Article archive / June 1, 2013
Originally published: . Volume 4, No. 10. Source pages: 2.
“Posterity! You will never know how much it cost the present Generation to preserve your Freedom! I hope you will make good use of it. If you do not, I shall repent in Heaven, that I ever took half the Pains to preserve it.” – John Adams Why should we in the psychology and the behavioral sciences be following the three Washington scandals?
Sitting in the perpetual traffic jam in Baton Rouge recently, I switched to 1150 AM because NPR became boring. I caught the tail-end of Sean Hannity talking about the three scandals: Department of Justice going after Associated Press journalists and the Fox News White House correspondent James Rosen; the State Department’s handling of Benghazi; and the IRS targeting Tea Party groups.
If you’ve been following these, you know that they are all related to the First Amendment.
Hannity’s style is clearly an extroverted, sensing, thinking, judging type. Because of this, he goes on and on and on, beating an issue into a bloody pulp. He’s a moral conservative and so unpleasant to most (an estimated 96 percent) in our community. But I resonate (i.e., I get to hear things I already believe in) when he waves the Constitution in everyone’s face, which was in high gear on this particular afternoon.
A woman called in, announcing herself as a liberal. She stated her criticisms of Hannity and his views. She was well-spoken and seemed educated. She and Hannity spent a little time in the back and forth thing, then he asked her, “Answer one question for me. Does the IRS targeting conservative groups bother you?”
“No, not at all,” she said.
Her answer stunned me. Hannity handled it with his usual sensitivity and finesse––he hung up on her.
Not everyone is following these issues closely: 37 percent of Republicans, 25 percent of Independents, and 21 percent of Democrats are following the IRS scandal, according to Pew Research. Pew found that opinions about the controversy are “highly partisan.” Sixty-nine percent of Republicans think the administration was involved in the IRS actions, while only 21 percent of Democrats agree.
When Hannity’s lady caller said that the IRS targeting of conservatives did not bother her at all, I had a flashback to dinner table talks with my journalist father and mother. I don’t know exactly how my father came to his beliefs but he agreed with John Kennedy when Kennedy said, “The rights of every man are diminished when the rights of one man are threatened.”
In that time, the 1960s, rights, especially for journalists, had nothing to do with entitlement or government charity, but simply freedom of information, the First Amendment.
Those of us in psychology and behavioral science know that the caller was making a fast-think, in-group/out-group judgment. And she was wrong. The IRS targeting anyone for their beliefs should chill us to our bones, especially those of us in psychological science. We understand group dynamics, the errors of human decision-making, the absolute necessity for open and unencumbered flow of information. We also know that power corrupts best in secrecy.
The Obama Justice Department has used the Espionage Act six times so far, compared to only three times total for all other presidents combined since the Act’s inception in 1917. The Fox News correspondent, James Rosen, has been accused of being a co-conspirator to espionage by the DOJ. Really? Really?
Memorial Day reminds us that our countrymen and countrywomen have given their lives for an idea. It is an idea set out by a group of geniuses who came together, and like a diamond, the idea was forged in pressures, danger and moral strength that most of us can only imagine and admire.
The founders crystallized the necessary conditions of a truly free society. Amazingly, they understood the dynamics of large social systems, and the unavoidable drag on collective consciousness and individual moral behavior by the forces of self-interest.
Memorial Day reminds us that it is not a small thing we have––this shinning idea of freedom. It is truly precious. It is the most precious thing we can give to our children and our children’s children. We should pay attention. Because as John Adams warned, “Liberty, once lost, is lost forever.”
This article is part of a historical newspaper archive. Read the original issue for its original layout, photographs and graphics.