish professor of Islamic studies, the most venerable method seems to be to wrap the text in cloth and store it indefinitely in a safe place. During the 1972 renovation of an ancient mosque in Yemen, workers found piles of parchment—presumably unwanted holy texts—dating to the seventh century. Similar discoveries have been made in mosques in Tunisia and Syria. Today, Muslims in some areas, such as Quetta, Pakistan, place their linen-swaddled Qurans in caves dug into the side of rock quarries.

Ritual burial is another widely accepted practice. The grave should be in a holy place, such as the grounds of a mosque or a Muslim cemetery, where the book won’t be trampled upon. As in the case of storage, the Quran should be wrapped in cloth—often linen, but there’s no requirement—to protect it from impure soil. The most fastidious scholars demand that Muslims place the book in a niche dug into the side of the grave, oriented toward Mecca.

A less common practice is to desanctify the book by removing the text from its pages. Some medieval scholars recommended wiping off the ink and disposing of the paper by ordinary means. A more modern and practical alternative is to tie the book to a stone, then drop it into a stream to symbolically achieve the same effect.

Burning isn’t a popular choice, because fire is associated with the devil as well as the early rival religion Zoroastrianism, but some scholars find it acceptable. Saudi religious authorities place burning on par with burial, as long as it’s done ritually on mosque property. They point out that Uthman ibn Affan, a friend to the prophet and early caliph, sanctioned the burning of nonconforming Qurans after compiling the official version. Other scholars view burning as a last resort, for example, in an emergency situation to prevent the book from being defiled. After burning, the ashes should be buried or scattered over water.

Quran-handling regulations extend far beyond disposal. Depending on their chosen sect, Muslims are forbidden to touch the Quran during menstruation, allow the book to touch the ground, leave it open after reading, use it as a pillow, or take it into impure places such as the bathroom. (As with any religious mandate, not all Muslims adhere to these rules, even if they acknowledge their legitimacy.) The physical text of the Quran is considered not just sacred, but also mystical and powerful. Some Muslims wear verses as amulets for protection or dissolve ink from a Quran in water and drink it to cure illnesses.

Other religions may not imbue their holy texts with quite the same degree of sanctity, but most have rituals for disposal. Many Jewish authorities require the faithful to place sacred writings into a repository to await mass ritual burial. For some, the dictum goes beyond the Torah itself to include any text containing the name of God or brief quotations from the holy book. A common disposal method in Hinduism—though it is a vast religion with widely varying rituals—is to consign the Mahabharata or other sacred text to a holy river such as the Yamuna or the Ganges after a brief prayer. Christianity is somewhat unique in that it has no long-standing rituals for disposing of worn-out holy texts. Recently, however, some Christians have adopted practices from other religions, such as a respectful burial.

Got a question about today’s news? Ask the Explainer.

Explainer thanks D. Max Moerman of Barnard College, Jonas Svensson of Linnaeus University, and James Watts of Syracuse University.

Shame on You!

Emily Bazelon — Wed, 22 Feb 2012 23:11:13 GMT

Earlier this month, New Orleans Police Superintendent Ronal Serpas brought down the wrath of civil libertarians by telling his cops to start putting plate-sized orange stickers on houses that they’d searched for drugs. The crazy thing about Serpas’ idea was that the cops wouldn’t have to make an arrest or find drugs to smack a sticker on a house—all they’d need was an anonymous tip and a quick investigation of the home. Cue the protests: The ACLU of Louisiana called the stickers a “scarlet letter tattooed onto the homes of otherwise innocent people, giving them no presumption of innocence.” When Serpas backed down last week, saying the stickers wouldn’t work without “widespread community support,” the Times-Picayune editorial page expressed relief that he’d scrapped a “dreadful idea.”

That’s right, of course: It’s easy to see how one neighbor with a beef against another could have called up Crime Stoppers in hopes of using the stickers to settle a score. It’s an idea too easily abused to have legs. And by targeting people whom the cops didn’t even have grounds to arrest, Serpas veered into netherworld territory: it sounds more like North Korea than New Orleans. But what about other forms of shaming? Is it ever acceptable or even worthwhile to use shame as a form of punishment, and if so, when?

Shaming, of course, is as old as the public stocks or the pillory. (The Crimes Act of 1790, for example, decreed that anyone convicted of perjury had to stand in the pillory for an hour.) By 1839, however, Congress had abolished the punishment, and shaming started to be seen as primitive and out of fashion, even if it was never entirely abandoned. Then in 1989, the Australian criminologist John Braithwaite came up with a theory that distinguished “stigmatic shaming,” which he argued shredded ties between offenders and society, and “reintegrative shaming,” which he said could bring the offender back into society. To me, reintegrative shaming sounds a lot like restorative justice—the attractive idea that a teenager who shoplifts, for example, should be called to account by apologizing to the storeowner and doing some form of restitution (stacking boxes, maybe).

For a while, the idea of stigmatizing culprits through shame got some play among academics. In the 1990s, Dan Kahan and Eric Posner, law professors at Yale and the University of Chicago, argued for shaming as an alternative to prison. It could be cheaper and more effective than just locking people up. Kahan and Posner floated the delectable idea of shaming nonviolent white-collar defendants—the Wall Street types who fleece their customers or companies. The insight was that shaming had a particular power—exposing the wrongdoer to the public gaze was different from hiding him behind prison walls or imposing a fine he could quietly pay. Posner and Kahan could point to examples where this type of shaming had already been tried. In Cincinnati, a corporate executive had to write an apology published in newspaper ads after his company put cancer-causing chemicals into the local groundwater. Elsewhere, a slumlord was sentenced to house arrest in one of his own rat-infested buildings. Kahan and Posner proposed that Congress should explicitly provide for such punishments, as a cheaper form of deterrence.

But then they got off the bus. Posner decided that shaming punishments weren’t reliable. Often the wrong people are targeted, he argued, or the penalty isn’t calibrated to the offense. How do you know, for example, how many years of prison the embarrassing newspaper ad or the rat-infested house arrest is worth? The uncertainty meant that shaming wasn’t actually a good deterrent. Kahan, for his part, abandoned shaming for being too partisan: Choosing these punishments means siding with people who care about community values over people who care about individual equality. When I emailed with Kahan this morning, he said he’d become less interested in shaming because the debate about it had become “nonserious ideological theater.”

That has left the academic field largely to critics of shaming like Dan Markel of Florida State University and Martha Nussbaum of the University of Chicago. They each make the distinction between guilt punishments (good) and shame punishments (bad). The idea is that guilt punishments—and here we are back to apologies and restitution—tap into the impulse behind shaming and harness it to better ends. You’re still fighting against the erosion of values that leads to social disorder and decay. But you’re not deploying humiliation to destroy someone’s dignity. Instead, you’re trying to make someone think about what they’ve done wrong, take responsibility for it, and then use that to stitch them back into society. Nussbaum argues, too, that shame focuses on a trait—branding the whole person as deviant—whereas guilt focuses on an act. It’s what you did, not who you are.

This sounds more civilized. And yet the desire to shame hasn’t gone away. Before Ronal Serpas came to New Orleans, he headed the police department in Nashville, where he championed the use of stickers—two-foot-long green ones this time—stating that a narcotics search warrant had been served. (Serpas hasn’t explained why he didn’t just take that approach again in New Orleans.) In 2004, the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit upheld an order of Judge Vaughn Walker—the gay-rights hero!—sentencing a mail thief named Shawn Gementera to “spend a day standing outside a post office wearing a signboard stating, ‘I stole mail. This is my punishment.’ ” The 9th Circuit said the sandwich-board sentence could be a form of rehabilitation that would help ensure that Gementera would “reassume his duty of obedience to the law.” In the last few years, a smattering of states have ordered up special license plates for DUI offenders. In Ohio, the plates are yellow with red numerals. In Minnesota, they start with the letter W—for whiskey. Last year, in Washington, the legislature considered marking offenders’ license plates with a Z for three years. The Washington bill seems to have quietly died for now, but the argument for such plates—besides shaming—is that other drivers will learn to recognize the telltale plates and know to take extra care. The argument against the plates is that the police may be more likely to stop former drunk drivers, even when they’re not doing anything wrong. And as Markel points out, attaching shame to property can punish people other than the offenders themselves—what about the wife of the drunk driver who has a clean record, but shares her husband’s car? Or the kid who lives in the house with the big green NARCOTICS SEARCH WARRANT sticker.

I’d also argue that shaming is all too unpredictable, uncalibrated, and hard to contain in the viral era of the Internet. Every time a perp walk is splashed across a newspaper’s web site, it becomes future Google fodder, carrying with it the seeds of bad publicity that makes the ritual very different from what it once was. The same is true for sex offender or general criminal registries that are published online—the ease of access increases their power to humiliate. You can argue that the perp walks and the registries are as much about warning and deterrence as they’re about shaming. But mostly I think we’re just too habituated to them to think much about their precise purpose. Last summer, when the French were outraged by Dominique Strauss-Kahn’s perp walk in New York City, Americans shrugged. The perp walk, and more recently the registry, have become part of the wallpaper of American criminal justice system in a way that Gementera’s sandwich board is not.

The 9th Circuit recognized the humiliating power of the Internet in another 2004 case. Arizona’s Maricopa County Sheriff Joe Arpaio—the immigration crackdown guy—installed web cams in a county jail that streamed the daily activities of pretrial detainees over the Internet. “We get people booked in for murder all the way down to prostitution,” Arpaio said. “When those johns are arrested they can wave to their wives on the camera.” The 9th Circuit, however, pointed out that the pretrial detainees hadn’t been convicted of a crime and were in jail after being arrested for a charge as minor as disorderly conduct. The court had no doubt that the web cam would do the detainees harm, calling the exposure “a level of humiliation that almost anyone would regard as profoundly undesirable.”

That’s hard to argue with. But I’d argue it also applies to making Gementera stand outside the post office with his sandwich-board. And I’m not sure the distance between pretrial detention and a conviction for mail fraud—hardly the very worst of crimes—is great enough to justify calling one kind of shaming excessive while keeping the other. Maybe the real problem here is the one that Eric Posner identified: In the end, the people whom the law shames aren’t likely to be the Wall Street fat cats. They’re just the unlucky ones.

Candidate Wars: Tucson Edition

David Weigel — Wed, 22 Feb 2012 19:17:00 GMT

TUCSON, Ariz. -- A parking lot of frustrated voters is a good petri dish for agit prop. As Rick Santorum supporters arrived, they were greeted by Ron Paul fans, who lined the sidewalk outside the Sabbar Shrine with their signs. One sported a sandwich board reading NOT HERE FOR RICK SANTORUM. Another passed out home-made shopping lists of reasons to never ever vote for Santorum.

The Paul supporters crossed a line, though: One of them held up a sign telling readers to GOOGLE RICK SANTORUM. The joke (do I have to spell it out?) is that doing so will take you on a magical mystery tour of sexual terms. Ann Doherty, a Santorum backer, showed up ready to shame them.

As Santorum gains support, you hear plenty of voters who only recently discovered him raging about what they had to look at when they researched him. "This isn't somethin you'd show your grandmother!" said Doherty.

Ash Wednesday Do’s and Don'ts

Anna Weaver — Wed, 22 Feb 2012 16:36:45 GMT

Tonight’s Republican presidential debate falls on Ash Wednesday, and Catholic candidates Rick Santorum and Newt Gingrich may appear on the debate stage with noticeable ash marks. Once you've put on ashes for Ash Wednesday, how long do you have to keep them on?

It’s up to you. Ash Wednesday is not a Holy Day of Obligation in the Catholic Church, so Catholics can choose whether to go to church and where the ashes would be placed on their foreheads. They're also permitted to make their own decisions about when and how to remove the ashes. Many Catholics leave the mark on all day but wash it off before bedtime. Ashes also tend to flake off by themselves, or get rubbed away by absentminded forehead brushings. (Services can happen at any time of day, so it's at least conceivable that Santorum and Gingrich might receive the ashes after their early-evening debate in Arizona.)

For Catholics, the ashes are considered a sign of penitence and mortality. They are rubbed in with a prayer that says, “Remember that you are dust, and to dust you shall return.” In the United States, the dark smudge is supposed to take the shape of the cross, or a smudge vaguely resembling a cross depending on the precision of the person giving you ashes, but customs vary around the world. In Europe, ashes are sprinkled on the top of a person’s head. (One consistent tradition is for Ash Wednesday ashes to come from burning last year’s Palm Sunday fronds. The ashes are often combined with oil for sticking power, and sometimes bought from religious suppliers when churches are short on palm fronds.)

Despite its being an optional observance, Ash Wednesday Masses and services are among the busiest in the Catholic Church’s liturgical year. Several mainline Protestant churches including the Episcopal, Methodist, and Lutheran churches distribute ashes as well.

Got a question about today's news? Ask the Explainer.

Explainer thanks Jesuit Father James Martin of America Magazine.

Roementum Ends: Buddy Roemer Goes Third Party

David Weigel — Wed, 22 Feb 2012 14:41:00 GMT

It was only seven short weeks ago when Charlie Pierce and I stood in the breakfast nook of the Manchester, N.H. Radisson and watched Buddy Roemer announce that his invisible presidential campaign would go on. He would skip the states with filing fees; he would concentrate on voters in Michigan.

Or maybe he wouldn't. The statement just out from Roemer world headquarters, located in an asteroid circling the planet*:

Tomorrow, I will formally end my bid for the GOP nomination for President of the United States. As the GOP and the networks host debate number twenty-something this evening, they have once again turned their backs on the democratic process by choosing to exclude a former Governor and Congressman. I have decided to take my campaign directly to the American people by declaring my candidacy for Americans Elect. Also, after many discussions with The Reform Party, I am excited to announce my intentions of seeking their nomination. It is time to heal our nation and build a coalition of Americans who are fed up with the status quo and the partisan gridlock that infects Washington. Together, we will take on the special-interests that control our leaders and end the corruptive influence of money in politics so we can focus on America’s top priority – jobs.

In some mirror universe, one with looser rules about entering televised debates, Roemer is a minor star. He nestled in to part of the Zeitgeist last year, attacking Citizens United and marching in solidarity with Occupy protesters. There surely were real human voters who wanted to hear a message like this, but they never heard Roemer. How that will change now that he's seeking a Reform Party nod, I have no idea, but I'm surprised to see that the Reform Party still exists and is in a "rebuilding stage." One of Roemer's rivals is "one of NY’s top fitness models," which isn't something you could say about the GOP field.

*Waiting for a fact check on this one.