It seemed somehow fitting that the landslide school referenda in Shelby County towns and Chick-fil-A appreciation day happened in a 24-hour news cycle.
They both were about the power of fear, bias, and stereotypes to drive action by a large segment of people these days.
None of this was unexpected of course. It was pretty obvious that sanctimony, intolerance, pharisaism, and feelings of superiority would carry the day. Both also shared lapses in logic and convenient rationalizations based on cherry-picked information that validate their demonizing of people different from them.
The Chick-fil-A anti-gay marriage demonstration had the clearest disconnect since it was said to be rooted in “Christian beliefs” and gave hyper-right wing people an opportunity to once again to play the victims. As usual, these people dependably summoned up Bible verses to support their bigotry and to suggest that Christians (when they say it, they only mean conservative ones, not people in mainstream Protestant denominations) are somehow under siege.
Playing the Victim
It’s a staple of these skirmishes in our culture wars that the Sharia Christians forget that Americans are arguably the most religious people in human history and live in a nation where Christians account for 78.4% of all Americans. This of course means that now that a majority of Americans support gay marriage, a large number of Christians (notably Catholics – 52-37% and white mainline Protestants – 54-34%) are on the other side of the Chick-fil-A’ters.
Interestingly, despite the venom and vitriol in the attacks by these hyper-conservative Christians, most LGBT people are in fact Christians, not animists worshiping plants and rocks in the forest.
Frankly, we don’t care what the CEO of the company believes (or imagines that he cares that we won’t ever eat there again). We have a friend who describes it this way: “People like the CEO use the OId Testament to judge everyone else but always want to use the New Testament when it comes to themselves.”
Maybe it wasn’t precisely hate that drove people to show up for their chicken strips (or at the polls in the towns), but it certainly wasn’t to follow the mandate of one of the main commandments: love your neighbor.
Selective Reading
It’s a decidedly curious form of Christianity since the states with the strongest Religious Right tendencies also are the ones with the poorer health care, higher poverty, lower educational attainment, and the most frayed social nets. There seems to be no part of America more Darwinian than the believers of this brand of Christianity.
Whether the poultry provocateurs last week were not motivated strictly speaking by hate, they certainly were not motivated by love and a large group of people – our gay friends, family members, and neighbors – definitely felt hated and despised. If patriotism is the last refuge of a scoundrel, the ultimate scoundrel is the patriot wielding a Bible to beat up other Americans.
We have a friend who says that he has no problem with civil unions but just can’t support gay marriage, but for us, if this decision is based strictly about protecting the sanctity of marriage, we’re thinking that it’s the heterosexuals who should be limited to civil unions, because, God knows, no one has done more damage to marriage.
Theology of Tolerance
Two of our favorite local theologians, Idlewild Presyterian’s Steve Montgomery and Temple Israel’s Micah Greenstein sum it well. Rev. Montgomery: “And so we turn to scripture for guidance. That sounds easy, doesn’t it? And for some it is easy. Take the five or six verses in a cursory reading of the entire Bible that seem to speak to homosexuality and one could conclude that it condemns homosexuality unequivocally. End of discussion. But it is a mistake to look to the Bible to close a discussion; the Bible seeks to open one. You see, the Bible is violated whenever it is used as a catalogue of proof texts to support my own prejudice. Everybody knows, I assume, that there are passages of scripture which can be, and often have been, used in support of slavery, of brutal war, of women keeping their heads covered and their mouths shut in church. Now, it is no more legitimate to pick and choose those passages of scripture which seem to point to an anti-homosexual bias than it is to pick and choose those passages which seem to support an anti-woman or pro-slavery bias.”
Rabbi Greenstein said: “After all, isn’t this what the faith of Jesus and all good religions teach? Isn’t this the meaning of the prophet’s plea: ‘Have we not all one Father? Hath not one God created us? Why then do some deal treacherously every man against his brother?’ Whether gay or straight, black or white, Jew or Gentile, all are children of God, created in the divine image. That is why I subscribe to Jesus the Jew’s central idea – not Jesus the Baptist – but Jesus the Jew’s central idea to love one another, especially those different than me. The shameful demonization of people who happen to be gay or lesbian underscores what must happen now. We must all take a stand for non-discrimination and basic human dignity in the public square or be labeled a pious fraud. People of all faiths need to remember that we forfeit the right to worship God whenever we denigrate the image of God in other human beings.”
Separate but Equal
The same sort of rejection of people who are different took place the day after the Chick-Fil-A anti-gayathon when the referenda in the six small towns in Shelby County saw an overwhelming vote in favor of their separate but equal school districts. More to the point, it was a vote in favor of a diminished view of what we can become as a united community.
Back in January, speaking about the Transition Planning Commission and its mission to develop a plan for a unified district, Germantown Mayor Sharon Goldsworthy said she was looking for “hopefully a very rational, reasonable group of people figuring out how to do this and hopefully they would be receptive to all sorts of creative ideas about how schools might advance in Shelby County.”
The Transition Planning Commission has now issued its final, impressive report, and it surpassed any of Mayor Goldsworthy’s hopes for it. Not that it mattered, since the mayors of the towns weren’t really keeping an open mind at all. They already had made up their minds, and they never practiced what they preached.
That same reasonableness that the mayor urged for others never applied to the suburban school advocates themselves, as the towns rushed headlong toward a future of municipal districts with a lot of talk about excellent schools but without a real academic analysis or detailed plan.
Now For the Hard Part
Collierville Mayor Stan Joyner repeatedly said that his town wanted to “get education right” but his rhetoric has been more about politics than academic performance, teacher excellence, classroom size, and other dominant issues affecting student success. From the beginning, the mayors were all about driving the results to a preordained conclusion, and as a result, the emphasis was on getting out the vote instead of getting out all the information and creating an informed electorate.
The town mayors have insisted that smaller districts are better and have cited 6,000 as the best size of all. Of course, the newfound obsession with district size never surfaced while they were part of the 50,000-student county school district, but came into full bloom, replete with code words about Memphis schools and students and Memphis itself.
But under the heading of “be careful what you wish for,” the county towns are about to learn what it’s like to pay their own way after a history of their schools being paid for by county government. After decades of justifications for why Memphians should pay twice for schools, town taxpayers are about to find out what that feels like.
Like City of Memphis before them, they will now struggle to find the money to continue investment in parks, theaters, and athletic clubs. In the future, it will be the schools that drive the towns’ budgets and eclipse all other priorities if the municipal districts are truly to be in the league with the high-quality ones visited by town officials when they were looking for what their district should aspire to be.
The towns do not have an actual plan to reach those standards and pressed to deliver on the unrealistic promises about taxes, they are trapped between the best the schools could be and the amount of taxes that their constituents are willing to accept. In this way, the biggest education in the towns won’t take place in their new school districts, but in the towns themselves and their elected officials who have now won their political battle but face a severe learning curve to produce what they said they could.
SCM,
Your disdain for suburban residents is truly remarkable. You really believe that 87% of Germantown residents were fooled by their Mayor and/or enthralled by their own prejudices?
The breaks in your logic are remarkable in their own right. Here are just a few.
You ridicule the suburbs for claiming smaller is better when they were willing members of a 50,000 student district. You ignore the exponential differences between 50k and the proposed 150k. More importantly, you ignore the fact that suburban leaders were never asked to consider whether or not 50,000 students is too large to thrive (it is). Is it equally appropriate to ridicule Memphis residents for waiting for a charter surrender before talking about reinventing education, squeezing out operational costs, or developing a world class system? Why did we need to dissolve MCS in order to close underutilized schools, outsource custodial services, or aspire to double AP participation? When faced with a dramatic change, citizens and their leaders are both forced to identify alternatives and evaluate the best path forward.
You accuse the suburbs of blindly pursuing a pre-ordained conclusion. In one sense this is correct. The ‘burbs immediately concluded for myriad reasons they would prefer not to receive their educational services from a mammoth central office on Avery. (By the way, the race of the students is provably not one of those reasons – see Collierville, Arlington, and Lakeland votes.) Meanwhile, the TPC concluded it was beyond their scope to contemplate any structure other than a single, unified district. There has been NO honest discussion on the Memphis side as to whether or not smaller really is better. Your definition of close-minded seems to mean people who don’t agree with your position.
You continue to assert that we do not have a plan. Our citizens have been told that we will start by replicating the academic programs and services currently delivered by SCS and adjust from there. (By the way, the TPC has promised us larger class sizes in the burbs immediately upon consolidation. So much for nothing will change.) We have a detailed, account by account draft budget outlining the expenditures required to meet this plan. None of the cost critics, including you and Commissioner Ritz, has ever pointed to a budget line and said “This amount should be xx instead of yy.” You just “know” we’re wrong.
I doubt you even begin to recognize this logic break. You say it will take a lot more money “..if the municipal districts are truly to be in the league with the high-quality ones visited by town officials..” Does this mean that you don’t even aspire to have the consolidated district deliver “high-quality” education? The suburbs have overwhelmingly concluded that if we want any options at all in the quality of public education in our communities that we must have independent school districts.
Nice use of “separate but equal” to prejudice your point. Sounds a lot more sinister than “municipal” school districts.
Hey Ken, any word on whether we’re at last going to be able to get the demographics right at Germantown High School so we can get all the parents who pull their kids out of public schools after they get out of Germantown Elementary and Riverdale and switch to private schools to stay in the system?
Remember the campaign of “more Germantown kids at GHS” when SCS reran the attendance boundaries between GHS and HHS about, oh, 5 years ago?
The irony of the municipal school vote is that the municipalities’ contribution to education will show Memphis at $0 and the 6 dwarfs at $xxx, a reversal of the tax burden; and the small municipalities will continue to help fund the unified Shelby (i.e. Memphis) school district . Does DeSoto County have capacity for more students without raising taxes? Everybody’s screwed now.
Ken: mix up another batch of that Kool-aid, will you? There’s no reason to poke holes in the convenient logic of your justifications, and I’m sure you’d still try to tell us that race had nothing to do with all this as well.
So about 32% of the registered voters managed to cast ballots supporting? Congratulations. Now 100% have to pay for it. We’ll see how quickly the buyer’s remorse sets in.
As much as an anonymous poster can say, here is my attempt at a legitimate question.First SCM I wanted to say that I enjoy your blog. You are consistent, vocal and passionate about your position.
That said, I have have always been amazed as why you care so much that the towns want their own school system. Are you hateful? Do you hate that folks with money disengage from the problems of the city to seek what they think is the best alternative for their family. As an outside observe I think you are, I can think of no logical reason why you post, week after week about a group of people that just want to do what they think is best for their kids.
Different anon. I was a no vote. I was a no not because i have a problem with municipal schools; they aren’t that unique in the world. I think the thing was sold on fear; I’m not saying fear of racism, but fear of Memphis people running the new district, fear that kids would be bused or that something would change for the worse. I went to meetings and I saw it first hand. Most of these fears are without merit. Because it was sold on fear, the fact that there was no plan, no answers to major questions, rosy assumptions used without question, is not surprising I guess. But that was my problem – there was no plan. I was asked to vote for a school system and a tax increase to pay for it on faith. Faith that the new system will be as good as the county schools (not a real high bar, by the way). Faith that the costs won’t be higher than the rosy estimates to date. Faith they can get the buildings for nothing, faith they can find a qualified person to run the system, etc. Real conservatives don’t vote for the creation of new government programs on faith. To answer Hoover’s point above, promises aren’t a plan. I know of no government program that has ever cost what it was initially projected to cost, and voting for the creation of this program with as little information as we have was in my view shortsighted.
Anonymous: 10:11:
We guess we’re passionate because the writer of this particular post grew up in one of these towns, and like a former smoker, perhaps the passion springs from too much understanding of the problem. Race is a constant theme for decisions – whether it’s schools, governance, etc. – and the pretense that it’s not puts a pretty face on the ugly part of suburban growth and results in these towns’ sense of superiority and the notion that somehow they exist because of their own brilliance rather than because they are orbiting around Memphis.
What was at play in the recent vote, in our opinion, wasn’t about academic as much as it was about fear and stereotyping, and that’s why we get passionate on this subject.
We have written several times that living in one of the small towns in Shelby County is not an invalid choice. Whatever drives someone to live where they live is valid to them. But in trying to paper over the racial motivations keeps us from staring straight into an issue that all of us should care about – the future of Memphis, because with that future goes these towns.
There are regions where the ‘burbs and the major city work together, share the same goals, and pursue the same ambitions. We contend, as we have written, that the attempts at regional thinking have been driven by City of Memphis and there has been little to no reciprocation. In this way, the towns’ leaders cut off their noses to spite their faces.
As for the problems of the city being the motivator, remember that Memphis metro has the highest rate of poverty and crime because the suburbs have anomalous high rates in both. The problems of Memphis are the problems of the suburbs, not just philosophically, but in a very real way when compared to comparable towns.
@ SmartCity
Keep speaking the truth! I suspect that what will happen is that in the long run, the private schools will benefit from all of this just as they did during the last round of ‘white flight’ in the 70’s. Especially since I suspect that some of the small cities – particularly Bartlett and Millington – will not be able to maintain the levels of performance they expect.
The suburbanites don’t seem to understand that they benefit from the city and not the other way around. Without a Memphis, there would be no Germantown, Bartlett or Collierville as we know them today. But now the free ride is over and they will now learn the hard way.
As for the big question about race, then there is no question that is certainly a major part of it. Just ask yourselves: why are other (whiter) cities like Nashville able to consolidate without much of a debate, while in Memphis it brings up all types of irrational fears? For years, we in the Memphis area witnessed, otherwise small gov’t conservatives pushing for waste and double gov’t!