Richard's cherry picked quotes are unconvincing and, to be honest, somewhat misleading. I will admit to oversimplifying the history a bit in the interest of brevity, but I could just as easily have cited Hugh Thomas as Preston in support of my thesis. Certainly it is true that some violence directed against the Church occurred prior to the 1936 uprising, and I agree that I was guilty of suggesting otherwise. But that hardly undermines my point or legimiates Mr. Krog's ludicrous suggestion. The occasional violence directed at symbols of the Church was simply not on the scale of destruction and wanton violence that occurred in the period immediately after the nationalist uprising. It was certainly nothing on a scale that could even possibly (1) carry the weight of the abortion analogy or (2) diminish the utter evil of Franco and his murderous colleagues, which I had thought was the point I was criticizing.
The church burnings that Thomas describes around page 58, and to which Richard points as evidence contrary to my position, were part of a brief (that is, several day long) wave of protest in May 1931 in which, Thomas says, "[n]o one died," (p. 56) and perhaps 100 churches were damaged, with a small number of them burning to the ground (Thomas only describes one that did so). And it is hardly the case that the government sat idly by. As Thomas describes it, "Maura [the minister of the interior at the time] got permission to use the army . . . , and martial law was proclaimed." (p. 56) It is true that the state might have reacted more quickly, but it did not do nothing. In fact, as Thomas explains, the burnings were the work of the anarchists, who were not very sympathetic with the moderate politics of the republican government in 1931 (see pp. 68-69). Indeed, Thomas describes them as "enemies of the republic." (see p. 45)
Nor is there much support for Mr. Krog's bizarre suggestion that the republican government somehow encouraged and benefitted from the violence against the Church that did occur. If anything, the opposite was true, since the fascists used the attacks on churches as propaganda to their great advantage (notwithstanding their own brutality against the Basque Church, which was more republican in its sympathies than the Church elsewhere in Spain).
Thomas does, as Richard said, say that, immediately after the elections, in early 1936 (but before the actual fascist uprising), there was "a trail of murder and arson" across the country and that "[t]his was partly caused by the euphoria of the socialists and anarchists at being released from prison." But he goes on, in the very next sentence, to say that "[i]t was also the conscious work of the Falange, determined to justify the establishment of a regime of 'order.'" (p. 153) In other words, Richard is right that July 1936 was not a complete discontinuity (what ever is?) with what came before. Rather, with the help of both the left and the right, in the months leading up to the rebellion, the republican government progressively lost its grip. But this was hardly the situation the Mr. Krog or Richard describes, of a republican government that secretly approved of the disorder that surrounded it. Nor was the falange reluctant to take on the government through violence. Richard here is misreading Thomas, who refers only to Jose Antonio Primo de Rivera of being of two minds on the subject (see pp. 153-54).
In any event, the pre-July violence was simply not of the scale of murder and violence that occurred after the July 1936 military uprising, when thousands of priests and religious were brutally murdered. And there, my description of the violence in republican Spain as the result of the breakdown of the state in part as a consequence of the rebellion (in contrast to the intentional policy of extermination in rebel Spain), was entirely accurate. Here's Thomas, one last time (p. 268):
Though there was much wanton killing in rebel Spain, the idea of the limpieza, the 'cleaning up' of the country from the evils which had overtaken it, was a disciplined policy of the new authorities and a part of their programme of regeneration. In republican Spain, most of the killing was the consequence of anarchy, the outcome of a national breakdown, and not the work of the state, even though some political parties in some ctieis abetted the enormities, and even though some of those responsible iultimately rose to positions of authority.
Friday, February 6, 2009
I haven't found the opinions yet, but two judges of the Ninth Circuit, Reinhardt and Kozinski, in separate rulings have included same-sex marriages within persons entitled to federal spousal benefits under the employee-benefits program for public defenders that (as I understand) each circuit administers. Judge Kozinski construed the statutory language to include same-sex spouses so as to avoid a significant constitutional question under Lawrence v. Texas, while Judge Reinhardt went further and held that the part of the Defense of Marriage Act that defines marriage for federal benefits violates equal protection (as opposed to, I assume, the parts of DOMA that shield states from having to accept same-sex marriages performed in other states). Arthur Leonard of New York Law School has a description here. These are not regular panel opinions, just single-judge internal-grievance rulings, but they will still get a lot of attention.
