Sunday, July 14, 2013

Stand Your Ground in Florida - Unless You're Black

A (Black) Florida Mom has just been awarded a 20-year prison sentence - yes, you read it right, 20 years - for firing warning shots at an abusive husband. This despite invoking Florida's infamous Stand-Your-Ground law which allows the victim of an ongoing crime (which can simply be feeling threatened) to immediately retaliate with lethal force in self-defense, instead of having to first attempt to run for safety and resort to violence only when all possibilities of escape have been exhausted. 

How does this square with the verdict in the Trayvon Martin case, where the guy who trailed and killed a 17 year old black kid - simply because he thought the kid wearing a hoodie was looking suspicious - was acquitted?? In the Martin case, the shooter also invoked the Stand-Your-Ground law and won! Maybe it's just a coincidence that in both cases the law's been interpreted to the detriment of black protagonists.

But it seems to me that in  Florida the stand-your-ground law applies to black people only if they're the person facing a gun not holding one.

Thursday, July 11, 2013

The New Algeria?


 I'm a fervent believer in both democracy and in keeping church and state strictly separate. In Egypt these two values were in conflict - if not war - when Morsi won the popular vote to become the country's first democratically elected President. It was soon clear that the Muslim Brotherhood leader was not going to hesitate to bring a more religious bent to the new constitution and to Egyptian public life. So a part of me cannot but be happy that Morsi is gone. Deposed by his own purblindness and an even larger popular revolt than Mubarak faced two years ago. My hope was that if religious parties again won a large vote share in the next Presidential and parliamentary elections, they would be more focused on economic development versus driving a religious agenda - taking a cue from Turkey's ruling party, the AKP.  The AKP is also mildly Islamist but took a softly-softly approach in the first ten years of being in power - since they faced an entrenched, arguably anti-democratic secular establishment (army, judiciary, elite). The AKP government had to deliver astounding growth ((Turkey's GDP per capita has tripled in nominal terms in the last ten years) before it was strong enough to enact religion-influenced laws without the danger of being over-thrown.

However, if today's New York Times article is right, and the Muslim Brotherhood is going to be banned once again - then it will put paid to the hopes of establishing a real democracy in the country. And the fact that the power cuts and gas shortages disappeared almost as soon as Morsi fell, leads me to believe that the army/secular establishment was hard at work behind the scenes to artificially create conditions that would bring a cross-section of people out into the streets. The people of Egypt have been had, I think.

A democracy that excludes the main Islamist party from public life will by definition be truncated. The coup has established a year as the time within which a government must deliver tangible improvements to be judged worthy of staying in office. And when the new government fails to deliver significant improvements - (as is likely - who can turn around a country battered by 60 years of despotism amidst a slow-growing world economy in 365 days?) - it will also lose legitimacy.

Real democracy requires allowing the Muslim Brotherhood an unfettered right to win elections (if they can), form a government and fail to deliver on the mundane things - over 4-5 years - that ultimately all governments are judged on, by voters the second time around. That would be the best way to demystify and defang the Islamist parties. Otherwise, what the Egyptians liberals will be left with, is another frozen peace - where they have social freedoms but no real political freedoms. Or if they're unlucky, they'll face an internecine conflict with the disenfranchised Islamists, a la Algeria.

No Egyptian should want that.

The Evisceration of DOMA and why It's Important

I was lucky enough to be in Washington DC on 24th June 2013 and in front of the US Supreme Court building at 10:00 when it annouced two momentous decisions - one legalizing gay marriage in California and the other repealing a key provision of the discriminatory law, with the Orwellian name - Defense of Marriage Act (DOMA). Here's my description of the scenes outside the SCOTUS building and how the DOMA decision impacts gay rights in the US and beyond.

Take a gander.