Linda Lowen at About.com: Women's Issues has done an excellent job of covering the controversy surrounding CBS' decision to air an anti-abortion ad during the Super Bowl. Such an excellent job, in fact, that I'm not going to write a blog entry summarizing my views on the matter--because she already put it better than I would have.

But there are some fallacies floating around the blogosphere, re the ad's civil liberties implications, that need to be dealt with:

1. Contrary to what you may have heard, the ad has nothing to do with the First Amendment. CBS is a private corporation; constitutional free speech guarantees restrict government behavior, not private-sector behavior; ergo, CBS has a First Amendment right to air or not air any ad its managers decide to air or not air, without government interference. We went over this two years ago when CBS made another controversial decision (one that I agreed with) to terminate Don Imus' contract over racially inflammatory remarks he made on-air.
2. Contrary to what you may have heard, the ad is not a useful way to "start a national dialogue." Responses to the (highly misleading) ad will not air during the Super Bowl, and will be left largely unchallenged in venues that viewers are likely to actually see.
3. Contrary to what you may have heard, this does not reflect a meaningful policy change on the part of CBS. They chose to air a specific advocacy ad from a specific group, after "working closely" with the group for months on end, without announcing to other groups that the advocacy policy would be changed, giving Focus on the Family a monopoly on 2010 Super Bowl advocacy advertising. Make no mistake: by its actions, CBS is implicitly allying itself with Focus on the Family, an organization noted for its attacks on lesbians and gay men, among others.

Related: Top 10 Anti-Abortion Myths

You know, I'm not sure where I personally stand on Citizens United v. Federal Election Commission.

The louder liberal responses to the ruling have been fatalistic and unhinged, and neither terribly helpful nor terribly intellectually honest. From Greg Palast's bizarre xenophobic rant about how the ruling will produce Chinese-funded "Manchurian candidates" (isn't that clever?) to Bob Fitrakis and Harvey Westerman's characterization of the ACLU (which tends to oppose campaign finance laws for First Amendment reasons) as "a conservative political organization, working to arm the ultimate enemies of democracy with unlimited monetary and political power," the more orthodox left-wing commentators seem to be trying to start their own version of the Tea Party movement.

I know the ruling is supposed to be about corporate personhood, but the majority opinion is not directly about the question of whether the First Amendment protects corporations. The First Amendment has protected corporations for as long as there has been a First Amendment; among the first beneficiaries of the right to the freedom of speech were newspapers, political organizations, and other such corporations. That's not really a controversial position. The issue at stake is the very narrow issue of whether, and to what degree, the First Amendment prevents the FEC from restricting what the people who manage corporations may use corporate funds to say. This ruling does not conclusively resolve the corporate personhood question; it just grants corporations more power to intervene in elections.

And that's the part where I tend to agree with the liberal side of the issue, not because corporations have too much money but because there is too much opportunity for people to shield donations behind corporations--and to spend other people's money in a manner they would not find acceptable. This, and the fact that the ruling just isn't constructed very well, is what makes it a bad ruling from my vantage point--not the fact that it holds campaign finance laws to strict First Amendment standards.

But if the problem with unregulated corporate interference in elections is secrecy and misuse of resources, transparency and accountability make more effective remedies than prior restraint. I like Erin Miller's suggestion:

... [F]ederal legislation should, at a minimum, build on the disclosure and disclaimer requirements that the Court upheld by an 8-1 vote in Citizens United, requirements specifying that electioneering communications funded by anyone other than the candidate must disclose who is "responsible for the content of this advertising" and must display on screen "in a clearly readable manner" for at least four seconds the name and address or website of whoever funded the communication ... Among other things, the impact of a campaign ad, whether in the form of a thirty-second spot or an extended production, would be cut down to size if it had to be (accurately) presented as a self-interested attempt by big pharma or by a cigarette or oil company or a bank holding company or hedge fund to influence the outcome of a candidate election for the benefit of the sponsoring company's bottom line rather than masquerading behind a veil of public-spiritedness.

This kind of disclosure requirement could be buttressed by the creation of a federal cause of action for corporate waste ... [I]t could provide better deterrence by imposing individual liability for the corporate officers authorizing the improper political expenditure. And the "business judgment" rule making such cases notoriously difficult to bring under state law could be replaced with a rule less deferential to management and more focused on the existence of a convincing justification for using general treasury funds as such rather than relying entirely on PAC funds contributed by people with politics in mind.

Liberals need to be pushing for specific, constructive reform that achieves the intended objectives--not flailing around declaring democracy dead, attacking the ACLU, revising the First Amendment, and misrepresenting the content of the ruling.

Related: The First Amendment

Civil liberties and human rights are usually framed in adversarial terms. Governments or other specific powerful entities oppress you and deny you your civil liberties or human rights, you get angry, you organize to reclaim them. Good thing to do. It's what I'm about, in my best moments (and there aren't necessarily all that many of those), and it's what this site is about.

But Tuesday's earthquake in Haiti reminds me that when people hurt each other, when they oppress each other, they're instruments of a deeper, blinder oppression that lies at the root of who we are as a species. W.H. Auden writes of this in my favorite of his poems, "September 1, 1939":

I and the public know
What all schoolchildren learn,
Those to whom evil is done
Do evil in return ...

Into this neutral air
Where blind skyscrapers use
Their full height to proclaim
The strength of Collective Man,
Each language pours its vain
Competitive excuse:
But who can live for long
In an euphoric dream;
Out of the mirror they stare,
Imperialism's face
And the international wrong.

Faces along the bar
Cling to their average day:
The lights must never go out,
The music must always play,
All the conventions conspire
To make this fort assume
The furniture of home;
Lest we should see where we are,
Lost in a haunted wood,
Children afraid of the night
Who have never been happy or good ...

All I have is a voice
To undo the folded lie,
The romantic lie in the brain
Of the sensual man-in-the-street
And the lie of Authority
Whose buildings grope the sky:
There is no such thing as the State
And no one exists alone;
Hunger allows no choice
To the citizen or the police;
We must love one another or die.

There is the idea in civil liberties and human rights that governments are something new, something sacred, when revolutions pour out with molasses and oppression grows from the dirt with cotton. We act like governments aren't part of the system of cause and effect, like they come from nowhere, like the drives and impulses that make us human aren't, at their core, about the physical world, about our own chemistry, about material necessities and hard-wired pleasures. We make specific people out to be monsters so the universe looks a little less monstrous, so that we look a little less monstrous; and we make specific people out to be our leaders, so that the things that happen under our watch are no longer our responsibility.

Pat Robertson made my blood boil last week with his comments about Haiti. But you know, that's a nice distraction from the fact that Haitian poverty, and subsequent limitations imposed on architecture, housing, and emergency services, made a 7.0 earthquake the Western hemisphere's answer to the 2004 Tsunami. By saying that Haiti purchased a curse, Pat Robertson reinforced his irrelevance. But by treating Haiti as if it were cursed, we as Americans have reinforced our own. The popularity of Pat Robertson's disgusting, nihilistic theology disgusts us because it shows us the values that our international economy all too often reflects, and the nihilism he shows us is a nihilism we tolerate every time we pretend that the casualties of these disasters are not preventable casualties, that this is just the way the world works.

As Martin Luther King Jr. said from the pulpit of New York City's Riverside Church in April 1967:

A true revolution of values will soon cause us to question the fairness and justice of many of our past and present policies. On the one hand, we are called to play the Good Samaritan on life's roadside, but that will be only an initial act. One day we must come to see that the whole Jericho Road must be transformed so that men and women will not be constantly beaten and robbed as they make their journey on life's highway. True compassion is more than flinging a coin to a beggar. It comes to see that an edifice which produces beggars needs restructuring.

The words of Martin Luther King Jr., which I first quoted here in a blog entry three years ago, stand as an antithesis to Pat Robertson's fatalism--and our own:

Let us be dissatisfied until the tragic walls that separate the outer city of wealth and comfort and the inner city of poverty and despair shall be crushed by the battering rams of the forces of justice.

Let us be dissatisfied until those that live on the outskirts of hope are brought into the metropolis of daily security.

Let us be dissatisfied until slums are cast into the junk heaps of history, and every family is living in a decent sanitary home.

Let us be dissatisfied until the dark yesterdays of segregated schools will be transformed into bright tomorrows of quality, integrated education.

Let us be dissatisfied until integration is not seen as a problem but as an opportunity to participate in the beauty of diversity.

Let us be dissatisfied until men and women ... will be judged on the basis of the content of their character and not on the basis of the color of their skin.

Let us be dissatisfied.

Let us be dissatisfied until every state capitol houses a governor who will do justly, who will love mercy and who will walk humbly with his God.

Let us be dissatisfied until from every city hall, justice will roll down like waters and righteousness like a mighty stream.

Let us be dissatisfied until that day when the lion and the lamb shall lie down together ... and none shall be afraid.

As we condemn Pat Robertson, let us not rest comfortably in the false belief that his words bear no relation to our actions and the actions of our leaders, who are ultimately accountable to us. Let us see his words, these actions, as a challenge to be overcome. Let us be dissatisfied.

Take Action: Donate to Save Lives in Haiti

Perry v. Schwarzenegger, the lawsuit to overturn California's discriminatory Proposition 8 ban on same-sex marriage, is underway. While the Supreme Court has decided not to allow the trial to be videotaped, it is being liveblogged by the Courage Campaign.

The transcripts are kind of raw--visibly paraphrased notes--but they cover the gist of the discussion. Here's a sample, from this morning's exchange between the defense attorney representing the anti-gay amendment ("Prop. 8.") and an expert witness, sociologist Michael Lamb ("L."). The attorney is citing research from the 1970s that calls into question the efficacy of single parents, same-sex couples, and other nontraditional family structures:

L: Testified earlier that finding has not held up in subsequent research.

Prop. 8: So science was wrong?

L: Science is a cumulative process in which studies grow and develop. Both mothers and fathers can play different roles when children are being raised by heterosexual parents when both are deeply involved in raising children. Often qualitative differences in ways in which mothers interact with children, but those differences in and of themselves do not affect children’s’ adjustment.

Prop. 8: It is disturbing that role of fathers has diminished in 20th century.

L: You have done a great job of refreshing my memory of very old documents. I hope you have in some of these other tabs my more up to date research (Laughter).

L: Some findings have held up that boys do better with fathers and some don’t.

You get the idea.

The Courage Campaign has compared the exchange to the Scopes Monkey Trial, and I can't entirely disagree. Much like the plaintiffs in that case, Proposition 8's defenders are using a mix of religion and old science in an attempt to rebut an equality ethic and new science--and, frankly, they're doing such a terrible job that it's easy to understand why they didn't want the proceedings videotaped. Some of this stuff, like the "So science was wrong?" line, seems tailor-made to go viral on YouTube.

Related: History of the Gay Rights Movement