This isn't a country, it's a religion.
Christians 1, Lions 0.
There's a book out called "Inside the Mind of the Religious Right."
Right away I don't want to read that book.
It's missed the point.
The title should say "Inside the Heart of the Religious Right."
We're not sure the RR has a mind.
Oh, it probably does, but it starts from a different premise.
The Christians, the real Christians that is, the ones comprising the religious right, start their thinking from the premise that there is a God, He reaches down to control human affairs, probably visits either the Oval Office (but not Congress or City Hall) or the President in solitary moments, and tells him to "Stay the Course."
For these folks it's probably okay to ask "What would Jesus do?"
There are some questions that Jesus was notably silent on, such as gay marriage, abortion, and the invasion of Iraq.
He also didn't seem to have much to say about slavery for some reason. You'd think that someone like Jesus might have anticipated a moral dimension to slavery and condemned it. But no.
There's omniscience and there's omniscience.
The religious right, let's call them the True Christians, start with God and base their thinking on that.
The rest of us start with reason and try to find a place for God, if only we could find this rescuer.
We're reasonably confident he doesn't visit the White House, any more than he visited Saddam's Villa or Hitler's Mountain Resort or Berlin Bunker regardless of all the "Gott Mit Uns" embosses on Nazi belt buckles. God has a pretty poor track record when it comes to taking sides in madmen's wars.
The Religious Right, our party of God, or Hezbollah if you will, is now in firm control for awhile, and Pres. Bush is its Prophet.
The non-Religious Right, the Lions in this gladiatorial event, meanwhile, are seeking a new Prophet for themselves.
Gore and Kerry, as prophets, were busts, for trying to sell Reason in a marketplace of Faith.
This, incidentally, is why a lawyer of today could not expect to time-travel to Salem, 1692 and reason the good folk out of hanging witches. Reason didn't count then except if it began with the premise: There is a Devil and his agents cause mischief.
Today's lawyer would likely argue: "But there is no Devil, we don't believe in Devils in 2004."
And the good Christian Puritans of Salem, 1692, would tell you: "We don't care what you say people believe 300 years from now. We believe in the Devil today. Don't your people believe in God?"
"Of course our people believe in God," you'd reply. "We just had an election and God won, for goodness sakes. How can you even ask?"
"Well if you believe in God, please don't condemn us for believing in the Devil. Do you think God causes all the trouble in the world? Don't be silly. It's the Devil who does that and we're only protecting ourselves, our children particularly, from Him. So back off, please, and don't tell us how to run our lives. We know what we're doing thank you."
Today's lawyer loses in Salem, 1692.
What you need to send to Salem in 1692 is not a lawyer but a preacher. A preacher who doesn't believe in witches. You might find one or two of those around.
And what this preacher is going to argue is not that there isn't a Devil, but that there is. He's going to beat Salem at its own game.
This is in fact what happened, except for the time-travel bit.
Preachers and hard headed businessmen, not in Salem, necessarily, but in neighboring towns like Boston, began to wonder whether the Devil, or Satan as they called him, who was a well-known trickster, might be somehow fooling them.
Why, for example was Satan allowing the town to catch, condemn, and hang the REAL witches?
Maybe he was running a con game in which his REAL agents (the true witches) continued to cause their mischief among the neighbors, such as tormenting the girls who then "cried out" their accusations, but causing the girls to accuse not the REAL witches, but innocent neighbors.
Thomas Brattle, a merchant of Boston, was the first to proclaim that "Innocent blood has been shed."
After that others chimed in and realized they'd been had.
When the new governor's wife publicly sympathized with the condemned women, who it was noted, had never committed any other offenses but led law-abiding, church-going lives, the girls 'cried-out' against her. The governor wasn't buying the bit about his own wife being a witch, however, and, with public opinion beginning to smell a rat, quickly closed all the special courts specially established to handle the outbreak of hundreds of accusations.
After that when the girls tried again to cry out, they were told to shut up, which they did, after they saw they were being shushed, ignored, and mocked by the same ordinary people who had previously fallen in line behind them to condemn the innocent.
Eventually not only some of the girls who had cried out, but some of the judges who had been so quick to condemn made contrite and public apologies in their meeting-houses, churches, for having operated under the influence of a delusion.
That was the last time the Devil visited this country until today, last Tuesday, actually, called Black Tuesday by one wit, when people, voters, elected leaders, have concluded that a supernatural being, God this time, not the Devil, has invaded the White House. But not City Hall. We all know that City Hall is the preserve of the Devil. Just ask Gavin Newsom, the young mayor of San Francisco, who married all those gay couples from all over the country (where the Devil still has influence). Hell, the Devil has made City Hall, San Francisco, his home away from home since before the Great Earthquake and Fire, 1906. Ask Abe Ruef.
The Devil made Gavin, and Abe, do it, I guess.
And caused Bush to beat Kerry by exercising the Religious Right to get out and vote. God ordained that, I guess.
Excuse me, I'm getting a little confused. Am I saying that God caused the outcome of the last election or was it the Devil?
I'm not sure.
I don't even think I can tell them apart.
You see, I have trouble seeing clearly the supernatural creatures flailing around in other people's heads.
I can barely make out the ones in my own head, although I do visit the fumigator annually.
I don't think I like living in a country that is a church. All the big issues, and a lot of the little ones, change into whether I believe in God, or believe in him enough.
I'm still trying to get Him, or Her, as the case may be, to believe in me.
I don't mind people who speak to God. Praying I call it, and I do it when I need help for a friend. But never for me. God has better things to waste his time on than me, like the people who buy lottery tickets and want an edge.
I do mind people who say God speaks to them.
We used to have places for people like this, and it wasn't church.
I mind most the people who say they speak FOR God, as in this is what God wants you to do.
That means God spoke to THEM first, before he spoke to you and me.
How did HE get the inside track with God, I want to know.
Was it because he was a Republican?
Okay, I'll join the Party if God will speak to me, too. I'll join both parties, in case God is a Democrat, which I sincerely doubt. I know he's not a Green. Look at Nader.
It strikes me that we're resembling too much the Salem days when we hanged witches.
Today we hang witches.
Only we do it in the party activities of the Religious Right.
And in the Senate Judiciary Committee over the confirmation of federal judges.
Nobody who writes like this could ever expect to be nominated or to clear the Committee. Ask Arlen Spector, whose scaffold is being erected as we speak, who was referred to in this regard in a post from yesterday which you can scroll down to.
But why would anyone give up being able to write like this in order to become a public official, a priest of the religion of the day?
While you're scrolling to see why Arlen Spector is about to be burned at the stake for being insufficiently Christian, by Religious Right standards, or not Christian at all, please say hello to Jonathan Edwards, the Last Puritan, and don't forget to visit the Protestant Reformation.
Shakespeare knew about living in a church instead of a nation. See "Will in the World," by Stepen Greenblatt, W.W. Norton, 2004.
The past, you see, isn't dead. It isn't even past. I didn't say that. I did actually, but Faulkner said it first, and I'm stealing it from him.
The Devil made me do it.
PS The Texas Board of Education, the 2d biggest purchaser of public school textbooks in the nation, approved new health texts for high schoolers but only after the publishers agreed to reword passages to depict marriage as the unioni between a man and a woman, according to today's Associated Press.
No more of this "two individuals" and "married partners" nonsense, called "asexual stealth phrases" by one proponent of the change, that opens the doors to gays getting together and calling it marriage.
God forbid that people should be allowed to make their own choice of life partner when the Texas Board of Ed is willing to do it for them.
I wonder how many Texans we have in the Castro these days...