No Cooties Bus Lines

Some Israeli women are suing to eliminate gender-segregated bus routes in Israel. "Modesty buses," in which men ride at the front and women ride at the back, provide transportation on about 60 routes throughout the country.

Although those sixty are only a tiny fraction of the thousands of bus routes in Israel, many of them are in Jerusalem, and many of them offend and inconvenience riders--especially female riders. Those riders particularly resent that the buses are state-subsidized. They say, rightly, that while ultra-Orthodox Jews have the right to ride on segregated buses, they don't have the right to force all Israelis--many of whom are non-Orthodox, some of are non-Jewish--to pay for their own segregation.

Some apologists for the bus lines try to say that this is good segregation, not bad segregation. Shlomo Rosenstein, a Jerusalem city councillor, wants us to believe that "this really is about positive discrimination, in women's favor" because "our religion says there should be no public contact between men and women [and therefore] this modesty barrier must not be broken."

That's not a very good explanation. I'm not a Talmudic scholar, but I'm willing to bet that there's nothing in the Jewish holy writings expressly forbidding that "a man and a woman should commit a sin in the eyes of the LORD their GOD by traveling in shameful mixture on the Jerusalem number 40 express."

More importantly, I'm inclined to agree with Thurgood Marshall's insight in Brown v. Board of Education that the impulse to segregate is almost inevitably the result and the cause of inequality. (I wonder, for example, how the male defenders of the segregated buses would handle being made to ride in the back.) And, once again, I realize how nice it is to live in a country governed by the First Amendment, which prevents the establishment of a state religion and therefore makes it harder for people to turn "our religion" into state policy.

Religious Conspiracy?

In a piece in today's New York Times (unfortunately inaccessible to non-members), Paul Krugman makes a fairly persuasive claim that the theocratic wing of the Christian right is trying to sneak its way into political power.

He points out that, for example, 150 grads of Regency University (founded by Pat "Blame Them Fags" Robertson) now work in the Bush administration and that many of them and their fellow believers seem to be there because of what they believe, not because of what they know or can do competently.

Now, fundamentalists, Catholics, evangelicals, ecumenicals, premillenial dispensationalists, Unitarians, whatever, all have a right to serve their country. I'm not bothered by Christians in government any more than I'm bothered by atheists or agnostics or Zoroastrians. But I am bothered by people of whatever faith or anti-faith who take a government job not in order to serve the people as defined by their job description but rather so that they can advance some cause hostile to their job description. I mean, Robertson and Liberty University founder Jerry Falwell both said after Katrina that the people of the Gulf Coast took a beating because God was passing judgment on America's tolerance of abortionists, feminists, and gays. Do we really want people who "think" like that involved in storm disaster relief? It would be like putting Josef Mengele in charge of the Tel Aviv Children's Hospital. (I have no idea if any Robertson-Falwell true believers were involved with Katrina relief efforts, but it would explain a lot about FEMA's response, yes?)

On the other hand, and it's not like this is any consolation, Krugman may be putting too much emphasis on both the religious dimension and on the degree of coordination of all this. Bush and Bushies seem to have a particular fondness for appointing people they like whether or not they're likely to be any good at the job--Alberto Gonzales, Don Rumsfeld, Michael Brown, Harriet Miers, et al. And you can only like someone if you know them, so it could be that all the graduates of Bob Jones, Liberty, Regent, etc. working in the Bush administration aren't there as part of a sneaky religious movement but simply because they're part of the general embrace of cronyism and contempt for government that underlies so many of this administration's hiring decisions.