Riding that Filisbuster

Posted on April 28, 2005 in Courage & Activism Secularism

I’ve been keeping quiet about the filisbuster rules change. It shouldn’t surprise my readers that I am against it and that I support the position of People for the American Way. As James Dobson said on “Justice Sunday” “the Supreme Court [is] a “despotic oligarchy” that [is] “unaccountable,” “out of control,” and needing to be “reigned in.” I must say that I agree, but Mr. Dobson wouldn’t like my point of view, primarilly because I deeply feel the need to separate church and state altogether.

I cannot agree with any Christian who buys into the myth that more religion in government is a good thing for the nation. This is bad for government and it is bad for religion. Government suffers because the lack of diversity means we lose valuable input in the democratic forum. If, for example, we rigorously taught the Creation story instead of Evolution, our advances in medicine would be miniscule. Our secularism in this area allowed us to look past religious dogma and learn how the universe worked. Knowing how it worked enabled us to devise medications and procedures for diseases which might have been uncurable or without palliative such as AIDS. It was the Darwinian knowledge of the gene — carried through by Mendel, Watson, Crick and others — that allowed us to master this and other illnesses. Our government’s investment in Science led to progress. A state founded on Fundamentalist Christian religion would have prevented us from such explorations.

One might ask “But what about the right kind of Christianity, one which supports the theory of evolution?” I feel that this amounts to a voluntary placement of blinders over our eyes, putting our version of Christianity ahead of all others which is precisely my problem with what the Fundies are doing. Only in a free and open debate can prejudices and artificial limitations on thought be exposed. When one religion claims authority over all others through the agency of Government, there can be no accounting for its claims.

That is just one way that religion can suffer. Another way is that by teaming up with government, religion will begin to abandon its own principles. Witness how the ugly liaison between corporatist dupes and Fundamentalists has negated the message of Christ. Christians go to war, they think that wealth is a sign of Divine Favor, and that our moral focus should be on rooting out gays, lesbians, and other sexual undesirables. There is no basis in the Gospels for any of these positions, yet it is touted in the media and in right wing tracts as Christianity. By grasping for political power instead of spirituality, Fundamentalists have corrupted and sold out the Christian message. This is the biggest moral decline that Christians today allow themselves to slide into.

A secular government is not, despite the claims of the unChristian Right, an atheist one. Atheist governments are just another form of religious despotry, seeking to impose a view about the existence of God on the People. The Government which has methodically denied Christians the privilege of using it as advertising space for their beliefs is not one that states an opinion on theological matters. It is primarilly agnostic meaning it has no opinion whatsoever. This means that the citizens can make personal choices for themselves. They can follow their consciences and voice those freely. That is how Christians may influence their fellow citizens, through the free right to worship and to speak as the spirit moves them. No placement of the Ten Commandments in a town park or courthouse quite has the power of a single human being stating the findings of her spiritual journey. And conscience frightens Fundamentalist leadership because it ultimately leads to the questioning of their reading of the Bible. Can we, as a free society where Christianity is free to prosper, afford to have their un-negated, unbalanced control of the nation? I think not, not if we truly believe in Liberty and Justice for All.

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Frist is now calling for a compromise on the judges/filisbuster issue. The only worthy compromise he can offer is to respect the past: preserve the filisbuster and ask the President to withdraw those candidates who do not satisfy the Democrats in Congress.

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The Republicans have been seizing on single issues nearly all my life. From my experience here in California, this is a smokescreen. Here, they jump into the judiciary by supporting the Death Penalty. But what Californians discover is that such nominees have more on their platter than that: they turn into corporate shills, overturning worker protections, pollution restrictions, etc. I dare say that we will see more of the same from the Republicans in Washington. The moral of the story is never ever think single issue.