MyQuest | my thoughts on life's journey

Religion not the monopoly of the political right

The Washington Post relates how religious language and argument are now not only used by the American political right.  Progressive politicians have begun to increasingly site their faith and values.  And politicians on the right are having to defend their religious claims, not just site them.  This is good for religion and for politics.

Obama's "evolution"

Yesterday, about an hour before the announcement, I saw on Twitter the prediction that he would be announcing his change of mind yesterday.  I read the analysis of that, which I found more interesting than the actual announcement.  

I was in the middle of something and received a call from a friend who was excited and wanted to share.  Because I had been busy, I had not been on-line to see the burst of news.  I rather unenthusiastically responded.

Now, I'm normally very excited by every major vote in our favour, every court ruling, every important development.  But this didn't really excite me in any way.

I guess partly because I think this was his actual position all along and that he only took the opposite position because of political cowardice.  Overcoming your vices doesn't deserve celebration on my part.

Another reason is because I don't find this a difficult or controversial moral issue.  It should be a pretty easy call.  Nor is it leadership when a majority of the country already feels that way.  There shouldn't have been a religious issue for him, as he was part of the UCC which has endorsed marriage equality theologically.

The "evolution" language has always annoyed me.  And I think that the final evolution was politically expedient because major gay donors had been withholding funds.  I generally agree with this WashPost blogger.  

The HRC wanted everyone to send a thank you e-mail to the President.  Unlike most of their e-mails, they didn't let you change the text.  I didn't agree with their text, and didn't send it.  

Yes, this president has achieved more for LGBT rights than any other president before, but when you are comparing to a bunch of folks that did nothing or actually enacted laws to make our situation worse (Bill Clinton), then there isn't much to compare to.  I don't find that he's acted with moral courage or leadership on our issues.  And I doubt I will forgive him or Democrat party for their failure to pass ENDA when they controlled the Congress.  Part of the array of things I was voting for in 2008 was to see that achieved within the year.  I really don't think I'll ever get over that disappointment.

So, this President has still not excited or motivated me.  I'm still disappointed in him.  With his personal change of heart yesterday came no call for action and no new steps, because he basically said his personal position wouldn't change any federal policies or laws.  Well, that was Dick Cheney's view a decade or more ago.  Doesn't do much for me and my household.

One qualification: will his public position put more pressure upon those opponents in the African-American community to change their position or lessen their opposition?  If so, then I'll be grateful for that.

Signorile criticizes Axelrod's gay panic

Michelangelo Signorile writes about the Joe Biden endorsement of marriage equality and the gay panic it sent David Axelrod into.

Who exactly was supposed to be appeased by Axelrod's tweet? The Christian right, which isn't voting for Obama and believes he is for gay marriage no matter how many tweets Axelrod sends? Or is it independents, who really couldn't care less about this issue but see another episode in which an indecisive, fearful leader doesn't take a stand, the opposite of the kind of leader independents like to vote for? Is there really a group of voters out there that would switch votes from Obama to Romney because the vice president -- who is unlikely to ever become president -- vaguely supports marriage equality?

The answer is no on all counts. And that's how you know it's a gay panic -- an irrational fear of all things gay that has politicians acting on impulse rather than reason.

The walk-back was offensive because it was another slap in the face, a reminder that this "fierce advocate" not only doesn't support full equality but can't tolerate it even from his number two. However vague Biden may have been, there's no question he articulated a different position from the president. He prefaced his comments by saying, "I am vice president of the United States of America. The president sets the policy." That was a clear admission that he had a different opinion than Obama. And Biden's office stressed that the comments were Biden's own comments, not the administration's. Why would that matter if Biden's own opinion was the same as Obama's?

Signorile points out that the Bush administration respected a wider difference of opinion.  Dick Cheney has supported most LGBT rights for more than decade, while George W. proposed a constitutional amendment to ban marriage equality.  So, the Bush administration looks more tolerant of difference.

Ryan budget runs counter to Christian teaching

Ahead of his appearance at Georgetown University, Catholic academics write an open letter to Rep. Paul Ryan asking him to quit misusing Catholic Social Teaching to support his budget, which defies the teaching of the church, as the US Conference of Catholic Bishops has previously pointed out.  The best excerpt from the letter:

In short, your budget appears to reflect the values of your favorite philosopher, Ayn Rand, rather than the Gospel of Jesus Christ. Her call to selfishness and her antagonism toward religion are antithetical to the Gospel values of compassion and love.

Does the current House GOP majority want to repeal the 20th century?

One HuffPost commentator says yes, that this is the most reactionary Congress since 1896, and that they share much in common with McKinley-era Republicans (repudiating both the Lincoln and Teddy Roosevelt Republicans who bookended them).

And of course, none of the advances of the 20th century were yet in place: child labor laws, consumer safety, the national parks or later environmental laws, consumer safety, popular election of Senators, women's suffrage, a progressive tax system, decent labor laws, a minimum wage, Social Security, Glass-Steagall, the GI Bill, civil rights laws, Medicare, Medicaid, Legal Services, Head Start. None of it existed.

Flash forward to today. With the exception of women's suffrage (and given the gender gap, I have no doubt that secretly Republicans would be happy to get rid of that), various high-level Republicans from this session of Congress have argued for the repeal or severe curtailment of all of those advances. This is not just Conservative with a capital C, but Reactionary with a capital R.

This is why the worship by so many pundits and establishment figures of bipartisanship and meeting in the middle as the all-around best value in American politics is so fundamentally wrong as a political strategy for Democrats. With the Republicans in Congress actually wanting to repeal the gains of the 20th century, for Democrats to meet them halfway becomes a nightmare strategy. Repealing half of the 20th century is just not a reasonable compromise, even though that would be meeting the Republicans halfway.

Responding to religious liberty document of US Conference of Catholic Bishops

My friend Rob Howard sent me this letter, which I had missed, from the U. S. Conference of Catholic Bishops.  It discusses religious liberty and, in particular, the contraception issue.  I have a few replies, as I continue to be surprised by the novel interpretations of religious liberty that the Catholic Church has been embracing recently (I've posted about this a number of times in recent months).

First off, the final paragraph surprised me, particularly this line: "our First Freedom—religious liberty—which is not only protected in the laws and customs of our great nation, but rooted in the teachings of our greatTradition."  Historically the Roman Catholic Church has never been understood as big defenders of religious liberty nor have they actively embraced it and argued for it in those nations where they are dominant.  As a former Baptist who were among the very first to argue for religious liberty, this very much surprised me.

There are three issues that the bishops raise against the contraception rule.  First, "The mandate includes anextremely narrow definition of what HHS deems a “religious employer” deserving exemption—employers who, among other things, must hire and serve primarily those of their own faith. We are deeply concerned about this new definition of who we are as people of faith and what constitutes our ministry."

As a matter of law the government often has to make these sorts of decisions.  I'd refer you to Martha Nussbaum's great book on the history of religious liberty and our constantly developing application of our constitutional doctrines.  Her overall estimate is that we generally have done a good job in law and the courts of adjudicating these matters, with some clear failures along the way.  Government must in order to avoid the chaos and anarchy that Justice Scalia warned of in a religious exemption case in the early 90's, decide these sorts of questions.  Admittedly there is a wide gray area and any decision deserves scrutiny and re-examination based upon empirical consequences.

But I don't think that the government has tried to define what is religious and what is not.  They have tried to determine what employers are subject to the law and which are exempt.  In a wide range of laws churches are exempt (but not all, building codes for instance) in ways that church-owned businesses such as schools and hospitals are not.  That is already the case.

The courts have consistently held that when institutions receive government money they have to abide by the rules set by the government.  Some religious traditions, therefore, do not accept any government money because that leaves them free to act.  In fact, Baptist churches I served had intentionally avoided government money for this reason.  The Roman Catholic Church has often accepted government money for its programs.  They seem to be upset about losing establishment privilege and don't want to be a sectarian group (as I've often written, we also provide you the opportunity to be a sectarian group and live separately from society if you object to society -- think of the Amish).

Many churches have gotten out of the medical care business precisely because the rules and regulations for medical care might not align with their doctrine.  This doesn't mean that they have to sacrifice doing ministry.  They may still contribute large amounts to health care, but they often spin off their hospitals to be separate businesses not owned by the denominations.  Frankly, if the pluralistic, American democracy determines that X will be the standards all people should accept in health care, and the RCC does not want to accomodate X, then they should get out of the direct health care business.  That is the best way to actually protect their religious liberty.   Religious liberty does NOT mean that the rest of us have always to accomodate your doctrinal beliefs (though there is a place for accomodation as the courts have consistently held).

The second point they make is, "Those deemed by HHS not to be “religious employers” will be forced by government to violate their own teachings within their veryown institutions. This is not only an injustice in itself, but it also undermines the effective proclamation of those teachings to the faithful and to the world."

Some of the points I made above apply here as well.  The government can set standards in order to do business.  Abiding by those standards does not in and of itself violate your conscience or your religious beliefs.  Generally those standards mean that you cannot impose your beliefs upon others -- customers, clients, patients, employees.  Does this mean you may have to do things you'd rather not do, even things that you think are wrong?  Yes.  But that happens all the time.  It is part of living in a pluralistic society.  For instance, my tax money continues to support wars, capital punishment, and other activities that I believe are wrong.  The government does not accomodate my religious objections.  

Let us also remember that the government is not telling anyone they have to personally take contraception if they don't believe in it.  That would be government force and a violation of conscience.  The government is saying that you have to make it available for others who want to use it based upon their freedom to choose to use it.  The freedom of individual is being protected from the institution.

Which gets us to the third point of the Bishops Conference:

The HHS mandate creates still a third class,those with no conscience protection at all: individuals who, in their daily lives, strive constantly to act in accordance with their faith and moral values. They, too, face agovernment mandate to aid in providing “services” contrary to those values—whether intheir sponsoring of, and payment for, insurance as employers; their payment of insurancepremiums as employees; or as insurers themselves—without even the semblance of anexemption. This, too, is unprecedented in federal law, which has long been generous inprotecting the rights of individuals not to act against their religious beliefs or moralconvictions.

This is the claim that has outraged me in recent months because it is such a wild distortion of the tradition of religous liberty which is so important and quasi-sacred to me.  If an individual businessperson can follow their own conscience in violation of the law, then the chaos Justice Scalia warned of would in fact ensue.  The reasoning used by the Catholic Bishops here is analogous to saying that if your religious belief was against Jews, you could deny them employment or custom.  If your religious belief was that women should not work, you could not employ them.  If your religious belief was prejudiced against black people, you could deny them service.

This is NOT what religious liberty is all about.  Quit bastardizing it because of your inability to surrender your privilege and live in the pluralistic, twenty-first century.

Politics is constructive/destructive

According to Walter Isaacson's biography, Steve Jobs told Rupert Murdoch, "The axis today is not liberal and conservative, the axis is constructive-destructive."  He told Murdoch that FoxNews was on the destructive side of that axis.

FoxNews aside, I found this to be an interesting and potentially insightful analysis.  It does explain the confusion around some issues where historically liberal, moderate, and conservative people now agree and yet all get lumped together and viewed negatively by a group of people that generally is described as far right, despite many of them engaging in a form of populism and historically having been members of the Democratic Party (evangelicals, Roman Catholics, Southerners, for instance).

Lakoff on the Santorum strategy

George Lakoff, once again, reminds progressives not to cede the public discourse to radical conservatives and to quite strengthening the radical conservatives by using their language.   Rather, develop one's own based on progressive values.  Lakoff made these points after John Kerry's defeat and progressives got better at following his advice, which is one reason I think that they did well in 2006 and 2008.  

Liberals tend to underestimate the importance of public discourse and its effect on the brains of our citizens. All thought is physical. You think with your brain. You have no alternative. Brain circuitry strengthens with repeated activation. And language, far from being neutral, activates complex brain circuitry that is rooted in conservative and liberal moral systems. Conservative language, even when argued against, activates and strengthens conservative brain circuitry. This is extremely important for so-called "independents," who actually have both conservative and liberal moral systems in their brains and can shift back and forth. The more they hear conservative language over the next eight months, the more their conservative brain circuitry will be strengthened.

Religious liberty doesn't make me "throw up"

Rick Santorum said many embarassing and frightening things over the weekend, including his outrageous comments on higher education.  But what led the news this morning was his comments on John Kennedy's famous 1960 address to Baptists in Houston, that reading that speech made him want to throw up.  Wow!  

So, this morning I went downstairs and got my collection of Kennedy speeches and re-read that famous speech.  I am shocked that anyone would find it objectionable.  That Santorum does is incredibly revealing.  And people should pay attention.

Evangelicals were worried about a Catholic president, that he would be overly influenced by the Catholic hierarchy, and Kennedy met with them to assure them of his commitment to religious liberty and the separation of church and state.  Here is Kennedy's core statement:

I believe in an America where the separation of church and state is absolute--where no Catholic prelate would tell the President (should he be Catholic) how to act, and no Protestant minister would tell his parishoners for whom to vote -- where no church or church school is granted any public funds or political preference -- and where no man is denied public office merely because his religion differs from the President who might appoint him or the people who might elect him.

In addition to that, "I believe in an America . . . where no religious body seeks to impose its will directly or indirectly upon the general populace or the public acts of its officials."

It is very disappointing that in 2012 a Catholic candidate would deny that claim.  It is also troubling that evangelicals would now accept someone denying that claim, where fifty years ago they expected a candidate to make that claim.  

Kennedy also made a bold statement about the conflict between private consciences and the national interest, "But if the time should ever come . . .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."

Re-reading Kennedy's speech, I became interested to re-read George Washington Truett's famous 1920 sermon on the steps of the nation's Capitol "Baptists and Religious Liberty."  In some ways it sets the context for the concerns that Kennedy was addressing when he spoke to the Baptists in Houston.

Re-reading the Truett for the first time probably since the 1990's, I was surprised by how dated it is and how sectarian it is.  I had not remembered that.  But it was as clear about individual liberty and the separation of church and state as I remembered it.  

It would be good for this sermon to re-enter the national dialogue, especially as it addresses the concerns a century ago about Catholic hierarchy and its conflict with religious liberty.  As Truett portrays the 1920's Baptist vision, religious liberty is for the individual not the church or institution.  In fact the individual's conscience is free even from the church.  

As I've been saying the last month or so in relation to the contraception issue, the religious liberty to be safeguarded is that of the person, the employees of Catholic hospitals who should not have Catholic doctrine imposed upon them.  

Here is what Truett preached (I've highlighted the key part of the paragraph):

Baptists have one consistent record concerning liberty throughout all their long and eventful history.  They have never been a party to oppression of conscience.  They have forever been the unwavering champions of liberty, both religious and civil.  Their contention now, is, and has been, and, please God, must ever be, that it is the natural and fundamental and indefeasible right of every human being to worship God or not, according to the dictates of his conscience, and, as long as he does not infringe upon the rights of others, he is to be held accountable alone to God for all religious beliefs and practices. Our contention is not for mere toleration, but for absolute liberty.  There is a wide difference between toleration and liberty.  Toleration implies that somebody falsely claims the right to tolerate.  Toleration is a concession, while liberty is a right. Toleration is a matter of expediency, while liberty is a matter of principle. . . It is the consistent and insistent contention of our Baptist people, always and everywhere, that religion must be forever voluntary and uncoerced, and that it is not the perogative of any power, whether civil or ecclesiastical, to compel men to conform to any religious creed or form of worship, or to pay taxes for the support of a religious organization to which they do not believe.  God wants free worshipers and no other kind.

Truett held views which we would now label as anti-Catholic.  Post-Vatican II mainline Protestants and even evangelicals made siginificant strides in over-coming their anti-Catholicism, but largely because the Roman church had made significant strides in overcoming their opposition to Protestants.  We spent fifty years drawing closer together, only to now be drawing farther apart as the Roman Catholic Church goes backward on the changes of Vatican II and mainline Protestants continue to move forward on social justice issues in contemporary life that the Catholic church hasn't even begun to address adequately.

Here was Truett's concern.  It was not about the individual Catholic believer; he argued vigorously for their freedom of religion.  His concern was the hierarchy and its way of structuring ecclesiastical power in opposition to individual liberty.

Likewise, the Catholic conception of the church , thrusting all its complex and cumbrous machinery between the soul and God, prescribing beliefs, claiming to exercise the power of the keys, and to control the channels of grace; all such lording it over the consciences of men is to the Baptist mind a ghastly tyranny in the realm of the soul and tends to frustrate the grace of God, to destroy freedom of conscience, and to hinder terribly the coming of the Kingdom of God.

***

The right to private judgment is the crown jewel of humanity, and for any person or institution to dare to come between the soul and God is a blasphemous impertinence and a defamation of the crown rights of the Son of God.

Out of these two fundamental principles, the supreme authority of the Scriptures and the right of private judgment, have come all the historic protests in Europe or England and America against unscriptural creeds, polity and rites, and against the unwarranted and impertinent assumption of religious authority over men's consciences, whether by church or by state. Baptists regard as an enormity any attempt to force the conscience, or to constrain men, by outward penalties, to this or that form of religious belief. Persecution may make men hypocrites, but it will not make them Christians.

We would do well to remember that this famous, influential sermon of Truett's details the context and the concerns that Kennedy was addressing in his famous 1960 speech.  

We would also do well to remember the important distinction that Truett makes -- that religious liberty resides with the individual, sometimes in opposition to their church when that church tries to override individual conscience.

We are in a frightening place in the United States when a leading candidate for President casts scorn upon our magnificient tradition of religious liberty.

The Catholicization of the American Right

Here is a fascinating analysis of trends in the right, especially focused on why Protestant Evangelicals are suddenly aligning themselves with Roman Catholics.  Here is an excerpt:

To understand what is going on, we need to move from the role of Catholic individuals to a broader, more metaphorical idea of a Catholic style of political reasoning. "Catholic" in this exercise means responding to leadership; focusing on outcomes (think "doctrine of works"); and a Manichean view of the world in which the Church -- as opposed to mere churches -- stands as a bulwark against equally great opposing forces, so that outside the Church there can be only chaos. In this sense a Catholic Republican voter would be someone looking for a commanding general to lead Christian soldiers on a crusade, would care about a candidate's policies rather than his soul, and respond to a call to view the Republican Party as the last bastion of civilisation in a howling wilderness. Extending the metaphor, a "Protestant" conservative should reject the idea of leaders in favour of grass roots communalism; local self-direction in the congregationalist model; care about character and personal values more than specific stances or doctrines; and see the world as a mass of sinners who are to be judged individually by the quality of their soul rather than by their enlistment in one party or the other.

In this metaphorical sense, the "Catholic" political style is strongest among evangelical Protestant voters, not actual Catholics. The eagerness of Catholic bishops to jump into a fight over contraception, for example, does not reflect that attitudes of their parishoners, but it gets strong support from evangelicals. Similarly, in one recent poll more than two-thirds of Catholic voterssupported some sort of legal recognition of gay couples' relationships, with 44% favoring same-sex marriage; in very sharp contrast, an outright majority of evangelical voters said there should be no legal recognition of a same-sex relationship.

In political terms, the evangelical Protestant Right has become Catholicized. 

Maybe this also helps to explain why I ultimately had to leave the GOP myself?