Our government is incompetent. And?

I would guess that people know that the government has now officially shut down, an awareness mostly fueled by the attendant onslaught of media coverage, countdown clocks, and the like.

But I also have to wonder if it's something bigger than that.

You see, another thing is happening tomorrow that you might not know about. Well, you probably do; I like to think of my friends as better-informed than the average citizen.

But if statistics are to be believed, sizable majorities of you don't know that Obamacare goes into effect today. The statistics from this particular poll are arresting to say the least:

       • Only 15% of those surveyed were actually aware of the October 1, 2013 start date. Another 20%           gave the pollers incorrect dates, whereas a full 64% didn't know the answer at all.

       • A majority of those surveyed were under the impression that the Affordable Care Act included              the oft-mentioned "public option," which the reasonably cognizant person will recall died in                  Congress 3-1/2 years ago.

       • More than 40% of respondents think that so-called "death panels" are a thing (they aren't),                  Medicare benefits have been cut (they haven't), and that illegal immigrants are covered under the            Act (they aren't).

We can argue to no end about the ACA's merits. But this poll has nothing to do with policy merits. It has to do with clear, unassailable facts about a significant piece of legislation.

We can all agree that Congress is inept. It is. Disturbingly inept. There is no excuse for the legislature of a first-world country to act the way it does.

Let's ignore that though. Regardless of how dysfunctional our government is, there is similarly no excuse for democratic citizens to be so mind-numbingly ill-informed, for fifty percent of voters to believe straight-up falsehoods, for 85% of the voting public to be unaware that one of the biggest laws in the last decade is going into effect.

We can blame politicians for our problems, and we can blame the media for misinforming us about those problems. Surely they're both at fault.

But no matter how much I rail against Congress and CNN, I have to wonder how people don't know such basic things. I have to fear for a democracy whose citizens consistently say they disapprove of Obamacare but approve of pretty much all its major components. Who can't identify the Speaker of the House or Chief Justice.

Is this not the Information Age all of us '90s kids were told to fervently anticipate? Of 24-hour news coverage? Of round-the-clock Internet reporting? Of instantly accessible information on essentially everything?

I expect most of these people would say something like "Oh, I'm just not a political person," or "Oh, I just get so frustrated with it all," or "They're all incompetent, I just don't care."

Like I said, most people are probably aware of the government shutdown by now, but I wonder if that's part of our own excuse apparatus. We are aware of this because it reinforces our cynical belief that politics are broken, that there's nothing we can do about it, and that we can continue not paying attention.

None of these are excuses. If we believe ourselves to be a genuine democracy, you are by definition a political person. You don't get to hate politics. By holding citizenship in this country, you are a political actor, an agent of change. And one of the duties of being a political actor is being informed on current events, or at the very least being aware of how your government works.

On this our country has failed, and it's not the fault of the politicians, not the fault of the news media. The only people we can blame are ourselves. You don't have to be out canvassing every day to be a responsible citizen. But if we are to justify ourselves as a political system, to silence the critics of democracy who say that the masses are too stupid or detached to deserve political involvement, it'd be useful if we weren't proving them right.

Where have we been?

The 2014 Olympics should not be in Russia. I believe this. And it seems to be the quickly-arriving consensus among activists in light of the country's revolting anti-gay laws. This morning Stephen Fry joined the chorus calling for a boycott of the 2014 games.

Which is good – it's important to take stands. We should expect certain standards from countries hosting international events. But I have to wonder: has Russia ever met these standards?

Actually no, I don't have to wonder. It hasn't. Certainly not under Putin. The anti-gay laws are only the latest dish in a veritable buffet of human-rights abuses, which has included attacks on journalists and opposition figures, widespread police brutality, torture, racial discrimination, extralegal killings, censorship, and war crimes. We knew all of this when Sochi was selected, and yet it's taken until now for people to be up in arms.

This isn't the first time this has happened, either. The regimes hosting the Olympics have included:
• The Soviet Union in 1980. (To be fair, there was a boycott of these games, but it took an invasion of an entire country for that to happen.)
• Yugoslavia in 1984.
• China in 2008.

Add to this the numerous games in Britain, France, Belgium, and the Netherlands, all of whom committed grave atrocities in their colonial empires — and, it must be said, the United States, whose human rights record isn't exactly pristine.

The comparison that's been bandied about a lot is the 1936 Berlin Games, but we can actually cut the IOC some slack there: they selected Berlin as the host city in 1931, 2 years before the Nazis came to power. All these other hosts were selected with full knowledge and ample evidence of abuses. It would be almost inconsistent to deny Russia the games.

As an aside, I should note that I don't think we should have particularly severe political litmus tests when selecting Olympic hosts. The Games are about international unity, and the IOC is trying to look less exclusionary. They don't want to rock the boat.

Still, I think it's safe to say Russia did cross a line (or several), like China before it. But that line had been well-crossed in 2007 when they selected Sochi. The choice should have been scrutinized then. If we are going to expect standards on human rights, we need to be consistent about them.

LGBT rights are obviously important. But we need to remember that they are one set among many of important human rights. If we narrow our focus to one struggle, we run the risk of glossing over other struggles.

We can dream now.

We have not won gay rights today.

But we've won the right to dream.

It's still illegal to be gay in 78 countries. In 8 countries it can get you killed legally, and in countless more extralegally. 37 states still outlaw gay marriage. 29 states still don't protect gay people's jobs or housing. Schoolchildren still bully, churches still shame, families still disown.

But today, like so many other wonderful days over the last couple years, we've had our rights expanded, our dignity recognized, our humanity affirmed just a bit more. 

We have a president who finally recognizes our right to happiness.

We have an army that finally only cares if you can shoot straight.

We have a citizenry finally coming around, and a generation of young people who have come around in full force.

We have almost 100 million people living in states that allow equal marriage, with more on the way.

And today, we have a nation, the beacon of democracy, the city upon a hill, that can finally be as a city upon a hill for gay people the world 'round. Our federal government can finally say consistently, without hypocrisy: You are human. You have feelings. You deserve dignity. You deserve respect.

As a child in this country, even in the progressive and cynical '90s, you have a lot of dreams about marriage and families. It's in the Disney movies, on TV, and at least for a suburban kid like me, in real life all around you.

I think few people would say that real marriages are ever fairy tales, or that it's easy (or even assured) to find the love of one's life and make a perfect family with them. Some gay people even question the pursuit of gay marriage — do we really want to be boxed into heternormative conformity?

But I think a lot of us still dream. Dream of finding that love, and committing to it, and making a life with that person. And having society bless that relationship, and welcome our family into the larger family of humanity.

It's startling to realize that as few as ten years ago, this dream was universally condemned, or ignored, or at best cordoned off into sanitized "civil unions" and "domestic partnerships."You can sort of have your dream," society told us, "but don't talk about it too much, and don't pretend that it's as valid as normal people's dreams."

Not anymore. Today, that dream has won. Maybe not everywhere. But it's only a matter of time. There will be another court case, another bit of legislation, maybe some day a constitutional amendment. The road is wide open.

We have not won gay rights today. We still have a long way to go.

But today, we can dream. And today, that dream is a little more real.

Can we not?

Fluttering amid the barrage of news, blog posts, and tweets over the last week was a story that really shouldn't be a story. The infamous Westboro Baptist Church, while they were still cleaning the blood off Boylston Street, blamed the explosion on "fag marriage." They've since vowed to picket the victims' funerals.

To which I say: yawn.

Why is everyone so fascinated with this group? Their media coverage has attained a near-ritual quality. Something bad happens. The WBC blames it on fags. Everyone wrings their hands, aghast that they could say such a thing. The WBC pickets funerals. Everyone wrings their hands, aghast that they could do such a thing. The WBC gets its desired media attention, and retreats back to its cave until the next national tragedy.

The Westboro Baptist Church is a small Kansas hate group (I will not degrade Christianity by calling it a church) that consists of 40 members. Forty. 40. My own [small] Lutheran congregation in Hanover has more than twice that many members. More people came to my high school grad party than go to this "church."

They speak for no one and nothing else but their own desire to make everyone gasp. And somehow, they've succeeded at that for the better part of the last decade. 40 people from Topeka have managed to earn such a reputation for hate that even the KKK has told them to tone it down. They've provoked lawsuits, won a Supreme Court case, and have attracted the ire of the Anonymous hacker group.

This is not good for the gay rights movement. The continual, ritualized attention these 40 people attract does nothing but distract from more subliminal bigotry. As long as anti-gay figures and groups can point to groups like this and say "Hey, at least we're not that bad," their positions become that much more respectable. As long as the average person can read blog posts about the WBC and see how revoltingly hate-filled it is, he'll stop thinking about he can change his own attitudes and actions, as long as he's not as bigoted as these 40 people from Kansas.

Relating this to a pet topic of mine: The Boy Scouts may finally overturn their ban on gay youth members. Progress! but not really. They'll still ban gay adults, which is still a pretty offensive position if you think about it. This could be a great moment to talk about how so many people still stereotype gays as dirty old men.

But compared to the 40 idiots from Kansas, the Boy Scouts' position looks positively magnanimous. When society has a bête noire, it is less likely to address its real problems, or won't do it as effectively.

To the media, to bloggers and Facebook users and Twitterers, to Anonymous, to everyone else: Stop. Stop giving these 40 people attention. Stop fulfilling their own self-importance. Stop distorting the conversation on LGBT issues by including them in it, even tangentially. Stop wasting your breath, your time, and your 140 characters on them.

This is the last time I will ever mention the Westboro Baptist Church — and I ask everyone else to join me. We all have much better things to do.

Waiting.

About eight months ago, I took my Eagle Scout badge and buried it in my sock drawer.

Some people sent their badges back to BSA National. The cynic in me thought that it would annoy the BSA more for an "open and avowed" homosexual to hold on to it. The idealist in me was thinking about the day that they'd finally come to their senses, and I'd finally be able to take my badge out of my sock drawer.

I procrastinated like everyone else at that age. But I worked hard for that badge. And I learned a lot from my troop — how to camp, canoe, and hike, but also how to deal with people, how to lead, how to be patient. How to use axes and knives even though axes and knives freak you out. How to keep trudging along even when it's raining and you have the stomach flu and you haven't showered in a couple days. How to appreciate a camp stove meal and the beauty of a mountain morning.

And I spent time with my father, probably some of the closest times I've ever spent with him.

I was determined to finish up the Eagle, and I did. I turned in my paperwork 2 days ahead of my 18th birthday. I sailed through my Board of Review — probably as one of the few prospective Ivy Leaguers they'd seen in a while.

A couple years later, I grew up a bit more, and came to terms with who I was. Being out has been great. But it's also meant that I've had to downplay my Scouting past. It also means that unless things change, I won't be able to wear that badge or my uniform in public (thanks to both personal conscience and institutional frowning). It means that unless things change, I won't be able to share Scouting with my son, certainly not as much as my dad did with me.

It meant that I had to live a lie — or at the very least, a tacit omission — in order to become an Eagle Scout.

So my badge is still in my sock drawer. And I'm waiting.

It looked this week like we had an opening. For the first time ever, the BSA said it was "considering" lifting the ban. But it looks like we're going to have to keep waiting. Today, the National Executive Board decided to keep the ban while they form a "task force" to look at the issue.

One quote in particular stood out to me:


“You don’t need to form a task force to know that discrimination is wrong,” said Jennifer Tyrrell, a lesbian mother from Bridgeport, Ohio, who was ousted as the leader of her son’s Cub Scout Pack in April 2012 because of her sexual orientation. “I had to tell my family and my son that the Boy Scouts of America didn’t think I was good enough to be their den leader, all because of my sexual orientation. No parent should have to do that, yet today the Boy Scouts told America showed that they don’t have the courage to condemn this kind of discrimination.”

The family values crowd has been pushing back against lifting the gay ban. But they couch their language in vague, cushy terms like "values," and "the issue," and "tradition." The BSA is forming this task force because they decided "this issue" had too much "complexity" to make a clear decision right away.

This is not an "issue." These are people. These are insecure preteen and teenage boys, many of whom already hear in their churches, locker rooms, etc. how bad and weird and sinful they are, who are looking for at least one organization that welcomes them. These are children who are being explicitly told that their parents are worth less than "normal" parents, and aren't welcome to participate in the troop with them. These are young men who have to lie about who they are in order to stay with the organization they love.

This is not complex. A Scout is supposed to be Brave: where is the courage here? Where are the "timeless values" in reinforcing intolerance, religious dogmatism, self-loathing, and dishonesty?

At least there's some hope. They didn't completely rule out changing things. Maybe this "task force" will come to the right conclusion on "this issue."

All we can do is keep pressuring, speaking out, protesting. And waiting.

Defining absurdity.

Note: Virginia Gov. Bob McDonnell has declined to support his party's new electoral vote bill. My overall point still stands.

Until the 1830s, the British House of Commons drew its members from districts drawn centuries earlier. Given natural population shifts, migration, industrialization, and the like, until they finally got around to fixing it in 1832, the boundaries were so antiquated that some abandoned villages were sending 2 MPs to London, while industrial hubs like Manchester, Birmingham, Leeds, and Bradford were left completely unrepresented. The most odious of these districts were the infamous "rotten boroughs" and "pocket boroughs," where the voting population was either small enough to be bribed, or only consisted of a single landholder who was assured election. The overall effect of this system was that aristocrats and rural Tory landowners were able to hold an inordinate amount of power, and edge out middle-class urban liberals.

The U.S. today isn't nearly that bad. But in some ways we're getting there.

Virginia Republicans are putting forward a new bill that would grant electoral votes based on congressional districts rather than overall popular vote. Maine and Nebraska already do this, but Virginia goes even further by granting the 2 additional votes (the ones representing senators) to the winner of the congressional district count rather than the winner of the whole state. Similar bills are being pushed in other Republican-controlled swing states, though they stick to the Maine/Nebraska model.

If every state had the Maine/Nebraska rules in November, Mitt Romney would have beaten Barack Obama 273 to 262, despite Obama's 4-point popular vote victory.

Granted, this assumes every state would have had them in place, which is unlikely to happen, and if every state did, it would have allowed Obama to shave some votes off of some Republican states too. But it's clear that the net advantage would have been Republican, despite Obama's comfortable popular vote victory.

Ultimately, the source of the problem comes from the current congressional district lines, which in many key states are gerrymandered to the point of silliness. Thanks to state-level GOP victories in 2010, Republicans redrew already-conservative district lines to give them a staunch advantage. These proved highly effective in November:

• In Pennsylvania, Obama won by 5 points, and Democratic Sen. Bob Casey won by more than 9. But Democrats only won 5 of the 18 House seats.

• In Florida, Obama won by a razor-thin 1 point, though Sen. Bill Nelson won handily with an 11-point lead. Still, Democrats only picked up 10 of 27 House seats.

• In Ohio, Obama won by 3 points, and Democratic Sen. Sherrod Brown by 6. Democrats only won 4 of 16 House seats.

• In Michigan, Obama won by nearly 10 points, and Sen. Debbie Stabenow by 16. Democrats only won 5 out of 14 House seats.

Nationwide, even though nearly 1.4 million more voters picked Democratic candidates over Republican ones, the GOP maintained a respectable House majority of 234 seats to the Democrats' 201. It's not at all hard to understand why the Republicans would want to base the presidential election on this sort of system.

I'd be lying if I said I don't care that the Republicans are the ones doing this, because that's probably a great deal of what is bugging me. But even that aside, is this not a little absurd? If we are going to pride ourselves on being the beacon of democracy, should our government not adhere to some basic democratic and majoritarian principles?

The thing is, these bills are perfectly constitutional. States have the right to pick their electors however they choose (Democratic-Republicans and Federalists actually tried to use this to their advantage in the 1800 election). And aside from some basic civil rights provisions, states more or less have the right to apportion their congressional districts however they choose.

The Founders probably thought the Electoral College was a good idea. But they also thought all sorts of things were good ideas that we now think are crazy (it was 1787, after all). It's instances like these that increasingly show how silly our electoral systems are, and how we need to seriously look at changing them. The very fact that the Republicans feel the need to alter the electoral vote in their favor should say something about the system; the very real possibility that Romney could have won the popular vote without winning the electoral vote should be reason enough to get rid of the thing altogether.

We're a long way from returning to the age of the rotten borough. But as long as states can gerrymander their districts to so blatantly favor particular parties, and as long as the Electoral College even allows the possibility of such grossly unrepresentative elections, we're skewing our democracy and our political dialogue in the same direction. I've been to Ohio and Florida; they're both very nice places. But they aren't any more American than Minnesota, Idaho, Oregon, Tennessee, or any of the other 40ish non-swing states. Nor are rural conservative Rust Belt voters more entitled to a piece of the congressional pie than urban and suburban voters.

One of the tritest political jokes is how obsessively candidates invoke small towns, visit diners, pretend to like hunting, etc. But it's not that far from the truth: our electoral system grossly favors rural areas over urban ones, small states over big ones, and ultimately a few key swing states over most other states. I can understand rural voters not wanting to be edged out of the political process. But that doesn't mean they get such an outsized share of it.

We need to scrap the Electoral College, and we need to have nonpartisan redistricting. These should be two pretty easy fixes. But as long as we stay content to have a system that lets politicians fix things the other way, our elections will continue to define absurdity.

With centrists like these...

Starbucks CEO Howard Schultz made another one of his periodic forays into the political realm the other day at a National Retail Federation convention.

Schultz lambasted Congress for its "lack of leadership" in combating fiscal problems, and called on business leaders to exercise their influence and convince everyone to come together, compromise, be more bipartisan, show more leadership, work across the aisle, and fix the "dysfunction of Washington, D.C."

Those might not have been the exact words he used, but it doesn't particularly matter, as his exact words appear to be the same bland flavor of "centrist" mush of which we've seen a lot over the last few years.

Congress is dysfunctional and partisan. Basically everyone agrees on that. And the rhetoric used by these partisans is too often empty, buzz-worded, and sound-bite-ready, focused more on saying the right things than actually providing functional proposals.

But as Mr. Schultz so finely illustrates, that's not at all exclusive to the right and left. What we often miss is how equally vacuous the rhetoric used by our self-proclaimed centrists is.

Schultz isn't giving us any solutions. Despite how dire he sees our fiscal outlook, the most specific Schultz will get is this vague exhortation for business leaders to exercise "influence" to convince Congress to make a budget deal.

We see this far too often (look no further than the comically unsuccessful Unity '08, No Labels, and Americans Elect campaigns). What passes for a centrist movement these days needs no ideology, no defined goals, no specific platform. Only the requisite hand-wringing about the lack of Civility, wistful outcries for Real Leadership in Washington, the essential avowal that Both Sides Are to Blame, and just wishing that those gosh-darn politicians will be nice to each other and compromise.

I'm not talking about the oft-maligned false equivalency; that's another argument entirely. I usually align with the Democrats, but I recognize the need for a real centrist movement, as well as more bipartisan cooperation. What I fail to see is how this sort of vagueness is all that helpful.

I have respect for centrists and independents. Genuine ones. I don't always agree with Michael Bloomberg, but to his credit, he generally avoids drivel like this. His mayorship has allowed him to implement real, tangible ideas for solving educational problems, gun violence, and public health issues. Ross Perot got 19% of the vote in 1992 not because he had the rosiest stories about civility, but because he went around with his easels and charts and offered specific solutions to the nation's problems.

Howard Schultz is right that Washington needs leadership. But if he wants to have the sort of real impact on politics that he seems to want, he could offer some of that leadership too. Give us a tax proposal. Tell us what budget cuts he would make. Give some thoughts as to what "compromise" actually looks like.

Otherwise, he's really just part of the problem.