One of the most contentious elections in US history is now behind us, but the ramifications of it are likely to live on for the remainder of what I hope will be a long lifetime to come. I say this not only because we have seen a ballooning deficit created out of a surplus during the first act of Bush 43, a deficit that my children will be saddled with during their adult lives, but because the next four years are likely to bring several resignations from the Supreme Court. A president with the illusion of a "mandate," and a Senate more conservative in numbers, are likely to nominate and approve justices who will turn the clock back on advances in civil rights and social justice that we have witnessed during the latter half of the 20th Century.
Finally, George W. Bush is elected President by the people, four years after his election by the Supreme Court. After a long and arduous campaign against Senator John F. Kerry, a campaign where he was bested by his opponent's superior command of policy, where he saw consistent defeat in debates, at a time when the failure of his policies at home and abroad were made abundantly manifest, he won.
As one British tabloid asked on its front page, "How can 59,054,087 people be so DUMB?"
One answer we are given from some exit polls has to do with morals. People thought George W. Bush was more moral than John Kerry. Seriously. Several exit polls showed consistent results: of a number of issues including Iraq, terrorism, the economy, and taxes, the largest single group of respondents (between 20 - 22%) said that the most impoprtant issue that determined how they voted had to do with the moral stance of the candidate, and 80% of those respondents voted for the president.
We need to give this proposition serious consideration on several levels. One has to do with the changing nature of political discourse in America. We are supposedly one of the most religious countries on earth. Religious values play a major part in the lives of Americans, and this is something that Republicans have learned to manipulate very well since Reagan was president.
But as a religious person myself, I have to question this talk of religion and morals. What is it about these religious morals that drove 20 % of American voters to the polls for President Bush? What his campaign had to offer these people is two thirds of the unspoken "G-string" mantra of Guns, God, and Gays. Leaving guns aside for the purpose of this discussion, Bush 43 offered an enhanced role for religion in public life through the promotion of his "faith based initiative." No doubt, religious institutions play an important role in the welfare of society. Some, supported by a particular faith group and inspired by a sense of religious mission, operate in a non-sectarian manner, employing people and serving people of all faiths without the overtones of creed or confession, and these organizations and agencies have been the beneficiaries of of state and federal support for some time now (I serve on the board of one such organization.) That is different from an agency or program that uses religious adherence, ideals or dogmas as a selective process for employment or as part of their service delivery - something which our federal tax dollars should not support in violation of the First Amendment. But this is something that our government does now, and it scores points with many who chose not to separate their lives in faith from their lives in a society with others who do not share their faith. Likewise, the administration's support for school vouchers will allow more children to attend religious private schools at the expense of the taxpayer and at a cost to public education.
What concerns me more than these infractions of our civil code is the type of selectivity that the religious right and the administration seems so focused upon, while leaving other sacred values shared by the religious communities represented in the US today ignored. Think about the issues of greatest concern to the religious right today and what do you come up with? They are, ostensibly, issues related to sexuality and reproduction. Abortion, sex/abstinence education, restrictions on AIDS prevention programs, same sex marriage, embryonic stem cell research - all items revolving around very primal issues. To the non-initiated, it would seem that this is the major thrust of American religion.
But there is another side to this moral divide, the part that, sadly, we hear little about within the religious and moral values rubric of politics today. Have we forgotten that social imperatives such as feeding the poor, caring for the orphan and the widow, have their roots in the Bible? What about fair employment practices? What about proper custodianship over the environment; does that not find its roots in the Bible? The sanctity of life and preservation of health? The education of children and the respect for our elders? All of these are not liberal values, they stem from the bedrock of the faiths to which the majority of Americans adhere. And these values were scarcely heard during the first term of Bush 43, and they were rarely expressed during his (re)election campaign.
While the Democratic Party supports these values, it tends to express them outside the rubric of religion and morals. These are social objectives met by strategic policy. And while keeping to the sterile language of policy debate, perhaps the Democratic Party does itself and the country a disservice. This was not the case during the fight for civil rights and racial equality, where the the major advocates wore clerical titles like Rev. Martin Luther King, Jr. and Rabbi Abraham Joshua Heschel, just to name a few, who spoke out with "moral grandeur and spiritual audacity" against the injustices of American society. Their rhetoric, like the rhetoric used today by the GOP, was peppered with biblical references and spiritual meaning, yet approached in an inclusive manner that could engage Jew and Gentile, Catholic and Protestant, in a sacred cause.
As Democrats, we stand for sacred values, values enshrined in faith and scripture. Read, if you will, Isaiah 58, the prophetic reading for the morning of Yom Kippur that places the ritual of fasting in perspective: "This is the fast that I desire: to unlock the fetters of wickedness, and untie the cords of wickedness to let the oppressed go free; to break off every yoke. It is to share your bread with the hungry, and to take the wretched poor into your home; when you see the naked, to clothe him, and not to ignore your own kin." Is this the spirit in which the Republicans and their religious cohorts have ruled these past four years? We needn't think long and hard for an answer. This is not the rhetoric we hear from the religious voices in politics today, but perhaps that is a void that needs to be filled.
Instead, we get the Republican proposal that we build a "culture of life" in America. But just how hypocritical can they become when this "culture of life" does not extend to life beyond the uterus? How futile is it when it cares only for the fetus? We have a party that advocates capital punishment and a president who has put more convicts to death than the most successful serial killers. We have a president and a Congress that has sent over a thousand troops and an unknown number of civilians to their deaths in an illegitimate war of dubious value - and let us not forget the tens of thousands of the wounded. We have Americans without health insurance and unable to afford needed medications. We have families struggling to survive, to make ends meet, sometimes unraveling at the seams under the stress of life in America today. If we are to have a real culture of life, we need to take care of the living before the unwanted unborn who will only come into a world that will cast them aside and care nothing for them later.
Religious fervor can be a great thing. It can be a balm to cure an ailing society. But in the wrong hands, it can be a bomb that will rend it asunder, with a force that will alienate people from a just and loving Creator. A diverse and democratic society cannot survive if any one faith claims a monopoly on truth and imposes that one truth on its citizens; if so it becomes a society that loses its democratic character and imposes its will upon those of us who don't share that point of view, and we revert from being "citizens" to "subjects." Part of the social contract in contemporary democracies is that we seek out the common denominators, but we recognize and respect the diversity that our religious faiths and legal traditions bring to a greater society; we learn from them, but at times we set them aside for the greater good. We fear not the wrath of a vengeful God; we seek the care of a merciful and compassionate God who will bless our efforts to build a society that will care for the entirety of the Divine creation and will seek to glorify God, each one in accordance with the dictates of his or her creed and conscience.
For us, now, as Democrats, we need to seek out people of faith who will forcefully and passionately preach the gospel of tolerance, diversity, dignity, and respect as a moral imperative. We must learn to clothe our goals in garments of righteousness, to speak the language of sanctity in a greater society. Short of that, we will lose to those who preach their narrowness within the context of a hollow holiness, and the great evolving experiment of American democracy will suffer the fate of so many nations that have fallen under the weight of their faith built upon hubris.
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