First up from this week’s God machine is a story that made its way around the ‘sphere pretty quickly yesterday. Some sites have gotten a few of the details wrong, but it’s still pretty disturbing.
In the heart of the Bible Belt, a few Missouri state lawmakers are trying to give Christianity a measure of government approval and protection. House Concurrent Resolution No. 13, introduced by State Rep. David Sater (R), claims America’s Founding Fathers “recognized a Christian God” and established the nation on that God’s principles.
Furthermore, the resolution states that the Missouri lawmakers “should protect the majority’s right to express their religious beliefs and should “stand with the majority of our constituents and exercise the common sense that voluntary prayer in public schools and religious displays on public property are not a coalition of church and state.” Instead, such actions reveal “the positive role that Christianity has played in this great nation of ours, the United States of America.”
The truth is, the resolution is a cheap stunt. It carries no force of law and would not actually designate Christianity Missouri’s “official” religion. The stunt is, however, rather over-the-top, even by far-right, vaguely theocratic standards.
And speaking of the GOP’s religious-right base, here’s a good piece from The New Republic’s Michelle Cottle, explaining why, when you cut through all the rhetoric, politically-conservative evangelicals care about sex — and nothing else.
Just this week I received a long, breathless wire story from the Southern Baptist Church’s news service reporting that some conservative groups were up in arms over the fact that the Evangelical Climate Initiative, a coalition of Christian leaders committed to fighting global warming, had recently accepted a major grant from the Hewlett Foundation, a (gasp!) secular organization that also happens to fund family planning efforts.
Now some folks might see such a grant as providential, since every dollar that Hewlett hands over to the Evangelical Climate Initiative is one fewer dollar it can spend on promoting abortion. Instead, the wing nuts at Operation Rescue and Concerned Women for America promptly began hyperventilating about the real purpose of the funding. “Hewlett Foundation is one of the most prodigious and unabashed funders of abortion causes,” charged Concerned Women for America president Wendy Wright. “Its significant grant for this initiative, along with the controversial Rockefeller Brothers Foundation, reveals where this effort could lead. They would not fund something that contradicts their main missions.”
I’ll admit that I’m often confused by the reasoning utilized by the religious right, but this is particularly hard to grasp. A secular foundation wants to give lots of money to sponsor an evangelical initiative. Far-right evangelicals think this is bad because the secular foundation is secular. Apparently, groups like Operation Rescue and Concerned Women for America would prefer the money go to liberal, pro-choice causes? Sounds good to me.
On the international religious scene, Spanish Prime Minister Jose Luis Rodriguez Zapatero is causing quite a controversy by telling the Catholic Church that Spain would be better off with a little more church-state separation.
Shortly after his election in 2004, Socialist Prime Minister Jose Luis Rodriguez Zapatero ended a quarter-century of cozy church-state relations by blocking mandatory religious classes in public schools. He then took wider aim, saying his government would relax abortion laws, ease restrictions on divorce, legalize gay marriage and permit gay couples to adopt children.
In response, the archbishop of Madrid called the Spanish capital “a hotbed of sin.” Pope John Paul II accused Zapatero of “promoting disdain towards religion” and said the Catholic Church in Spain would never yield “to the temptation to silence it.” […]
[T]he battle between the church and Zapatero’s government has spread from parliament to streets, pulpit and confessional, creating some of deepest political and social schisms in Spain since it returned to democracy 28 years ago.
Fortunately, in the United States, the law doesn’t allow the state to favor religion over a secular government. Of course, Bush still has three years left….
And in related news, Pope Benedict XVI took a provocative step this week against in-vitro fertilization.
Pope Benedict XVI said yesterday that embryos developed for in vitro fertilization deserve the same right to life as fetuses, children and adults — and that that right extends to embryos even before they are transferred into a woman’s womb.
The Vatican has long held that human life begins at conception, but Benedict’s comments were significant because he specified that an embryo — even in its earliest stages — is just as much a human life as an older being.
It’s a development that reminds us that William Saletan’s argument — that the next big fight in this arena is not over abortion, but over IVF — is looking more and more accurate all the time.