Guest Post by Ed Stephan.
File this under both “analysis” and “tirade”, mostly the latter.
Shortly after President Clinton reneged on his campaign pledge to admit gays to military service, I wrote this letter-to-the-editor for our local paper, the Bellingham [WA] Herald (Gannett):
30 May 1993
To the Editor:
Fundamentalists who favor banning gays from the military cite the Bible as the basis of their view. Leviticus 18:22 and Romans 1:27 say homosexuality is an abomination.
The “Good Book” can also be cited as approving of slavery, race hatred, oppression of women, rape of the environment and the slaughter of innocent children. Fortunately, the First Amendment to our Constitution makes it impossible to base public law or policy on any religious tenet, however interpreted and however large the majority which happens to proclaim it.
The section of Leviticus which condemns homosexuality also condemns the eating of rabbit, pig, shrimp, lobster, crab, etc. (while approving the eating of locusts, crickets and grasshoppers). It regards menstruating women as unclean for seven days. It forbids cutting men’s hair or trimming their beards. It bans wearing two kinds of cloth (e.g., linen and wool) and eating dairy products with meat (e.g., a chesseburger). Deuteronomy 21-3 says that drunkards and gluttons should be stoned to death, prohibits women from wearing men’s clothing, and condemns charging interest on loans.
In the Old Testament God used up two commandments condemning adultery. Why didn’t He use one of these to condemn homosexuality? In the New Testament neither Jesus nor any of His apostles make any reference to homosexuality. Religion-based homophobia is cafeteria fundamentalism.
[signed]
Ed Stephan
The letter was rejected because it engaged in religious argument. This from a newspaper which routinely published anti-gay, anti-abortion, anti-women … anti-everything-liberal letters, many of them routinely citing the Bible for backup. The paper, which isn’t all that bad for a small city press, continues to publish syndicated folks like Michelle Malkin and Jonah Goldberg and local worthies of the same ilk. To be fair, they have quite recently begun to include the occasional Krugman (eek!).
Under our system of government people are, or certainly were meant to be, free to hold whatever religious ( and non-religious and even anti-religious) opinions they like. The First Amendment guaratees that “Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof”. Further, “”No religious test shall ever be required as a qualification to any office or public trust under the United States” (Art. 6, Sec. 3.).
During our Cold War against “godless atheistic [I never did see the need for that redundancy] communism” we added “under God” to our Pledge of Alegiance and “in God we trust” to our money. Now virtually every presidential address ends with “God bless America”. Virtually every politician must make ritual appearances at prayer breakfasts and the like. Not exactly a “religious test” but pretty darn close. That we’re even debating forms of governmental support for religious schools, or other “faith-based” initiatives, seems way out of line with what is clearly spelled out in the Constitution. What part of “no” is so hard to understand?
Recently Howard Dean was attacked by a host of leading Democrats for daring to note that the Republican Party is overwhelmingly “white Christian” (evident to anyone who has seen/read anything beyond the carefully staged TV show during the last GOP convention). A CNN/USA Today/Gallup poll data reports that 82 percent of self-described Republicans are, in fact, white Christians. But so are 57 percent of Democrats and 67 percent of all Americans. I’m not particularly bothered by the numbers, but I am concerned that, given such overwhelming dominance by Christianity in our society, the GOP seems to be laying sole claim to that religious mantle.
As I’ve mentioned in a comment or two here, the only people Jesus publically attacked were the money changers and the pharisees (“whitened sepulchers” who paraded their sanctity in public) — the two most prominent wings of today’s GOP.
The GOP’s overwhelming goal, beyond total domination of the political apparatus, is elimination of every conceivable tax on the already obscenely wealthy. Jesus’s only comment on that subject was “Render unto Caesar the things that are Caesar’s”. He chose a tax collector, Matthew, as one of His disciples. The disciple Judas, closest they had to a money-manager, betrayed Jesus for 30 pieces of silver. “Blessed are the poor, the meek, those who hunger and thirst, the peacemakers….” “It is easier for a camel to go through the eye of a needle, than for a rich man to enter into the kingdom of God.” Is there a pattern here? It boggles the mind that anyone could justify the programs and policies of the GOP in the name of Christianity.
The famous German sociologist Max Weber struggled mightily to explain how Europe could evolve from a medieval Christian ethic in which holiness was exemplified by vows of monastic poverty to the industrial-era view that wealth might be a sign of Divine selection. He wondered if some future societies (he died just after WWI) might feel the need to evolve still further, from what he had called the Protestant Ethic (of producers) to a sort of “socialist ethic” (in which the poor were at least given the means to play their part as the necessary consumers). I don’t think even he had the mental strength to envision today’s GOP, which proclaims its Christianity loudly while snuggling up to wealthy arms manufacturers and condemning the poor as greedy “welfare queens”.
The Democratic party would do well to quit condemning Dean (for the entertainment of CNN and Fox) and begin recruiting mainline religious leaders who still remember what Jesus’s time on earth was all about. We don’t have to become GOP-Lite, in this or in any other respect. We simply need to find a way to add authentic Christian voices to what has long ago been established as the party’s fundamental secular commitment, one which the GOP can never claim: [doing good] unto the least of these, my brethren.