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It is not an easy time to be a Republican in Rhode Island, or anywhere else in New England.

By: Scott MacKay

Date: March 9, 2009

From the Rhode Island General Assembly to the White House, the party is out of power. For the first time since the founding of the gop in the 1850s, the party holds not one U.S. House Seat from New England.

We know that politics in our state and region is both serious business and a grand spectator sport.

Last week Rhode Island wags were wagging and pundits parsing the meaning of Steven Laffey's withdrawal as candidate for the Republican nomination for Governor. Laffey left a contest he never formally entered. Rhode Islanders, he asserted, really don't want to fix what ails the state.

Thankfully there is much time for candidates who think more of the voters to get into the race. The 2010 primary elections are 18 months away, which may as well be a century in politics.

It should be time for some deep thinking by local Republicans. The 2008 election cycle was especially cruel to their party; the gop has just 10 of 113 seats in the state general assembly. Republicans hold just one statewide office - that of Governor Donald Carcieri, who is barred by term limits from running for reelection. None of the state's U.S. Senators or House Members is a Republican.

On the national level, Republicans are mired in the kind of internecine spitting match that would be ludicrous were it not true. The party's new national chairman, Michael Steele, the first African-American to lead republicans, got into a joust with conservative talk-show host, Rush Limbaugh.

In a televised rant, Limbaugh said he hopes President Barack Obama fails. Steele called Limbaugh's rhetoric "ugly" and "incendiary." But Steele quickly backed off, apologizing to Limbaugh and giving Democrats something to gloat about as Obama struggles with the foundering economy.

New England Republicans have long been more moderate than those from the south. The GOP may be at a low point here now, but it wasn't so long ago that some of the party's storied senators hailed from the region - Margaret Chase Smith of Maine, John Chafee of Rhode Island, Edward Brooke and Leverett Saltonstall of Massachusetts, and George Aiken of Vermont.

Republicans need to do more than hope the Democratic President fails or the general assembly makes a mess of things. One-party Rhode Island could use a rejuvenated Republican party, one whose leaders would recruit new candidates and bring new blood and ideas to the political landscape.

The Rhode Island GOP could use leaders who get out of the right-wing echo chamber of talk radio and discuss solutions to the deep economic and political problems of the state. Perhaps it is time to go back to the future and focus on a reawakening of the private sector entrepreneurship that fueled the state's growth a generation or two ago.

There is no time like now to work on new economic ideas, or even graft some new proposals on to the Republican perennials of individual initiative, small government and low taxes.

Rhode Islander voters could use a full debate on the issues facing our beleaguered little state. There must be Republicans out there who care about our state and believe we can bounce back. The field is wide open.

WRNI political analyst Scott MacKay reminds us that while times are tough now, we Rhode Islanders have bounced back from worse.

By: Scott MacKay

Date: March 2, 2009

Being a Rhode Islander, he had an abiding sense of tragedy which sustained him during temporary periods of joy. Followers of Irish poetry will recognize the reference to William Butler Yeats, who so famously wrote those words to describe his countrymen. In this winter of jobless discontent the daily drip of dour news in the Ocean State threatens to make us the biggest little state of depression.

It seems that not a day passes without another reference to Rhode Island having the worst, or nearly the worst, economy of any state. No business is safe. The pages of the Providence Journal, the largest newspaper, are filled with reports of layoffs. We even learned last week that the Journal itself is shedding 74 workers. State government is broke. We are a 'tax hell' state. Our public schools are broken. Our college graduates flee the day they get degrees.

The public employees who clean our streets, put out our fires, keep the peace and teach our children are targeted for cutbacks and layoffs. Rhode Islanders seem to take a perverse glee in aiming the finger of blame for all of our ills at each other.

Our political leaders are depicted as obtuse, or worse, corrupt. The chorus of "Only in Rhode Island" greets any new revelation of government stupidity or chicanery.

In the midst of all this demoralizing news, it may be time to take a longer view and try to remember that the state's motto is Hope, not Hopeless. Ours is a small sliver of a state, bereft of natural resources. It has always been a nice place to live and a tough place to make a living.

Since colonial times Rhode Island has had to reinvent itself every generation or so to deal with economic upheaval. We have evolved from farming and fishing, to the seafaring trade, to textile manufacturing, to heavy industry, to defense industries, to tourism and finance, and a service economy.

If you think things are bad now, remember that Rhode Island's economy was once anchored to slave-trading, and later, to a merciless system of child labor.

Rhode Islanders have endured wars, depressions, natural disasters, wrenching economic change, political uprisings, ethnic and racial tensions, a banking collapse and even the loss of the U.S. Navy's Atlantic Fleet from Newport in the 1970s.

We are a state of scenic beauty and a place that respects its past. We live in human scale neighborhoods. We have grand museums, storied colleges and universities, low crime rates, wonderful arts institutions and people who pretty much get along with each other.

Let us not sugar coat the state's plight or minimize the pain faced by those who have just lost a job or had a house foreclosed. You can’t eat the views of Narragansett Bay.

A recent Brown University public opinion survey showed the soaring state unemployment rate is percolating through the lives of ordinary Rhode Islanders. When asked if they personally knew a friend of family member who recently lost their job, a astounding 66 percent said they did.

Yet, as spring approaches, we can all enjoy the mirth of birdsong in the morning, the gathering evening light, the gentle roll of wave upon beach. Passover and Easter, the religious seasons of renewal, are fast upon us. Baseball starts soon at McCoy Stadium, where the old and young can catch a big time ball game for $4.

Let us try to keep our current travails in perspective. For sure, we are in a recession, as is much of the rest of the nation. Unlike the banking collapse of the 1990s, political corruption in Rhode Island had no discernable role in our current mess. We must sharpen out wits and try to reshape our economy. As Edmund Burke, the great British philosopher said, "A state without the means of some change is without the means of its conservation."

Scott MacKay reminds us that when it comes to immigration in Rhode Island, everything old really is new again.

By: Scott MacKay

Date: February 23, 2009

In the neighborhood we call Rhode Island, every family comes from somewhere else. If any state can be said to be a laboratory of immigration, it is our tiny corner of New England.

The first white settler, Roger Williams, was a rebel and advocate of religious freedom who landed in Providence in 1636 because he was banished from the suffocating theocracy of Massachusetts.

Later, thousands of immigrants would come to Rhode Island. Some, like Williams, were fleeing tyranny. Many more were seeking jobs and a foothold in a society where they could support their families.

The Irish, running from a poor and famine plagued country, were first. They were followed by French Canadians, Scots, Swedes, Aremenians, Jews, Russians, Polish, Portuguese, Greeks, Italians and Cape Verdeans.

By 1905, 7 of every 10 Rhode Islanders were either first or second generation Americans. This ethnic ballet made Rhode Island the first state to have a Roman Catholic majority, in 1905.

Just about every immigrant group had the same experience. The first generation endured discrimination in every realm of life and at work, where they labored as maids, gardeners, maintenance workers or in the mind-numbing clatter of a textile or jewelry sweat shop.

Now, Rhode Island again is the golden door for a new stream of immigrants, fleeing an African civil war or the poverty of a dusty back road in Latin America.

And once again, natives are debating how to treat them. At the State House there is debate about measures to crack down on illegal immigration by making it harder for businesses to hire immigrants. Some want to make English the state’s official language.

Under one bill approved last year by the House, but not the Senate, Rhode Island businesses would be required to use an electronic data base called E-Verify, to ensure their employees are in the U.S. legally.

It seems some supporters of these measures suffer from a form of ethnic amnesia. In the web of myth and nostalgia, some descendants of Canadian and European immigrants assert their ancestors came here legally, learned English overnight and stayed to raise stable nuclear families.

The facts are less tidy. In the early 1920s, America’s  Protestant majority convinced Congress to slam the door on immigration, especially from southern Europe.

Today, immigrants from other cultures are at risk. In Providence’s large Liberian community, immigrants wait every year for the president to decide where they can stay for another 12 months.

Rhode Islanders and other Americans want the laws enforced and our borders protected. But even in our poor economy, there is a serious disconnect between the views of  most Rhode Islanders and the vocal anti-immigrant voices at the State House and on commercial talk radio.

A Brown University public opinion survey released last week showed that most Rhode Islanders do not see illegal immigration as a top issue. When asked  "what do you think is the most important problem facing the country today?,’’ less than 2 percent named illegal immigration. More than 50 percent cited jobs and the economy. The poll of 451 state registered voters carried an error margin of about 5 percent.

There are voices who insist we need to force businesses to use the federal E-Verify electronic database to ensure only legal residents are hired.

But as we confront the future, let us not forget the past. Especially the contributions of those from other cultures and lands who made us what we are today.

Gay marriage legislation is back again at State House. Maybe it’s time for a new direction.

By: Scott McKay
Date: February 13, 2009

Rhode Island is the lone New England state that has no legal recognition of same-sex relationships. Now, legislation that would legalize gay marriage is being debated at the State House.

Various measures recognizing gay marriage have been introduced at the capitol for a decade. None of them have ever been approved.

Massachusetts and Connecticut give same-sex couples full marriage rights. Vermont and New Hampshire recognize civil unions. Maine recognizes some same-sex domestic partnerships. Rhode Island is the regional laggard. Gay marriage has influential opponents in the state, including Governor Don Carcieri and the Rev. Thomas Tobin, Roman Catholic Bishop of Providence.

Marriage, of course, is fraught with religious and moral overtones. Bishop Tobin has written that state sanction for same-sex marriages implies public support of "immoral sexual activity." Not everyone sees it that way, obviously. The Rev. Gene Dyszlewski, pastor of Riverside Congregational Church in East Providence, says, "Same-sex marriage is God’s plan for humanity."

Dyszlewski is chairman of the Rhode Island Coalition for Marriage Equality, a group of more than 100 clergy, most of them from mainline Protestant denominations.

In a state founded by Roger Williams, the father of the doctrine of separation of church and state, many wonder why religion should enter at all in the gay marriage debate.

One solution would be to call all marriages civil unions or civil marriage. This would make every marriage equal in the eyes of the law. Couples would then have the choice of investing any level of religious feeling _ or none _ into their marriage.

Where is it decreed that a marriage consecrated under the vaulted ceiling of one of Rhode Island’s beautiful churches is superior to a marriage performed on a bluff overlooking Narragansett Bay by a justice of the peace?

Who can say that a marriage done in a house worship is more loving or lasts longer than one entered into at City Hall?

What we do know is that Vermont has recognized gay civil unions since 2000. The Green Mountains have not slid into Lake Champlain.

Recognizing gay marriage does not threaten heterosexual marriages. Massachusetts has the nation’s lowest divorce rate. It hasn’t changed since the state allowed gay marriage in 2004.

Times are changing. A public opinion survey done in last August (2008) by Greenberg Quinlan Rosner Research, a nationally recognized polling company showed 49 percent of Rhode Island registered voters supported gay marriage, with 39 percent opposed. More significant is the number of voters under age 40—59 percent—who favor same-sex marriage.

The debate over gay marriage is not theoretical. It affects real people, as my WRNI colleague Flo Jonic reminded us last week.

Imagine losing a loved one and having to wait 4 weeks to claim his or her body. Jonic told the story of Mark Goldberg, a Providence man whose partner of 17 years committed suicide.

Goldberg and his partner, the late Ron Hanby, had married in Connecticut, had mutual powers of attorney and owned a home together. Yet the Rhode Island medical examiner’s office refused to release Hanby’s body to Goldberg, citing a state law that prescribes that a body can only be released to a spouse or blood relative.

Says Goldberg, "there was no reason for Ron to be on a slab somewhere in the medical examiner’s office for over a month. There’s just no dignity in that. And there was no reason to treat me as a non-citizen just because I’m not allowed to get married."

Some day in the not too distant future, when gay marriage is allowed everywhere, people will look back and wonder why there was so much fuss over this issue.

Rhode Island’s experience with gay rights in the 1990s is instructive here. It took 11 years for the General Assembly to approve the measure that bans discrimination based on sexual orientation in employment, housing, the granting of credit and in public accommodations. Hearings of that legislation were noisy and divisive. Opponents asserted a gay rights law would bring flood of complaints from victims of discrimination, clogging state courts.

Of course, no such thing ever happened. Life in Rhode Island went on as usual. Maybe then-governor Lincoln Almond expressed it best when he signed into law Rhode Island’s Gay Rights law in 1995. "This legislation is not about endorsing a particular lifestyle," Almond said. "This legislation is about tolerance. It is about extending Rhode Island’s rich tradition of tolerance to prohibit discrimination based on sexual orientation."

Almond also said something else that day that has proved prophetic. "I’m not going to have a parade. And in four months nobody is going to be talking about this."