As he observes, the Republicans attacked the Democrats for raising questions about how John Roberts' religious views might affect his judicial rulings. But when the Harriet Miers nomination started drawing criticism from the Republican base, the White House started urging them to support Miers because of her religion. Dionne writes:
The use of Miers's religion as a magnet for conservative support is not just the work of a few religious voices. It's part of the administration's strategy. The New York Times reported that the White House put Judge Nathan L. Hecht, Miers's close friend and a fellow member of Valley View Christian Church in Dallas, "on at least one conference call with influential social conservative organizers" to testify to her conservative faith.
Let's be clear: It is pro-administration conservatives, not those terrible liberals, who are making an issue of Miers's evangelical faith. Liberals are not opposing Miers because she is an evangelical. Conservatives are telling their friends to support Miers because she is an evangelical.
But maybe Democrats should be loooking more closely at her religious affiliations. Especially since that is the main qualification that the Bush team is putting forward to persuade the Christian Right to accept her.
The Constitution bans formal religious tests for office. And a healthy democratic culture should not make the religious beliefs or church affiliations an informal, de facto criteria for officeholders, either.
bUT, Obviously, members in a crackpot cult like the Branch Dividians should have their behavior scrutinized more carefully than those not associated with crackpot cults. Just because someone declares controversial opinions and behavior "religious" doesn't mean that they are. Maybe the Branch Dividians are a bad example in this context. Because the Radical Right (secular and Christian) made a martyr-hero out of their child-molesting, cop-killing fanatical cult leader, David Koresh.
John Kennedy's Address to the Greater Houston Ministerial Association of 09/12/1960 is mostly famous for his reassurance to worried Protestants that being a Roman Catholic did not mean that he would take order from the Pope when he was President. But he also recognized the possibility that the dictates of conscience in relation a church's teachings could place a believer in conflict with his secular duties as a public official in a democracy:
Whatever issue may come before me as President - on birth control, divorce, censorship, gambling or any other subject - I will make my decision in accordance with these views, in accordance with what my conscience tells me to be the national interest, and without regard to outside religious pressures or dictates. And no power or threat of punishment could cause me to decide otherwise.
But if the time should ever come - and I do not concede any conflict to be even remotely possible - when my office would require me to either violate my conscience or violate the national interest, then I would resign the office; and I hope any conscientious public servant would do the same.
But if Miers' main qualification for the Republican base is her religion, then Democrats had better find out some more details of just how she sees her religious and church obligations in relation to the Supreme Court Justices duty to uphold the Constitution.
And I don't see doing so as some tactical political manuever restricted to this one situation. Supporters of small-d democracy can't afford to remain indifferent when organized of religious believers are actively seeking to use the government to impose their religious views on other citizens who do not share their religion and even on those who do not profess the same variact of their own religion. As Demetrios James Caraley writes in the Fall 2005 print edition of the Political Science Quarterly ("Complications of American Democracy: Elections Are Not Enough"):
The attempt to use government to interfere with what has been seen as
behavior within a citizen's right of privacy and to impose the religious beliefs
of a minority of the electorate who are fundamentalist Protestants and
conservative Catholics is an extremely disturbing evolution in American
politics. This minority wishes to impose their stance on issues of private
behavior and scientific research, such as birth control, when life begins, stem
cell research, decriminalizing homosexuality, gay marriage/civil unions, the
right to die, comprehensive sex education, the distribution of condoms to
countries severely afflicted with AIDS, and the teaching of evolution versus
Genesis in public schools.
Many, primarily Republican, politicians placate this vocal minority of
Protestant Evangelicals and conservative Roman Catholics because they
consider the first a bedrock of their support and the second a way to
garner the votes of a group that has traditionally voted Democratic.
Caraley also notes that while US foreign policy "opposes theocracy abroad in Iraq [!?!] and seeks the overthrow of the Mullahs in Iran," the party of the Bush dynasty has adopted the ideology of the Christian Right "to a frigthening extent at home." Let's be generous to Caraley and assume that when he wrote about the US opposing theocracy in Iraq that he hadn't yet seen the extent to which the current pro-Iranian government which the US supports in Iraq intends to rule by sharia (Islamic law).
Caraley also refers to the op-ed earlier this year by former Republican Senator John Danforth warning of the dangers of Christian Right theocracy: In the Name of Politics, New York Times 03/30/05. In that essay, Danforth wrote:
By a series of recent initiatives, Republicans have transformed our party into the political arm of conservative Christians. The elements of this transformation have included advocacy of a constitutional amendment to ban gay marriage, opposition to stem cell research involving both frozen embryos and human cells in petri dishes, and the extraordinary effort to keep Terri Schiavo hooked up to a feeding tube. ...
In my state, Missouri, Republicans in the General Assembly have advanced legislation to criminalize even stem cell research in which the cells are artificially produced in petri dishes and will never be transplanted into the human uterus. They argue that such cells are human life that must be protected, by threat of criminal prosecution, from promising research on diseases like Alzheimer's, Parkinson's and juvenile diabetes.It is not evident to many of us that cells in a petri dish are equivalent to identifiable people suffering from terrible diseases. I am and have always been pro-life. But the only explanation for legislators comparing cells in a petri dish to babies in the womb is the extension of religious doctrine into statutory law.
Probably anticipating the objections of the Christian Right who immediately start pleading religious persecution in response to challenges to their political power, Danforth also wrote:
I do not fault religious people for political action. Since Moses confronted the pharaoh, faithful people have heard God's call to political involvement. Nor has political action been unique to conservative Christians. Religious liberals have been politically active in support of gay rights and against nuclear weapons and the death penalty. In America, everyone has the right to try to influence political issues, regardless of his religious motivations.
The problem is not with people or churches that are politically active. It is with a party that has gone so far in adopting a sectarian agenda that it has become the political extension of a religious movement.
Those who don't support the radical agenda of the Christian Right had better take seriously the transformation of the Grand Old Party into the Christian Republican White Peoples Party.
I also couldn't help but think in reading Danforth's comments, that Moses confronting the Pharoah required a whole different level of faith and personal courage than demonstrators trying to intimidate distressed young women entering an abortion clinic. Or a Christian terrorist gunning down an abortion provider.
And since they're on a Christian jihad to take over the government, it's worth it for the rest of us to keep up with their shenanigans. The Texas Observer has a couple of new pieces up on the subject:
Meet the Fundies: Here are a few of the Texans who are bringing Christian Fundamentalism into state politics by Steve Satterwhite Texas Observer 10/07/05. Satterwhite focuses on Christian Right activists supporting an anti-gay marriage initiative on the Texas ballot for November. He writes:
Many of the people with whom we did speak used identical words to describe their position and cited similar statistics indicating an anti-gay echo chamber. Mary Ann Markarian rattled off numbers that come from widely discredited reports by Paul Cameron. The chairman of a right-wing outfit called the Family Research Institute, Cameron was dropped from membership in the American Psychological Association in 1983 for lack of cooperation with the Committee on Scientific and Professional Ethics and Conduct. Several identified Kelly Shackleford as a leader. Shackleford, a former GOP delegate, is president of a radical right think-tank called the Free Market Foundation. He also works as a lawyer with the Liberty Legal Institute, where he helps to gin out prayer-in-school and anti-evolution lawsuits.
Mary Ann Markarian of Sugar Land (Tom DeLay's home base) knows that sex sells. So she offers up a few pornographic image to titillate the rubes. And she says:
Now I know this is not real pleasant, but the truth needs to come out. When we say the word "gay," we’re really just hiding because we're really not understanding what that word really entails - what it means, what people are doing, and why this can hurt society as a whole. It's never been an accepted lifestyle. If we allow this to become accepted, then the numbers will grow astronomically. Now they want to take it into the classroom, to teach our children that this is okay. Our society is two to three percent gay, but if you teach children that homosexuality is okay, then we’re going to have a lot of problems.
In other words: THEY'RE COMING TO GET YOU... AND YOUR CHILDREN... What a sleaze-bag.
Monte Watkins of Houston shares some of her political enthusiasms with us:
I testified for myself as an individual at the hearing [on the initiative], but I am a member of a myriad of groups including the Mordecai Mission Initiative, the Eagle Forum, and the Daughters of Liberty who support the marriage plank of the Republican Party. I founded the Gulf Coast Eagle Forum because I felt like I could get more knowledge if I did that; I had a lot of respect for Phyllis Schafly, a very smart lady.She assures us of her Christian love for the sinful homosexuals. And then tells us:
I don't believe in killing, stealing, or adultery either, and to me all of those things are in the same category [with homosexuality]. We have laws against theft, murder, even against lying, so it doesn't make me a bad person because I disagree [with the gay rights crowd] on this homosexuality issue, too. ...
A few years ago, my husband and I were at one of the [Gay Pride Week parades]. After the parade broke up, some of them walked by us, talking to each other, but I heard them look around and say, "Mess with us, and we'll rape your kids."
Anecdotal stories supposedly based on personal experience are part of the stock lines of the Christian Right. When you're fighting such horrible enemies as killers and gays, a little lie here and there is perfectly Godly. I wonder if she and her husband filed a police report about that incident; I believe extortion is illegal in Texas. But filing false police reports probably is, too.
Alan Ward claims he takes part in a college ministry of some kind. He leads us to believe that a particular family experience affected his views.
We had a homosexual in my family, a young man. During high school, he learned to be gay; he wasn't before that. Was that different for my family? You bet it was, because we are a family of heterosexuals who really believe in being heterosexual. About two years ago, that young man learned not to be homosexual, and he has a girlfriend now. Right in the midst of all this social controversy, he learned to be gay, and then he learned not to be. I’ve seen him changed, and I've seen two or three or four changed. ...
Even if your mother was a racist, you can condemn her actions and behavior, but you will also defend her until the day she dies. Nobody is going to lay a hand on your mother because you love her. If your mother is a racist, she was taught to be a racist, and being taught to be a racist does not make it right. Homosexuals were also taught homosexual behaviors, but that doesn't make those behaviors right either.
The constant effort to associate gays with unrelated negative images is pretty obvious. This particular group of zealots isn't especially subtle. Chances are these folks figure are very concerned about racism - because they think us poor persecuted white folks are the main victims of it.
The weirdness of this way of thinking can be pretty disturbing. Like this odd story about the "young man" in the family who "learned to be gay" during high school. Don't straight kids "learn to be straight" at that age, too? How did they know he was straight before? Was he carrying on steamy heterosexual affairs at age 13?
Noe Reyes, a Latino attorney and choir director, takes the following bold stand against hatemongers among anti-gay fundamentalists:
And again, supporting this amendment is not an act of hostility. It's not a personal act of violence. [Say what? - Bruce] Perhaps as a church we've done a poor job of articulating that, maybe because at times we’re not mature enough in our relationship with God that we can articulate it that way. But I'm not going to question a person's Christianity because they're flinging words of hate at homosexuals. I won't agree with it, but I'm very careful about making a judgment call and saying, "Hey, I don't think you're Christian."
I heard recently there was a church, a Baptist church, in one of the southern states—they did some kind of rally, yelling, "We hate homosexuals. We hate you for this. God’s going to kill you. God hates you. Blah, blah, blah." Clearly, that's wrong. No doubt, no doubt. Now if this is a church doing it, well, you know, there are some elements of that kind of thinking everywhere. Look at some of the extreme Muslim churches, you know - "God hates everyone who isn’t Muslim, so we're going kill you all." You gotta watch out for that, but that kind of extreme position is not representative of the Christian body.
Well, we have to show Christian tolerance for anti-gay hatemongers, and ... look! Over there! Evil Muslims!
And if that's not a big enough dose for you, the same issue includes: For the Love of God: Old Time Religion Texas Observer 10/07/05.
Rev. Phillip "Flip" Benham ... Benham is the director of the Dallas-based anti-abortion group Operation Save America (formerly Operation Rescue). In Benham's view, the Lord cast down Katrina and Rita upon America as a warning that we must stop the sins of abortion and "homosexual sodomy." (Note to our hetero readers: Benham was very specific about the homosexual part, so it looks like you're off the hook on the sodomy end of things until further notice.) Basically, we must repent all our other sins or the Lord will rain down ever greater horrors upon us.
On September 23, Benham put out a press release that reads in part, "God is roaring to us in America. Can we hear Him now?" The good reverend's statement continues, "This time He is using Rita to get our attention. He has something to say to a nation that 'legalized' child sacrifice. We have been warned, we have experienced His judgments [those being Katrina and Rita]… Our call as a nation is to repent - not rebuild. REPENT! He will not be silent. God has more disaster than our federal government has relief!"
Given the amount of relief that the Bush administration provided after Katrina, that's not necessarily saying much.
But its folks like this who have become the hardcore base of the Christian Republican White Peoples Party. The country club Republicans made a Faustian pact with the Christian Right. They have a long, rocky ride ahead of them.
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