This week we Americans are in for a special treat: our fearless leader, in the best tradition of doublespeak, explains to us and to the lawmakers under his heel why hate is good and inequality makes us all safer from terrorism and a vengeful God. It’s the Federal Marriage Amendment, and it’s something God surely told Bush to do in one of their regular afternoon chats.
We will leave aside, for the moment, the notion that “marriage” has only changed from “ownership of a female by a male” to “somewhat equal partnership” in the last 150 years or so (or more recently, like the 1970s, if you count the US court decisions saying a wife couldn’t possibly be raped by her husband), and also leave aside the notion that the “God” Bush talks to could be shut off with a thorazine drip. We’re still left with the problem of amending the US Constitution with an article designed specifically to deny freedoms to a specific group inspired solely by a subjective and entirely Church-based (the one thing that’s
not supposed to get to poke around in our government) evaluation of their worth as individuals; it also defies Christian philosophy by placing arbitrary limits on what should be a fundamental and immutable right of all humans everywhere: the right of two consenting adults to cherish and care for one another. Perhaps most sinister of all, it obliquely codifies the function of marriage as a production house for our young, which in turn categorizes women as breeding stock.
It’s a nakedly political move, pandering of the lowest order - by which I mean pandering that doesn’t include me as a target; I don’t like feeling left out. If Bush wants to shore up his falling poll numbers, he should bite the bullet and do something to make the lives of ordinary citizens better for once, instead of just his corporate sponsors. The amendment has no hope of passing, and as many other writers and observers have noted, we have much, much,
much bigger fish to fry than this right now.
The people who fall into the category of Bush’s die-hard right-wing base are kind of hard for me to describe without resorting to invective, but I’ll try. These folks are conservative, obviously, which naturally means they’re averse to change. The majority of them self-identify as Christian, and I don’t doubt that some of them are sincerely spiritual in their religiosity, but the rest are a puzzle. They espouse and appreciate values that are essentially alien to me, and I’m a person with a strong Christian upbringing and a slightly-more-than-passing familiarity with the Bible and matters of the soul. While I don’t self-identify as a member of any specific religious group these days, I have a general affinity for people of positive faith; I understand the need and desire to draw comfort from a benevolent higher power, and to seek out the hidden order in an apparently chaotic universe. (I recognize that not everyone has a Christian upbringing or worldview, and I hope you’ll understand and respect the need to address this issue within the framework of the Christian faith.)In Christianity, the local manifestation of that higher power is Jesus Christ, who walked among us for over 30 years as a scholar, carpenter, and teacher. Jesus’s teachings are pretty simple (simple to say, at least; harder to live up to). Be kind to your fellow humans. Care for the poor. Care for the sick. Keep an open mind. Learn all you can. Accept people as your brothers and sisters, warts and all. Improve yourself. Practice humility. Embrace joy. Share what you have when you can. Immerse yourself in hope. Every single one of these general concepts could be included in a recipe for a better society, regardless of who said them or which religion’s tome carries the original quotes. When I consider the fervent throng who rally around Bush at times like this, though, I don’t see much of what really counts toward true Christianity. I don’t doubt their faith, but I’m nearly certain that the target of that faith is not the man known as the Prince of Peace.
Let’s look at the common threads: first and strongest in the weave is meanness, a bitter and sustained desire to do (or at least watch) harm to their fellow humans if they differ in any way. This is the opposite of kindness. There’s a constant effort to create the “Other,” the sub-human and sub-Christian enemy upon whom the blame for all of their woes can be placed. Gays, Jews, progressives, Muslims, blacks, feminists, and even casual dissenters interested in a more open discussion - they have all been propped up as the Other at some point in the uncomfortably-close past. This is the opposite of unity. We’ve seen many times throughout history that the effort to create an enemy is fractal; it spawns more and more copies of itself, with smaller and smaller variances in the criteria, until eventually each person is the enemy of the other. There’s hatred, a blinded and irrational codependence with the constructed Other which draws these people, like star stuff to a black hole, into a tightly focused downward spiral that can only end in annihilation. This is the opposite of love. It consumes the soul like rust consumes iron, slowly but inevitably destroying the strength and utility of the human spirit. There’s fear, a shrieking nightmare of unnamable ills waiting to be unleashed by an old-testament God (or his earthly suit-and-tie proxy) upon anyone who doesn’t fall into line. This is the opposite of hope. It is a numbing poison that short-circuits logic and rational thought, and leaves the victim vulnerable to manipulation.
These people, our fellow humans who can’t drink from their own chosen fountain of salvation, are frustrating to watch as they march blindly in an army whose true purpose is hidden from them. The individual, the man or woman, the husband or grandmother who submits to the will of their selected leaders and abandons the fundamental moral code common to the core of most theologies, is certainly accountable for their own actions; it’s the leaders, however, who are the true jackals, the fomenters of so much misery and rage. These men (and women, but for any number of reasons most are men) employ deception, misinformation, and outright lies to keep their chattel in a constant state of agitated fear; they use misdirection to point that fear away from the real and needful issues our society should work on, and toward the conjured issues which they can control and which are designed to defy peaceful resolution. I will not reprint the many hate-filled and repellent quotes from James Dobson, Jimmy Swaggart, Ralph Reed, Jerry Falwell, William Donahue, and other religious and civic leaders I’ve come across because I believe in the power of the word, and I do not want to give any more attention to these people and their hatred than I have to. Here’s an excellent
diary from DailyKOS on hate speech and the Us vs. Them mentality which contains many of their quotes if you’d like a reminder of just how repugnant they can be. These men and women sow chaos and divisiveness, and they use their positions as religious leaders to feed their own insatiable greed for wealth and power. They are quick to punish, slow to forgive, and brutal in their treatment of anyone who dissents from their stated world view. Today’s Other is homosexuals in particular, but tomorrow it will be someone else, and it will almost certainly include you or your loved ones at some point.
What I find most chilling about these leaders is that they cloak themselves in Christian beliefs and values, while their words and actions reveal plainly that they serve another master entirely. They use religion as a business plan, a means to advance themselves and exert control and dominance over the people under their influence. Do they care for the poor by addressing issues of poverty and engaging in discussions at the highest levels of government and business, or do they prey upon the poor by feeding them false hope and demanding a tithe? Do they care for the sick by pressing the issue of better and more inclusive healthcare, or do they dismiss the sick as deserving victims of God’s punishments? Do they embrace joy, or do they embrace sadistic glee at the suffering of the Other? Do they demand justice for all humans equally, or do they demand punishment for their enemies alone? Do they encourage hope, or do they encourage fear? Do they promote acceptance and tolerance, or do they divide and alienate? There’s a pattern here, and it’s most decidedly un-Christian. I don’t say this lightly or to be divisive, but if the Christian concept of Satan, the Prince of Lies, has any manifestation in the real world, it is here. The Bible says that lies and deception and hatred and cruelty are Satan’s stock-in-trade. If you’re willing to accept the notion of evil at all, by any name, these traits must be included in the description. The anti-Christians who rally around Bush’s call for hatred, who support all wars and the slaughter of our manufactured enemies, who wait eagerly for an unwarranted vindication in the Rapture…these people are truly fallen. Satanism, it’s said, is a Christian religion; it can’t exist outside the framework of the Christian faith. The Christian concept of satanic blood rites and demon worship is a false flag; the subtlety of a hateful nemesis with thousands of years of experience and knowledge is hardly likely to manifest itself in such a vulgar and obvious expression. Evil plays a very deep game. It knows that the best and most satisfying way to destroy something of beauty is to convince the believers in that beauty to destroy it themselves. So goes Christianity, and any positive faith, in the hands of the religious extremist.
The solution is both simple and exceedingly difficult: we must negate the hatred with love, and disperse the clouds of ignorance with the light of knowledge and education. We must firmly insist on the sanctity of the boundary between religion and government; this is already the law of the land in America, and there are plenty of enforceable laws governing hate speech as well. We must neuter fear by showering hope far and wide. We must restore faith to its proper place as a positive influence in the lives of those who choose to embrace it. When we engage them on their level, they have already won the battle; we must withdraw from their war altogether in order to save them and ourselves.
(Cross-posted at
The Inner Crab)