Being an election year, it seems as good a time as any to reflect a bit on citizenship and civility. I plan to read several books along those lines between now and November, and I'll share some thoughts along the way. One of the ones I'm most looking forward to digging into is Uncommon Decency by Richard Mouw. I've heard great things about it, and I wonder how it compares to Miroslav Volf's A Public Faith, which I reflected on earlier this year. I might also re-read The Case for Civility by Os Guinness as well as unSpun by some of the folks behind FactCheck.org -- an essential resource for making sense of "creative" campaign rhetoric.

In the meantime, I want to share a wonderful couple of paragraphs by Marilyn Chandler McEntyre, from her book Caring for Words in a Culture of Lies (Eerdmans). It's not a book about politics, per se, but it's packed full of lessons that would serve us well in our political engagement for sure. In this excerpt she introduces a series of really good questions:

Any effort to find reliable reporting needs to start not with questions about the sources but with questions about ourselves. What are my responsibilities as a citizen? As a person of faith? As a consumer? As a leader? As a parent? As an educator? What am I avoiding knowing? Why? What point of view am I protecting? Why? How have I arrived at my assumptions about what sources of information to rely on? What limits my angle of vision? Have I tried to imagine how one might arrive at a different conclusion? How much evidence do I need to be convinced? What kind of persuasion works most effectively for me? How do I accredit or challenge authority?

The answers to these questions are not simply personal. Some of them involve serious theological reflection on the relationship between the Kingdom of God and the state, what it means to give Caesar what is Caesar’s and God what is God’s, and whether and how to participate in the conduct of worldly affairs. If you’re Mennonite or Amish, that boundary is drawn pretty clearly. But most of us, I think, are navigating the murky middle ground marked out between not-so-separate church and state, trying to resist manipulation, seek truth, and act on it justly in the ways that remain open to us. (pp. 59-60)

What have you found to be helpful in discerning how to be civil in the public square while being a good steward of one's citizenship?

[Photo credit: isoc.com]

TIME’s cover recently featured a collage of Latino faces (and a Norwegian-Chinese-Irish one; oops), along with the words: Yo Decido. The cover story, written by Michael Scherer, is “Why Latinos will pick the next President.” He looks at national politics, but focuses his writing on things here in Phoenix. Simply put, Latinos are changing not only this state, but also the face of the country, and they will change its politics. Currently about one sixth of the total population, by 2050 one in three in the U.S. will be Latino. That’s a big piece of the pie.

But Obama, who won in 2008 with two-thirds of the Latino vote, failed to deliver on promises to pass immigration reform during his first year in office, and instead stepped up deportations like never before. The Republicans, meanwhile, are going to great lengths to outdo each other in anti-immigrant rhetoric (without much interest in differentiating between those with documents or without) that sees immigration as a simple problem with simple, if costly and/or strange, solutions. The most creative solution proposed by a one-time leading candidate entailed an electric fence at the border, guarded by alligators; he later called it “a joke.”

While Latinos are not a homogeneous voting bloc, they tend to be young and socially conservative. And immigration is far from the only issue on the table. Latinos have suffered disproportionately during the recession, and while the national unemployment rate holds steady at 8.3% -- happily a three-year low -- unemployment remains above 10% among Latinos. The economy matters a lot to all of us this time around, but even more so to Latinos.

Rev. Samuel Rodriguez, president of the National Hispanic Christian Leadership Conference, says in the TIME story, “We really look like Republicans on paper, but they don’t want us. The Democrats don’t look like us on paper, but they really want us.”

I blogged about this strange phenomenon last month, quoting Jeb Bush and Marco Rubio as Republicans who seem to get it and are pleading with their party to stop being so irresponsible and foolish. A little respect would go a long way. Sensible policies wouldn’t hurt either.

Though the cover story itself is unfortunately by subscription-only on TIME’s website, they do offer a photo essay with faces and quotes from different Latino voters here, and there’s another photo essay on being Latino in Arizona here. Finally, it’s interesting to note that while Mitt Romney won big in Arizona’s primary, and while he has said he favors “self-deportation” for undocumented immigrants, 63% of Republican voters in this state disagreed (36% thought they should be able to apply for citizenship, and 27% thought they should be allowed to stay as temporary workers). If the numbers are that high in Arizona, they’re certainly higher elsewhere, and if he becomes the nominee he’ll have no choice in the fall but to find a more moderate position. But by then, will he be able to rebuild the bridges he and others in his party have burned?

I'll have more to say in future posts about civility and citizenship, two themes more timely than ever, but I'll leave it there for now.

If you're Latino, what do you plan to do in November?  Has any party or candidate won your vote? What do you wish politicians, or any non-Latinos for that matter, understood?

The 2010 US census had some  important things to teach us about our country’s Latino/Hispanic population. Basically, it’s growing, and it’s growing fast:

[T]he Hispanic population increased by 15.2 million between 2000 and 2010 and accounted for more than half of the total U.S. population increase of 27.3 million. Between 2000 and 2010, the Hispanic population grew by 43 percent, or four times the nation's 9.7 percent growth rate.

And no, they’re not primarily entering the country illegally:

Analysts [of the census] seized on data showing that the growth was propelled by a surge in births in the U.S., rather than immigration, pointing to a growing generational shift in which Hispanics continue to gain political clout and, by 2050, could make up a third of the U.S. population.

While the Latino population in the US is largely Catholic and evangelical and tends to be politically conservative on social issues, in 2008 Latinos voted for Obama by a two to one margin.

The GOP really needs the Latino vote if it is going to win in November (and beyond), though you wouldn’t know it by listening to the party’s presidential hopefuls. None of the candidates have done much to woo Latinos; instead their extreme rhetoric, particularly on immigration, has only served to further ostracize the Latino electorate. Romney won the Florida primary with strong Latino support, but should he be the party’s nominee in the fall, that victory might not mean much -- the political motivations of Florida’s large (and highly influential) Cuban-American population is hardly representative of the US Latino population as a whole, especially in key swing states like Colorado, Nevada, New Mexico and Arizona.

Fortunately (both for the GOP and for the sake of civility in the public square), there are Republicans who recognize the problem and are urging their colleagues to stop making matters worse. In an op-ed for the Washington Post (which I shared on January 27), former Florida governor Jeb Bush wrote:

[W]e need to think of immigration reform as an economic issue, not just a border security issue. Numerous polls show that Hispanics agree with Republicans on the necessity of a secure border and enforceable and fair immigration laws to reduce illegal immigration and strengthen legal immigration. Hispanics recognize that Democrats have failed to deliver on immigration reform, having chosen to spend their political capital on other priorities. Republicans should reengage on this issue and reframe it.

A second Florida Republican has spoken up as well. It's up-and-coming Senator Marco Rubio, a Cuban-American with strong support from his own demographic, but who also understands the broader issues impacting the country’s Latinos (and there's been speculation that he could be a GOP running mate in November).

During his keynote address at the Hispanic Leadership Network’s conference in Miami just days before the Florida primary, Rubio was interrupted by DREAM Act supporters who had come in protest. Here’s the video of the speech, including the disruption and repeated pleas from Rubio for the protesters to be allowed to stay, followed by what I think is one of the most sensible articulations of the need for immigration reform I’ve heard from a Republican. I can’t say I vouch for Rubio on everything, but I do respect him for this:

[Photo credit: buschap/Flickr (Creative Commons) via SCPR.org]

For twenty years, a political philosopher named Michael Sandel has taught a course at Harvard simply called “Justice.” It’s been so wildly popular that it became the first Harvard course to be aired on public television and available for free online. I just read the bestseller he wrote, Justice: What’s the Right Thing To Do?, which takes some of the key themes of the course and, presumably, puts the proverbial cookies on a shelf low enough for folks like me to reach them.

Drawing on philosophers both ancient and modern, he wrestles through real life dilemmas that happen all around us, and shows that there are three main ways of thinking about justice: justice as maximizing welfare, justice as respecting freedom, and justice as promoting virtue. We hold our views, in many cases, with unexamined and unarticulated assumptions, which goes a long way in explaining why political and social debates often turn so nasty, even among people who generally like each other.

Of today’s most divisive issues, Sandel says: “Lying just beneath the surface, with passions raging on all sides, are big questions of moral philosophy, big questions of justice. But we too rarely articulate and defend and argue about those big moral questions in our politics.”

Sandel says that most political discourse -- in mass media especially -- pits the welfare camp against the freedom camp. You probably know with which of the two camps you generally align. But he proposes a version of the third view of justice, that of promoting virtue. I won’t go into detail explaining what he means by that; you’ll need to read the book. Or better yet, take the course!

Here Sandel introduces some of the themes he covers in the book, using a fascinating golf quandary as his case study.

I’m not sure how I missed it, but a month ago the US Treasury Department issued new guidelines on travel to Cuba. These long-overdue changes will ease restrictions on: (1) religious travel, (2) academic travel, (3) people-to-people travel and (4) journalist travel. The Latin American Working Group explains how the changes apply to each of these four types here.

I worked with Cuban refugees in Lancaster a few years ago, and having familiarized myself somewhat with US policy towards Cuba, I've found the logic behind it quite puzzling. In my opinion, these new travel guidelines are pretty sensible (unlike the travel ban), and hopefully we’ll see even more changes made in the near future.

To be clear, I’m no fan of the Castros and their regime; they abuse human rights, silence the press, stifle economic opportunity (with recent small exceptions), and generally I think they’ve done their country a tremendous disservice all these years. But the US embargo against Cuba and its people hasn’t helped matters either, and I'm glad for these small steps in the right direction.

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