Because their preferences actually do impact my life, that of my daughter, and that of my husband. Personal experience. Just making the point that your experience with Christian members of your community isn’t the only possible experience.
Yes. I work with some of those immigrants, too, although certainly not as many. Of the group behaviors that bother some people about Hispanic immigrants, quite a few are repeated in the Chinese immigrant community in NYC.
Some religious conservatives are trying to roll back gay marriage and abortion. In terms of creationism or intelligent design being taught in public schools or with public funding, there may be some in Louisiana and Tennessee.
http://www.slate.com/articles/health_and_science/science/2014/01/creationism_in_public_schools_mapped_where_tax_money_supports_alternatives.html
There there are the “bathroom bills” referring to the T in LGBT.
True and I appreciate the fact that you referenced religious conservatives and not Christians. There actually is a difference.
I don’t have any problem with Christians as a whole. My father was, in fact, a student of Reinhold Niebuhr which greatly shaped his work for civil rights.
How so?
Most non-Jewish Brooklyn based friends live near/around them…in some cases for decades and had no issues with them.
There’s also a sizable Hasidic community in my area as well co-existing without issues. They mind their own business…and everyone else minds theirs with some friendly greetings exchanged whenever we interact.
Moreover, I’m not sure most of them would be considered “immigrants” considering many of them have been living in the US for generations.
@cobrat:
I can’t speak for @zoosermom, but the Hasidim in some places have hurt a lot of other people, do a web search for example of the town of Lakewood in NJ or places like Ramapo, NY. What has happened in these towns and elsewhere is that Hasidim move in in numbers (which isn’t surprising, given that they have to walk to the synagogue on the Sabbath and so forth), and become a majority member of the community. What has happened is that they then, for example, take over the school board, and they slash school spending (in NJ, like most places, funding is based mostly on local property taxes) and cut property taxes, basically arguing since their kids don’t go to the public schools, they shouldn’t have to pay for it, and there has been the same thing that happens with other groups, where for example the Yeshiva schools take advantage of public school buses to bus their kids, or use school funds for special education students for their kids that need it in their schools (which is not illegal, there are laws about that, that private schools/relgious schools have the right to some school services, because obviously their members pay taxes, too), the problem is while doing this they take funding out of the public schools that benefits the rest of the kids. In Ramapo the school board sold off a school, claiming it was excess,and the remaining schools ended up running at capacity, class sizes shot up and so forth, because teachers were let go when the school closed…then about 6 months later, the school was sold to the Hasidic community for use as a yeshiva, and it was sold at a price well below the market price (it took an investigative reporter to uncover this and forced the issue with the state, politicians tread lightly with the hasidim because they tend to vote all one way, they are a block that really is one).
Other things people mention are that because of their large families, and also the level of education and the kind of work most Hasidic people do , they tend to be big users of both things like food stamps and section 8 housing vouchers (I forget the exact percentage, but in a town like Kiryas Joel in Dutchess County, NY, it is a large majority of the households), in NYC as a group the Hasidim were the largest percentage user of public housing (within their community, not talking absolute numbers). Also,in NJ a lot of support services like fire and EMT are volunteer organizations, and in Hasidic majority towns there have been complaints that rather than staff the volunteer services, they create their own for example ambulance squads that work only for their community, and let the town one wither and die (I am saying complaints, because I haven’t seen any proof of that).
Hasidim in the US are a small community relatively so they aren’t big players on the national scene, but locally there are places that are being referred to by @zoosermom and others.
One thing that I have noticed is that the most conservative (religiously and politically) members of a given religion often try to appropriate the religion’s name to mean their (religious and political) values, even if most who practice the religion do not have the same values. Unfortunately, they are often noisy and outrageous-sounding to others, so they tend to get the most attention, sometimes resulting in successfully (for them) causing the religion’s name to be seen by others as being represented by them.
“True and I appreciate the fact that you referenced religious conservatives and not Christians. There actually is a difference.”
The religious conservatives who are behind the anti evolution, anti science, anti Logical Thinking curricula in schools, who want to ban abortion, who want to try and roll back LGBT rights, make trans people’s lives a living hell, are almost totally conservative Christians, and of that most of them are the protestant, ultra conservative Christians the press has labelled as “evangelicals”, come them fundamentalists, call them what you not, it is the mega churches, it is the Southern Baptists, these are the people who make up most of the ‘religious right’ we talk about, the rest are mostly the 20% of Catholics who actually follow the party line of the church leaders in the US, who are as hard right as any fundamentalist (not only hard right protestant churches are fundamentalist, either, the term fundamentalist is not a good descriptor for all hard right Christians, fundamentalism is its own particular set of beliefs). This isn’t surprising, given that at least 80% of the country is Christian or Christian in backround (might be 90%) and the conservative religious of other groups,like Jews and Muslims, are too few to really influence things, Jews are not a huge group to start with, and large percentages of jews are either reform or cultural ie non practicing.
The only reason we have same sex marriage, we have gay rights laws (in some areas) and we have abortion is that fo the most part, the courts weighed in on it, the first gay rights laws were decided by judges, and so forth. And while abortion may be legal still, thanks to sympathetic courts and the religious conservative domination in some places, there are large swaths of this country where de facto abortion is illegal, the rules and regulations and zoning laws, not to mention threats of violence, mean there are no abortion providers there, and the courts have allowed all kinds of infringements on that right there. Without going into the details, the country has a history of religious belief being turned directly into law and religious groups given power they never should have, and any example I can think of it was conservative Christians behind it. It is amazing because religious conservatives make up maybe 20% of the country but have had such outsize influence.
@musiprnt
It’s a bit hypocritical to single out the Hasidim for this when there are plenty of native-born White Americans who have large families on public assistance and/or who attempt to divert public funding away from actual public schools to private schools through various means(i.e. Segregation Academies in the south, charter schools, etc) as a rebuke to segregation and because they didn’t like the fact a '60s era Supreme Court ruling meant they couldn’t maintain public schools as effective Protestant Christian ones.
Worse, the national influence of those who are part of the politicized fundamentalist evangelical Christian movement are currently exerting their influence to try further facilitating this as we speak.
My Mississippi based branch of my family got to observe and their kids experienced the negative effects of this before the parents wised up and moved them to better schools. Also observed the phenomenon of large White families on public assistance for generations firsthand while attending college in my rural Midwest college town areas
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This is very true and you are very wise!
My husband’s job is currently embroiled in a controversy with a group in Brooklyn over the procedure for garbage pick-up. My daughter works in a similar neighborhood, also in Brooklyn, and some (certainly not all) of the members of the community give a hard time to non-religious young women who work in the area on a daily basis. I am not a fan of ethnic enclaves, but I do understand needing to walk to the synagogue.
musicprnt, I am generally a great admirer or your posts, but you totally lost me with the first sentence in your first paragraph. I think I needed a roadmap to follow it!
http://www.pewforum.org/religious-landscape-study/ indicates:
70.6% Christian (including 25.4% evangelical Protestant, 14.7% mainline Protestant, 6.5% historically black Protestant, and 20.8% Catholic)
5.9% non-Christian faiths (including 1.9% Jewish and 0.9% Muslim)
22.8% unaffiliated (including 3.1% atheist, 4.0% agnostic, and 15.8% “nothing in particular”)
These groups are not always separate.
Cobrat - I’m a fairly observant Jew, and I honestly don’t think there’s a precise parallel to the situation zoosermom and musicprnt are describing (although I’m sure you’ll try to come up with one). There’s nothing antisemitic or untoward in acknowledging the reality that while certain Hassidic communities are of minor importance to the US at large, there are isolated instances of them having an outsize, negative impact on local districts different in kind from the type of negative impact caused by, say, right-wing Christian attempts to influence curricula. If you happen to live in, say, Ramapo NJ, the former is a much bigger problem than the later. The great majority of Jews – including most Orthodox Jews – would, I think, be in agreement with me on this.
There is a street sign welcoming people to the town of Kiryas Joel that says, "in keeping with our traditions and religious customs, we kindly ask that you dress and behave in a modest way while visiting our community. This includes - WEARING LONG SKIRTS OR PANTS, COVERED NECKLINES, SLEEVES PAST THE ELBOW, USE APPROPRIATE LANGUAGE, MAINTAIN GENDER SEPARATION IN ALL PUBLIC AREAS.
I made the letters larger here because that is how they are printed on the signs. The want different genders walking on different sides of the street. You can imagine that visiting long distance bicyclists, in their gender mixed groups, all wearing shorts, run into some disapproval.
Again, they are not immigrants, or mostly not, but it’s the kind of stubborn and insular refusal to jump in the melting pot that drives people crazy. It’s not just that they are keeping their cultural values strong, they are pushing them outwards onto others.
Godwin’s law aside, this site has TOS. If you want to insinuate other posters are like Nazis, perhaps you should find a different venue to express those beliefs. Or if you’re not insinuating anything about the views of any other posters in relation to the original topic and just going on a historical tangent on what the world was like 70+ years ago, then cobrat must be rubbing off on you.
Well for my part, I always read @cobrat posts. I may not always agree but I learn something.
Fallenchemist, may he Rest In Peace, advised me once that this site is much more enjoyable if certain posters never engage with or read the posts of certain other posters. I thought that was very wise and I follow his advice.
My ultimate view of immigration is that for such a vast nation as ours, with potential immigrants from almost every culture in the world, we all have to respect that it is complicated, that our own experiences can be completely foreign to other citizens and vice versa, and that even the best of intentions can have very bad consequences. We must never forget that both immigrants and citizens are human beings and must be regarded as such. I like to discuss my experience with immigrants only because there is a knee jerk reaction from some folks that any reservations about illegal immigration are racist. That is not the case.
One issue is that when one singles out a minority group for behaviors/actions that members of the dominant majority in some areas, but also nationally have not only also done, but have demonstrated on a far greater scale by virtue of being the dominant majority, it causes one to wonder about whether the implicit one-sidedness is due to anti-immigration/anti-minority attitudes.
Especially considering such types of cherry-picking has had a long history among various anti-immigrant/anti-minority/White supremacist groups going back to the early days of our Republic.
It’s also a bit of a non-sequitor like an earlier poster’s point about Saudi Arabia considering most Hasidic Jews have been here in the US for a few generations and thus…not immigrants.
Also, there’s cultural friction even among different groups of Americans depending on which geographic region or sometimes even neighborhood within a given city as the recent news story about a former White UWS woman complaining about Ice Cream trucks right after moving into Harlem which most of the long-time residents interviewed felt were ridiculous and a sign she’s trying to remake Harlem into her former well-off UMC gentrified neighborhood(One who was interviewed underscored this by mentioning how some upscale real estate firms were trying to rebrand Harlem as “SoHa” and attempt to gentrify the neighborhood in the process) or those like her who move into NYC neighborhoods like Greenwich Village/East Village, Williamsburg, Crown Heights, Bushwick, etc with a long established history of arts and live musical venues and then getting many of those venues shut down because they expected those neighborhoods to be like the well-off suburbs they came from.
The last is an issue which has irked many friends who grew up/have/had families who lived in those neighborhoods for generations precisely because they appreciated having a lively arts/live music venues around.
Not exactly a yes-or-no to various immigration issues, but the often used phrase “otherwise law-abiding” doesn’t set well with me. The idea that we should not enforce our federal laws upon a foreigner when a law breaker is caught because he/she is “otherwise law abiding”. Our American citizens don’t always have it so good, Martha Stewart and Bernie Madoff for example. Their defense wasn’t that they were otherwise law abiding. If I were to commit an arson, then claim that “yes I did it, but It was only once!”, and that otherwise I am law abiding, we all know that just wouldn’t fly.