In Part 1, I argued that the antidiscrimination laws were intended to dismantle traditional patterns of inequality and exclusions by prohibiting people from leveraging their control over other people’s access to the basic necessities to preserve those patterns. What happens when someone claims “freedom of religion” to oppose the new patterns of equality and inclusion? Well, nothing.

That’s what happened when the owners of a health club in Minnesota tried to call themselves a “ministry,” and wanted to ignore the antidiscrimination laws (State by McClure v. Sports and Health Club, Inc., 370 N.W.2d 844 (Minn. 1985)). They not only refused to hire homosexuals and to promote anyone not “born again” into management, but they demanded that married women have “permission” from their husbands to work and that unmarried women have the approval of their fathers. The courts were not impressed.

The flip side of saying we have absolute freedom of belief is that we have to accept anything as a religious belief. If someone says, “This is my religious belief,” the law can’t say, “No, it isn’t,” or “That’s not a real religion.” Case in point: the Church of Body Modification. They’re on the internet (surprise!) and while their theology is a bit hard to figure — I think it has something to do with exalting the spirit over the flesh — their main teaching is that people should get piercings and tattoos. You join the church and then, when your school or your boss complains about your lip studs, you get to scream “religious discrimination!” You’re a member of … the Church of Body Modification.

Heck, you don’t even need a “church.” You can claim a private belief. Out in Washington state, there was a doctor who wanted staff privileges in a hospital, but the hospital demanded that all its doctors carry malpractice insurance (Backlund v. Board of Commissioners, 106 Wash. 632 (1986)). He announced that he had a “religious” objection to malpractice insurance. Mind you, he couldn’t point to a religious body to which he belonged that had that among its tenets. It was also pointed out that he had plenty of insurance on his house and his car — it was just malpractice insurance that his religion prohibited.

By now, some of you are probably thinking, “Aw c’mon, no one could possibly take this stuff seriously.” They do. The Washington doctor was told that he had to carry the insurance even though it did violate his beliefs. And if you’re an employer and don’t want one of your employees walking around with lip studs, and he or she claims to be a Body-Modificationist, you will have to jump through all the same hoops as if you wanted to stop a Jewish employee from wearing a yarmulke or a Muslim from wearing hijab. (Wouldn’t it be just awful to wake up in a world where fussy old people could no longer tell young people how to look?)

The Roman Catholic Church, and other Christian groups, cannot be given an exemption from providing needed medical care with which its doctrines disagree unless we are prepared to extend the same exemption to members of the World Church of the Creator (white supremacists) who object to fertility drugs for mixed-race couples, Scientologists who object to medication for mental illness — if you think women who can’t get the pill are in a bad way, imagine being bipolar and not getting the meds that enable you to get through the day without literally “going crazy” — and even the inevitable Church of Not-Wanting-to-Pay-for-Expensive-Medical-Care. It’s everyone or no one. And a rule that anyone can write his or her own exemption from isn’t a rule at all.

But, of course, that’s not what the objectors to the contraception mandate are demanding. They’re looking for rules that recognize the special status of their own (Christian) belief system. (A lot of the folks who squawk loudest about the religious rights of the Catholic Church are the most outraged at possible concessions to Muslims.) The special privileges of Christians, like that of men and white people, is one of the major historic injustices we made the antidiscrimination revolution to dismantle. We can no more exempt Christians from the civil rights laws, and principle of equality generally, than we can exempt white supremacists.

When you leave your home, or your place of worship, you enter a terrain where tolerance and inclusion are not just good things — they’re the law. If your beliefs give you a problem with that, get over it.

And how does this relate to the larger struggle we’re in? That’s for Part 3.

As of now, it seems clear that what happened to Trayvon Martin was not ”self defense,” but people should know why not.

Self defense is a complicated and little understood area of the law. (We tend to devote a lot of attention to any situation in which someone dies — as we should — and the analysis can be a bit dense.) Basically, the law recognizes two types of situations in which one person is hurt by the deliberate act of another. One is an “assault,” where a person is going about his or her business and is set upon by someone looking to do harm. The other is what the law calls an “affray,” legalese for a “fight,” where two people have an argument that escalates into violence. (From this point it get complicated, but those are the two broad categories.) The law of “self defense” says that where you are the victim of an assault, you have the right to use proportionate violence to defend yourself; where you reasonably believe that someone is using “deadly force” — a degree of violence that might kill or seriously injure — you may respond with deadly force. An affray, on the other hand is different: where two guys are just fighting, neither one of them can claim self defense if the other gets hurt. We don’t care who actually threw the first punch; you’re expected either to dial it back or to walk away.

When there is an assault, unlike an affray, there may not be a “duty to retreat.” In most states — a lot of cops and even prosecutors are unclear on this point — a person who has been assaulted does not have to try to get out of the situation before resorting to defensive force. This is based on the idea that an innocent person’s right to go about his or her business freely — to walk down any street — should be given precedence over the right of a criminal assailant not to be hurt or killed; if we must choose between the freedom of the innocent citizen and the life of the criminal, we choose the former. This leads to weird situations that we read about in law school where someone just stands there watching an assailant coming, sometimes at a walk, and then kills the person when he gets close enough to do harm. (That’s an extreme case, of course, and most situations are a lot more ambiguous.) The so-called “stand your ground” laws, which have people up in arms right now, are basically just statutes that declare that the courts are not to impose a “duty to retreat,” which most states traditionally do not.

But remember that this has nothing to do with an affray, a plain fight. There you do have a duty to walk away before someone gets hurt.

This may be important, because some of the media reports indicate that George Zimmerman came away with a bloody nose. It is entirely possible that Trayvon punched him or hit him with an elbow. You probably believe — as I do, with as much as we know now — that Trayvon was himself under assault and trying to get away. But we don’t know what Zimmerman will say under oath in front of a jury, or what the jury will choose to believe.

There are only two scenarios in which Zimmerman would have a legitimate claim of self defense. First, he would have to have been minding his own business, or at least behaving in a peaceable fashion, when Trayvon for some reason chose to attack him with what he reasonably believed to be deadly force. From all the evidence that has come out so far — and there seems to be a bit more every day — this did not happen. Second, the two would have to have been fighting — an affray — when Trayvon suddenly escalated it to deadly force. (If you and I are in a shoving match, and you suddenly pull out a knife, then it’s an actual assault, and I have right to defend myself.) Again, this did not happen. The boy was smaller and completely unarmed.

So no. It was not legally self defense. Now you know why not.

Back in the 80′s, a leftist sect whose name I’ve forgotten, and whom you’ve probably never heard of, used the slogan, “Finish the Civil War.” In other words, it’s time we stopped messing around and came down hard on white Americans who have never gotten used to the fact that the war to end slavery and white supremacy ended in a Northern victory. Well, I say it’s time we finish the culture war.

Something momentous happened in this country about fifty years ago: We realized as a nation that a great deal of what has always gone on in American society — racism, sexism, religious bigotry — is deeply and totally unjust. And we took a decision to do something about it. We have deployed a number of tools, not all of them legal or governmental, but among the most important was the antidiscrimination law.

What follows is a personal interpretation of modern American law. Not everything here is on the books — yet — and it may not be interpreted as I do. In fact, some of it is not enforced. But it all could be, and it should.

Antidiscrimination laws are positively fiendish. We were faced in the 1960′s with one seemingly intractable problem — the treatment of African-Americans in the South — and asked “what would it take to live a relatively normal life surrounded by people who hate you?” We came up with four main things: you need to get an education; you need a job; you need a place to live; and you need a general ability to access the usual things — we call them “public accommodations” — to get through the day, the ability to walk into any store and get served like there’s nothing wrong with you. Give me untrammeled access to those four, and I can, and will, thumb my nose at anyone who disapproves of me. (It looks like we may be about to add a fifth, health insurance.) I have my own family and can find my own friends. There’s nothing the disapprovers can do to me that might actually pinch. And if they figure out a way to make it pinch, we can and should ban that, too.

It was such a good idea that we quickly began expanding it from the special problem of segregation in the South. The ban on sex-discrimination — originally added as a poison pill, to make the whole idea unworkable — made it practically impossible to maintain a system of sexual roles. This was especially true after the early 70′s, when we quietly added bans on discrimination against women who use birth control, get pregnant (including out-of-wedlock), and even have abortions. Some states have added bans on discrimination based on marital status, which plays hack with any attempts to “re-stigmatize” divorce and cohabitation.

So how are you supposed to preserve traditional rules about sex and family structure? You’re not.

These laws are literally revolutionary. We are using the law, and the power of the state, to dismantle the established social structure — or at least those parts of it that we find oppressive and unjust. Not everyone agrees with this goal. They don’t have to. But they cannot act on their beliefs to the detriment of other people — precisely because those beliefs are “traditional.” If we let people act on their traditional beliefs to deny other people their right of untrammeled access to the big four, then the traditional injustices, patterns of inequality and exclusion, will remain in force. And we have committed our society to doing away with them.

Right now, the hot issue is access to birth control under employer-provided health insurance. Without access to birth control, women cannot go about their lives — which, let’s face it, includes having a sex life — doing all the things they need to live a normal life, ignoring traditional roles. Therefore, we have every right to compel employers to make it available, or to tax people to provide it. (This is before we even talk about other medical reasons women might be taking the pill.)

And how does this interact with the right to freedom of religion? That’s for Part 2.

Some things sound so good that people lose sight of how stupid they are. Case in point — some Republicans demand that we keep our currency “strong.” Never mind that a weak currency helps our balance of trade and might even save American manufacturing jobs. (The Chinese are frequently criticized for keeping theirs artificially “weak.”) “Strong” sounds so much better than “weak.”

Another example: Folks on our side keep demanding that we change the Constitution — or at least the personnel of the Supreme Court — so that corporations will no longer be considered “persons.” It sounds good, but it makes no sense legally.

In the law, a “person” is any entity capable of having rights and owing duties — any entity upon which the law can act. Anything that isn’t a “person” can’t be taken into court. That’s why, depending on the law in your state, if you get beaten up by the cops, you can’t sue the police department. The PD isn’t a “person,” so you have to sue the city, which is.

There are “natural persons,” which is legalese for human beings. And there are “artificial persons,” a category which includes not only big, for-profit corporations, but small businesses, hospitals and universities, towns and cities, and political and religious organizations. They’re not “people,” as a certain Republican presidential candidate has been known to say, but what would be the consequences of saying they’re not “persons,” not capable of having rights or duties? Since I’m from Michigan, I’ll give you some examples involving our No. 1 corporate “person,” General Motors.

Say I cut through a fence onto a G.M. lot, hot-wire a new car, and drive it away. I’m a car thief, right? Name the person from whom I have stolen. No person, no property rights. No property, no theft.

Or maybe you take a job at G.M., paychecks to be issued every two weeks. At the end of two weeks, you don’t get your paycheck. So your contract has been breached, right? Name the person with whom you have the contract. Again, no person, no contract. No contract, no breach. (Of course, you could just swipe one of the cars.)

So how about saying “artificial persons” don’t have constitutional rights? Better, but be careful how far you go. If they don’t have First Amendment rights, the government can forbid them to “speak” based on what they want to say. It would be perfectly legal for the government to say corporations can support the latest war, but not oppose it — give money to the governing party, but not the opposition. It’s only the First Amendment that stops the government from doing that now.

And again, corporations are not just the Fortune 500, but the ACLU and Moveon.org. If we try to limit the rules to “for-profit” corporations, that cuts out corporations such as the New York Times and the Nation. Besides, the for-profits will just create non-profits to carry out their wishes. And in any event — as it should be clear by now — the problem is not just corporations corrupting the elections; the superpacs are being funded by a handful of hyper-wealthy individuals, such as the Koch brothers, who get their money from the corporations.

In the end, there are no short-cuts. We have allowed dangerous concentrations of irresponsible private wealth to develop, and there is no simple way to keep that wealth from entering and distorting the democratic process. We have to confront corporate power directly — and the problem of money in elections. But trying to simply declare corporations not to be “persons” — besides being completely unworkable — will accomplish nothing.

It’s Emperor-has-no-clothes time:

Has Obama Exposed the Powerlessness of the U.S. Bishops?

There are alternatives, and it’s time people started talking about them:

2012: The Year of the Cooperative

And a few thoughts from Jim Hightower.

Slowly but surely, the word is getting out.