So here’s what happened. The president whose legitimacy was a little shaky for the first 8.5 months of his term in office has gained this mark of legitimacy: he has won just over half the popular vote. Not that that should matter – but I’ve expressed myself on that point before.
Today (11-3-’04) both candidates made public appearances and called for an end to the division and bitterness. There’s irony for you. The two men who buried us in muck, challenged everything but the species identity of their opponent [who knows – maybe that’s next…] and in general worked on the bitterness in the hope of winning an election want to tell US to be nice? Isn’t that rather like the stark naked man in his front yard screaming about the neighbors who aren’t wearing shirts?
I have opined in the past about the bitterness of political discourse in the country, blaming it on the two-party system. The people who believe it’s acceptable for the majority to force their lifestyle on all minorities feel obligated to support all the policies of the candidate (the one of two) who sides with them on lifestyle. So you have the lunacy of evangelical "Christians" lauding an unprovoked war because they feel they have to support the only "viable" candidate who will give them the anti-moral power they desire.
But I believe there’s another correlation that’s far more indicative of the real cause of the partisanship and sharply divided electorate; the entrance of religion into the political realm. It’s a sign of how poorly the general public understands history that they would allow the preachers to talk them into voting on such a narrow basis. Even recent history is rife with examples of the decline in civility and the rise in violence whenever religion is allowed to influence politics.
The most terrible age on this earth resulted from the rise of the church to a position of political power. And if we allow the preachers to have their way; if church-goers heed the preachers’ ideas of what issues are most important and vote their lives away, we are headed for another dark age that could well dwarf the horror of the thousand years beginning about 500 A. D.
Already the church has managed to stifle scientific inquiry. Can book burnings be far behind? And how much knowledge will be lost this time around? How many hundreds of years will world civilization stumble blindly about until a few brave non-conformists begin the slow process of rediscovering that which should never have been lost?
Our hope lay in the defeat of King George the second. Not only did he win, he actually won a majority of the popular vote. Furthermore, he is a lame duck. He will never again stand for election to the office of president. No political expediency will moderate his right-of-Hitler bent. Those of us who thought Bush, in his first term, acted arrogantly, will discover that we didn’t know half of the meaning of arrogant.
And if that’s true of the man of privilege who believes his privilege is a God-given right to be defended at gunpoint, what about the preachers who have felt the power of the politically oriented pulpit? What demands will they make of their congregations at the next election? And what about 2008? Will they try to rewrite the constitution and form a Christian republic? What effect would that have on political and individual freedom?
"You need to get back on your Prozac," someone says. "Your outlook is far too pessimistic and gloomy." Except that modern 20-20 hind-wisdom holds the optimist of the late 1930s in greatest contempt. I speak of the man who claimed he held "peace in our time" in his hands. We now think the pessimists of the day, who certainly never predicted the level of carnage of the next decade, had the more accurate viewpoint.
And here’s a word about minority rights. Simply because a majority of people believe a particular behavior is immoral does not give them the right to invoke social sanction against the minority who practice said behavior. One of the key principles of our republic is that even homosexual sinners were given, by the very God the evangelicals claim has condemned them, the right to be and do wrong. Legitimate government can never attempt to force religious truth. And the states which have acceded to the controlaholics and placed a ban on gay marriage in their constitutions are marching rapidly down the road to illegitimacy.
The "values" movement fails to display its true colors. Everybody believes values are important. But government isn’t about values; it’s about common defense. If the presence of a homosexual couple in the community threatens to wash the heterosexual majority away in a flood of immorality and hedonism, then the heterosexual majority has not one moral leg or backbone among them. If they can’t stop moral decline through their examples and their positive child rearing, then they don’t have the moral credentials to tell everybody else how to live.
Their "values" aren’t to call on people to live their lives by their individual values; it’s a call for everyone to live their lives by the controlaholics’ values; whether you like them or not. Hey, I value a healthy diet. Let’s throw everyone who eats foods with refined sugar in them into prison for the next five years and feed them unsweetened bread and water. That will teach them to live healthy lives and not pass the diseases they’ve made themselves susceptible to on to the rest of us. If you think that’s too draconian, then their ideas of controlling others have the same ring.
Civil political discourse? Somebody tell these preachers what such civility will require. They need to stop playing politics and get back to the far more important business of feeding their congregations on the Word of God. And not just the parts that are popular. Any truth that’s popular doesn’t need their support. The unpopular truths, such as the crime of usury, should be emphasized instead, because they don’t have a natural life like the truths of sexual purity and human responsibility.