As an “ordinary” person who voted for Gerard Keiser’s original bread column, I take umbrage at the idea that bread is not an “actual” issue and therefore unworthy of discussion in the hallowed pages of this elite paper.
I wished to see a fresh new topic debated on the opinion page, and Keiser’s column was simply the best, in both argument and style. Also, bread does, in fact, affect people directly — according to the Department of Agriculture, the average American consumes more than 140 pounds of wheat flour per year. Keiser raised valid objections to the way we do this, hinting at how bread’s treatment by our modern fetish of efficiency, which strips it of its natural goodness and pretends to replace that which is lost by artifice, is emblematic of modernity’s effects on the human condition. Surely such a topic is important enough for our opinion page.
But I am not so disturbed by the idea held by some columnists that bread is below their august talents as much as I am by what they think the vote in favor of bread says about The Daily’s readers. Mary Stanfield has written that the bread vote was a conspiracy to “torture” the columnists and Jerod Coker used it as an example of how ordinary people cannot be trusted with decisions as momentous as determining the content of this opinion page, nor with other similarly important things like same-sex marriage. Allegedly, direct democracy leads to “idiotic” decisions.
This idea is to a degree supported by the U.S. Constitution, which, prior to the 17th Amendment, provided that senators be elected by the state legislatures, dividing power between state governments and the people themselves. However, we have witnessed a breakdown in the very idea of constitutionally controlled government with the rise of judicial activism. While justified on the seemingly reasonable basis that constitutional interpretation must change along with society’s views on what phrases like “equal rights” mean — after all, slavery was permitted by many states in 1787 — this line of reasoning is often used by judges to excuse decisions that have neither explicit constitutional support nor anywhere close to unanimous societal approval. In such cases, the people have the right to overrule out-of-control judges.
A prime example is California’s same-sex marriage controversy, used by Coker in his argument against direct democracy. Contrary to his telling of events, same-sex marriage was outlawed in California under a 1977 legislative act and a 2000 referendum. The 2005 act Coker mentioned was vetoed by Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger and never became law. What finally made homosexual marriage legal in California was a state Supreme Court’s decision that same-sex marriage is a fundamental right according to the state constitution, an idea that would be laughable to those who wrote that document in 1849. This decision was especially egregious considering just eight years earlier, the people of California had voted 60-40 for Proposition 22, which prevents California from recognizing same-sex marriage. The California Supreme Court seized power that did not rightfully belong to it, a wrong that was righted by the Californian people in voting for Proposition 8.
Coker lamented this series of events, writing “what a momentous occasion for California, we all thought ... . But then history took a turn for the worse.” The implication is to be included in this “all,” a fair-minded, intelligent human being could not be against same-sex marriage. This opens the door to a politics of arrogance in which all opposition is assumed to be stupid or malicious, an attitude not conducive to decent political discourse but sadly embraced by many.
The unavoidable fact of a diverse society is there will be well-meaning, intelligent, educated people who vehemently disagree on certain issues because they hold different things to be fundamentally true. The key to living in such a society is to realize those with whom you disagree are not brutal troglodytes. They may be dedicated to destroying all you hold dear, but that does not inhibit them from being just as intellectual and considerate as you are.
Additionally, the restriction of decision-making to elites excludes differing perspectives from discussion. For instance, if the readers of The Daily had not made themselves heard, the writers would not have known that bread was of such high interest to their readers and would have gone on publishing columns on things the readers don’t care about, like abortion and gender-neutral housing.
I, for one, applaud the faithful readers of The Daily for seeing a fertile new avenue of discussion in bread, a most peculiar thing, both humble and profound, and I commend those of the opinion writers who have made the most of it.
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theotherone 2 years, 1 month ago
this is a very insensitive article to run during passover.
Publius 2 years, 1 month ago
Very good, balanced article. The part about the "politics of arrogance" needs to be heeded by every opinion writer for the OU Daily. Issues are not resolved (and good arguments are not made, for that matter) by personal attacks on those one disagrees with.
IDIOTS 2 years, 1 month ago
A competent contribution to our student paper. Articles like this give me hope for our student body.