In this election, religious conservatives were able to craft a message making same-sex marriages look like an afront to apple pie and baseball and of course people voted against it. What if we could have somehow framed this election with the details of human suffering that these laws suggest?
Now available for the fashionable Bush-era bumper. Proceeds go to support the Nonviolence.org websites:
My predictable post-election essay is over on Nonviolence.org, “Four More Years”. Aside from the politics, I’ve been fascinated how the election was finally framed in terms of “moral issues” and how this measurement somehow translated to support for President Bush.
Friends and other lefty Christians need to take the “moral and faith issues” question as personal and corporate queries. (As usual Beppeblog has a good post about this, “Tough numbers for a fag like me…”:http://beppeblog.blogspot.com/2004/11/tough-numbers-for-fags-like-me.html). If someone had come up to me after I voted yesterday and asked me what I thought was the most important issue in this election, I would have replied “the war”:http://www.nonviolence.org/articles/cat_iraq_antiwar.php. The answer would mask the fact that for me war is a moral issue defined by a deep passionate faith (a deep passionate Christian faith). It’s too easy for me to talk around my faith though, and to frame the debate in secular language. I tell myself I’m being more inclusive when I use pragmatic rationales, but in reality I’m hiding from my listeners my true understanding of Christ’s work in the world and our role in His covenant.
A majority of voters are suspicious of us East Coast liberals and they should be. I just talked to a Friend buying a book for a Bush supporter who, she explained, “doesn’t understand the complexity of life.” Talk about judgemental! Would you support someone who thought you were a idiot if you didn’t support Kerry? The Democrats are starting to look at the turn-off of this form of elitism; from today’s _New York Times_ (of course, here _I_ am, quoting from the official publication of elite America):
bq. “Bill Clinton and Jimmy Carter got elected because they were comfortable with their faith,” said Representative Rahm Emanuel of Illinois, a former Clinton aide. “What happened was that a part of the electorate came open to what Clinton and Carter had to say on everything else – health care, the environment, whatever – because they were very comfortable that Clinton and Carter did not distain the way these people lived their lives, but respected them.”
He added: “We need a nominee and a party that is comfortable with faith and values. And if we have one, then all the hard work we’ve done on Social Security or America’s place in the world or college education can be heard. But people aren’t going to hear what we say until they know that we don’t approach them as Margaret Mead would an anthropological experiment.”
h3. War and tolerance as moral issues
Why am I not more explicit about my faith and my politics? Why don’t I say that I voted against Bush because I question his moral judgement and his faith? Why don’t I say that war is a Christian issue and that all Christians should be against war? Why don’t I say that charity and love is a Christian issue and that all Christians should honor loving same-sex relationships?
The Revealer has an article called Gay Marriage, GOP secret weapon. The author recently wrote a book about religion in America and concluded that the “greatest common denominator of American belief is anti-homosexuality.” But here’s a telling observation from his interviews of Christians:
bq.. Most of these people are surprisingly abstract in their thinking. There may be a certain disingenuousness to the popular anti-homosexuality mantra, “hate the sin, love the sinner,” but nearly everyone we met really did distinguish their hatred of homosexuality from their dealings with homosexuals.
How do I know? Because many, if not most, thought that Peter and I were a gay couple, by virtue of the facts that we�re writers and had come from New York City. We�re neither a couple, nor gay, but there never seemed to be a polite way to say that, so we didn�t, and still some of the great homosexual-haters of America welcomed us into their homes and their churches and their temples.
p. This does mean the laws are abstract and we shouldn’t worry. I’m sure there were plenty of Germans in the 1920s who could work themselves into a lather against Jews but be good friends with actual Jews. This sort of casual bigotry grows cancerous when government gets involved. When Hitler took power it was all too easy for them to pretend that the obvious wasn’t happening.
In this election, religious conservatives were able to craft a message making same-sex marriages look like an afront to apple pie and baseball and of course people voted against it. What if we could have somehow framed this election with the details of human suffering that these laws suggest?
The most striking moment of all three debates came when the top lieutenant of the most loyalty-obsessed administration in modern history said he disagreed with his president on the proposed constitutional amendment on marriage. Vice President Dick Cheney has a lesbian daughter and that experience forced him to see the human consequence of these otherwise-abstract laws. Both Cheney and his debate opponent “John Edwards are United Methodists”:http://www.pbs.org/wnet/religionandethics/week745/news.html. What if Edwards had broken the debate rules, walked over to Cheney and asked that they use his ninety second response time as an opportunity to offer up a joint prayer on love and charity? They could have held hands (gasp!) and could have turned the issue around right then. What good is faith if we don’t witness to it when it counts?
h3. Elsewhere on the Net
* “Gary Hart: Why the Personal Shouldn’t be Political”:http://nytimes.com/2004/11/08/opinion/08hart.html
Who would have thought that the Howard Dean of the 1980s would be so incisive about the issues of religion? I didn’t realize how religious a man he is and he explains why: “As a candidate for public office, I chose not to place my beliefs in the center of my appeal for support because I am also a Jeffersonian; that is to say, I believe that one’s religious beliefs — though they will and should affect one’s outlook on public policy and life — are personal and that America is a secular, not a theocratic, republic.… Declarations of “faith” are abstractions that permit both voters and candidates to fill in the blanks with their own religious beliefs. There are two dangers here. One is the merging of church and state. The other is rank hypocrisy.” Found via “The Revealer”:http://www.therevealer.org/
* “Beppeblogs’s roundup of post-election talk”:http://beppeblog.blogspot.com/2004/11/inspiration-about-elections-beyond.html
* “Omri Elisha: God Save the Queen”:http://www.therevealer.org/archives/main_story_001162.php
An explanation of Christian Evangelical appeal of Bush, and why for them qualifications aren’t as important as faithfulness (a principle any Quaker should agree with). “The Esther story, and that passage in particular, is read by evangelicals as a sign of the individual�s role in God�s sovereign designs for human history. They see it not as a story of heroism, but of instrumentalism; Esther is a vehicle, a tool. Mordecai�s statement (�Perhaps you have come to royal dignity for just such a time as this�) sounds like grandeur, but for evangelicals it is read as a radical call to self-abnegation.” These are Quaker themes too, and there are possibilities for “Liberal Quakers and Evangelicals to connect on these issus”:http://www.nonviolence.org/Quaker/emerging_church.php.
* The Friends Committee on National Legislation has issued a “Minute on Moral Values”:http://www.fcnl.org/legpolcy/moral_109th_printer.htm. It’s kind of the predictable press release you might expect but it’s good to see them weigh in.
Nazi hatred and “hygiene” extended to homosexuals as well as Jews, the mentally ill/handicapped, Poles and Romany. Pre-war, urban Germany, was an extraordinarily homosexual-friendly environment. There was an active homosexual rights movement so well organized that the Nazis were able to use the organization’s own member lists to round-up homosexuals to be sent to concentration/death camps. Among other things, Nazism was a right-wing, reactionary phenomena intent on redressing and correcting the perceived decadence of German society via a “return” to the values of God, family and nation (the “volk”). It was anti-science (leading scientists were “hollow-earthers”), magical-thinking and arch-militaristic. While I am not attempting my own exact analogy here, I believe these things are important to remember.
Interesting points. I suspect one reason politicians can cast anti-homosexuality as a moral issue more readily than others is that it’s always easier for people to condemn something they’ve never done, or even been tempted to do. Lots of people (including myself) have felt sympathetic towards the Iraq war at one point or another, and it’s rather disturbing to be told you committed an evil for doing that.
I’ve often heard that part of Pres. Bush’s appeal is his moral clarity — he casts things simply in terms of right and wrong. I understand the hunger for moral clarity, but unfortunately I think the converse is that people feel that any complicated, ambiguous issue must not really be a moral one.
Ironically, I think another reason this happened was precisely the separation of church and state itself. The concept of religion as governing only your personal behavior, compartmentalized away from public life, has actually been embraced by evangelicals as much as anybody, with their emphasis on Jesus as your “personal savior.” I think that’s why when they do legislate their religion with things like anti-gay laws, they usually use defensive language: we’re defending our marriages, defending our children, etc. I think that liberal Christians have to verrry carefully delineate what aspects of morality they’re willing to legislate and why, because if there’s anything Americans fear more than a government with no morality, it’s a government with a strong morality antithetical to their own. A lot of attempts I’ve seen at this have been muddled (e.g., Kerry’s position on abortion), which I think has only hurt the liberal cause.
Hi, I am a first time visitor to your site – great job. I just wanted to comment that I agree with the previous posts: the one demonstrating the rise of NAZIism from the right and the other pointing out the muddled message of the left. What I think the key to this issue is realizing that our left/right political spectrum is not linear, but circular. Dehumanizing, violent, and destructive regimes have arisen from both the left ant the right, and if you follow both directions far enough they meet at tyranny. This was part of my problem with John Kerry. He did not offer an alternative to Bush policies only a variation of degrees. Instead of unilateral war, Kerry suggested hunting down and killing terrorists. I fail to see the real difference between these two strategies. Don’t take this as support for Bush by any means – I only want to point out that neither candidate is/was committed to nonviolence as the only answer. My point is simply that there exists a political spectrum that orbits around a center of fear, division, violence, and power and only varies by degress. Where Christians fail is that we try and place the gospel somewhere on that continuum, choosing left or right based on certain issues or ideals both of which may be true to certain aspects of the gospel, but may be defiecient to varying degrees to others (hence Christians that are pro-life while supporting the war). In reality I understand the gospel as “off the spectrum” a completely other and distinct view that declares “Kingdom” values and virtues. It is Christo-centric and is grounded on love, faith, hope, and peace. It is dynamic enough to be tolerant, while at the same time avoiding dissolution into sentimentality or synchronism. This does not mean a retreat from the “real” world, but an engagement of the world as the body of Christ.
Here’s a simple and eloquent column from Patrick Nugent at Friends Theological College, Kaimosi, Kenya.
Johan