This post is not easy to write, and is arguably in poor taste on or near the Fourth of July. In my view, however, the aspirations of the American Revolution call us to consider where we have been and where we are, towards an examination of the greater questions of our unity or disunity as a nation. July 4th is no worse a time than any other and is arguably the best day on which to reflect.
229 years ago, a group of lawyers, brewers, printers and others gathered in Philadelphia to protest and ultimately to declare independence from King George due to his taxes, his instigation of war, his repression of self-government by the people of this continent.
Well, our "King George" has accelerated a military expansion into a principle of near world-wide military jurisdiction and reach, fighting multiple wars of occupation and while maintaining a "presence" in nations whose people largely hate the U.S. government and by extension our people generally (Germany, Korea, Iraq, Afghanistan.)
He has hocked our republic through the efforts of his Republican "small government" allies in Congress to pay for these wars, so much so that Washington has money to rebuild transit service in Baghdad but not in Baltimore, crime fighting in Kabul but not in Detroit, guaranteeing taxation in the future of those who are too young to have representation today
His government has seen the repression of home rule of state legislatures on the issue of medical marijuana including California and others states (most recently Rhode Island) issues such as possession of medical marijuana for cancer survivors and others, in placation of the theocratic right who have crayoned an eleventh Commandment beneath their original ten, "Thou shalt not overcome chemo side effects with cannabis AND thou shalt use the government to halt such overcoming."
Our policy policy drifts rightward to the glee of big-government big-spending "social conservatives" who envision a state robust enough to make men holy, pure, saintly and free of tarnish, broad enough to control both eyeballs and genitalia, strong enough to "protect the [straight] family" from the horror of two men somewhere, somehow ever marrying. People who take seriously the principle of "live and let live" do not recognize their homeland.
We are divided geographically; our northern costs and the St. Lawrence-Great Lakes seaway are largely liberal, while the southern and landlocked regions are very conservative, the most socially conservative region in current Western civilization, to the social right of Poland and Ireland and far to the right of western Europe.
From Baltimore going due north 500 miles, one crosses the Canadian border near Kingston Ontario at I-81. One clears Customs Canada and proceeds without crossing a major cultural barrier until one hits Quebec 70 miles to the east or so. Going south 500 miles from Baltimore, one reaches South Carolina, arguably the most conservative state in the Union. This is a place where the Confederate flag still flies high, the home of anti-Northern rebellion, Fort Sumter and the first state to secede. One has to clear customs due to a political boundary, not a cultural one; going south, the converse is essentially true.
We are now witnessing stage one of the recriminalization of abortion in the United States. After Bush gets his pro-life nominees to replace O'Connor and then Rehnquist,
Roe will be overturned.
Roe is a laughably bad piece of jurisprudence, but it kept the finger in the dyke for more 30 years on abortion. Once red states start prosecuting abortion again, We will see abortion task forces in police departments, public defenders getting training on defending expectant and recently expectant mothers, arraignments for abortion ["... you are charged with one count of attempting to kill foetus Doe, womb age 38 days...], plea bargains for attempting to procure an abortion, probation and parole for doctors or mothers involved in abortion, perhaps with mandatory quasi-religious probation terms comparable to court-ordered AA meetings. We are about to live in interesting times, and the cultural gap in our republic will snap open like a open wound held partly closed by a weak, dirty adhesive bandage.
With the replacement of Justice O'Connor, we can also look forward to more litigation regarding governmental postings of the Ten Commandments with specific intent to proselytize (and in whichever
permutation). The theocrats won't quit; the Supreme Court just decided two cases this past term alone. Justice O'Connor's voice will be replaced with that of a Scalia II - smart, tough and committed to accommodating at least low-grade theocratic spasms in the U.S. South. Bush owes it to the religious right to deliver big on the Supreme Court, and he will pay his note in full on time.
Christianity as such merits respect as the serious belief system of serious people, as do its various forms, including its hard-core ascetic, Calvinist and evangelical forms. It is the theocratic right spending money and time carving graven images and installing those images in courthouses that causes the problem, not Christians trying to apply Christian ideas to their own lives. Evangelical Christian and conservative commentator Cal Thomas has
commented eloquently on the difference between being a Christian and being a theocratic activist (my term, not his.)
So in light of the foregoing and with more fun theocratic politics sure to follow, should we liberals and libertarians really
want to stay in political union with the theocratic Christian Right? Or should they, the Christian Right, go ahead and get their own country, to be free of the irritation of political union with us, now or 5 years after the recriminalization of abortion in the "Red States"?
Our forefathers were not the tools of the religious right of their day but its implacable foes. Ethan Allen - a Deist who feared the political power of kings and priests. Thomas Jefferson - the author of the phrase "wall of separation" between church and state. Ben Franklin - the mocker of religious authorities. Thomas Paine - a critic of religious power so severe that Theodore Roosevelt called him a "filthy little atheist" a century after Paine's death. Samuel Adams - an armed anti-clericalist rebel.
These men had more in common with Bill Maher and George Carlin than with James Dobson and Ralph Reed, let no right-wing ideologue deceive you otherwise. These men distrusted government's ability to keep men free, let alone "holy." If modern Christian theocrats reject the values of the American forefathers, let none of them hypocritically raise their flags and watch fireworks this Fourth of July; they are party-crashers, aliens, red-coats, not invited to the Revolution but are rather the very problem that the Revolution tried to solve, at a mighty cost of lives and fortunes.
Lest you think I've gone too far, take a look at a possible
new flag for an American Christian nation. One gets the idea that Jesus of Nazareth may actually have been Jesus of Nashville.
I just hope that if this Christian "American Revolution" comes, it is less bloody than the one we are celebrating this weekend and leaves the rest of us non-evangelical Christians some swamp land or desert in which to maintain some libertarian semblence of the United States of America. It may take two generations, but that's where I see us heading.
Happy 4th of July.
-- Bruce Godfrey
