If Pious Democrats Make You Want To Puke, Read This
Nick Gillespie | June 7, 2007, 9:28am
Former press secretary for the Democratic National Committee, occasional Reason contributor, and self-proclaimed "libertarian Democrat" Terry Michael wasn't impressed with CNN's show earlier this week in which Donkey Party presidential candidates yapped about their religious streaks:
Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton (N.Y.), Sen. Barack Obama (Ill.) and former Sen. John Edwards (N.C.) all decided they did, indeed, owe an accounting of their personal religious beliefs -- a televised recitation, in fact -- to an audience assembled Monday at George Washington University by the left-liberal-worthy Rev. Jim Wallis and channeled through a television anchor aptly (or at least euphoniously) named Soledad O'Brien.
The front-runners' pandering to "people of faith" is the latest expression of Religion Lite advocated by the consultant wing of the Democratic Party.
After several decades of the religious right's attempt to trash the First Amendment and Christianize America via the GOP (God's Own Party?), we are now treated to the religious left and its heavenly claims on behalf of social justice....
Michael excoriates the Holy Trinity of Clinton, Obama, and Edwards (who he thinks was the biggest panderer of the trio) in detail and then relates some pretty interesting experiences of his own:
Having worked as press spokesman for the Democratic National Committee 20 years ago, when the late Rev. Jerry Falwell's Moral Majority was in full flower, I am appalled at how little these possible future leaders of the free world have learned from decades of mixing "faith" and politics.
I came to Washington in 1975 with the late Paul Simon, working for five years as his House press secretary and later traveling with him for seven months as spokesman for his 1988 presidential campaign. Never once in the almost four decades I knew the Illinois Democrat did I ever hear him invoke religion or mention God in a speech, or even in private conversation, though I assumed his religious views were probably those you would expect from the son of Christian missionaries to China (where he was conceived in 1928) and the brother of a Lutheran minister.
A man with the moral rectitude of an Eagle Scout, Simon understood why the Founders included not a single reference to a deity in our Constitution. The best way to protect your right to be guided by faith (and mine to be guided by reason) is to keep our understandings of where we come from and how we come to be moral animals on the other side of a very high wall between the state, with its coercive powers, and the temples created by believers.
The willingness of Democratic candidates to breach that barrier reflects a failure of nerve in a political party that ought to be our best hope for secular governance in a world where so much hate and murder is still being unleashed by "people of faith," whose beliefs were never touched by The Age of Reason and The Enlightenment -- the same felicitous era in human history that gave us Jefferson and others averse to the mingling of religion and governance.
To put it in bumper sticker form, Hillary, John and Barack: "I'm a Person of Reason, and I Vote, Too!"
Whole thing, well worth reading, here.
CFisher | June 7, 2007, 1:16pm | #
The Good Samaritan: American Politician edition:
There was a man traveling from Jerusalem who was waylaid by robbers, beaten and left for dead. A Pharisee passed by, but seeing the wounded man, crossed the street and continued. A lawyer likewise did the same. However, then a Good Samaritan came along who recognized that he lived in a global village and, in fact, had 50% of his income taken every year for the express purpose of paying government workers to dispense charity for him.
So he phoned in a report to the local police, who dispatched an officer to take a report. The officer was suspicious of the Samaritan’s proximity to the crime, his foreign status, and his lack of a proper Roman ID card and opted to detain the Samaritan indefinitely, until such time as he could prove his innocence. However, after some enhanced interrogation at the local precinct, the filthy bugger confessed to the whole thing and is currently incarcerated at an undisclosed location pending review by a military tribunal.
The police report was forwarded to the office of Health and Human Services who filed their own report on the matter and assigned a case worker to the injured traveler. Said report, in turn, was then filed to the office of Homeland Security who demanded increased funding from Caesar so they could put officers on every road to strip search travelers and ensure that no one was carrying any weapons of any sort except for the bandits who ignored the checkpoints.
Meanwhile, the HHS case worker made quiet inquiries and recommended the traveler’s case to the Deputy Regional Director of Hospital Services where he would be placed on a waiting list, unless of course, the traveler were a smoker, drinker, or a bit overweight, in which case he would be denied treatment. The Traveler (assuming he is a clean liver) would then see a doctor who would assign him a Tylenol for his pain, despite the fact that he was, from lack of speedy care, now dead.
Health and Human Services then recommended increased funding from Caesar to decrease the case worker load to solve the obvious delay problem that, their report assured him, in no way contributed to the traveler’s death, but was still a problem that required massive amounts of new funding anyway.
Caesar, in his infinite wisdom, reviewed the petitions of his Cabinet officers, and decided to pass tax increases under the theory that it was quite obvious that despite already high levels of taxation, the greedy Roman subjects obviously still had too much spare money if they were being targeted for robbery in the first place.
Hail Caesar!
Sad Cauliflower | June 11, 2007, 4:38pm | #
I generally agree with Terry Michael's vexation at the candidates' continuous reassurances of religious belief, in order not to alienate the all-important religious demographic. I wish a candidate would adopt, for a change, the stance that religious belief is, in fact, a private affair, and not at all a prerequisite for morality (nor political office). And, for "heaven's" sake, shake off the ridiculous notion that "atheism equals Marxism", which has dominated public opinion far too long now..
Alas, the closest thing to a secular politician I can remember of was the former wrestler (governor?) who inanely attacked all believers as "mentally weak persons who need crutches", or some such offensive nonsense (exactly what we don't need, and the kind of behaviour to paint atheists as confrontational bigots in the mind of the general public). In any case, religious reassurances seem to have become part and parcel of the meaningless posturing which has replaced reasoned policy discourse in electoral campaigns (alongside trotting out the wife and kids, kissing babies, and the rest of the populist shebang). More's the pity.
My scores, by the way..
"You scored as a Scientific Atheist"
"These guys rule. I'm not one of them myself, although I play one online. They know the rules of debate, the Laws of Thermodynamics, and can explain evolution in fifty words or less. More concerned with how things ARE than how they should be, these are the people who will bring us into the future."
Scientific Atheist 75%
Apathetic Atheist 75%
Spiritual Atheist 67%
Agnostic 58%
Militant Atheist 50%
Theist 33%
Angry Atheist 17%
In all sincerity, I find the "50% militant atheist" score disturbing, as the "religion as a virus of the mind" Dawkins-brigade honestly gives me the creeps. The "spiritual atheist" score is quite off the mark, too. Not particularly impressed by this quiz..
