Faith, Fundamentalism and The First Amendment

I have been away from this blog for more than a week. I’ve been sitting and waiting for the results of MI and AZ to wonder in like drunken sailors from a liberty port. The last few days have seen the polls stagger, careen, and career about like a very abstruse chaos theory calculation. The results may be close in Arizona and Michigan, or maybe not. Who knows? The primary season has lost all sense of narrative arc, degenerating into a tale that is all sound and fury. But, Sweet Baby Jesus On A Pogo Stick ,the shear idiocy and stark raving insanity of the Elephant tribe has been unnerving to watch.

Just when I think the Republicans could not dig a hole any deeper, they break out the heavy equipment to bore through the political bedrock. In pandering to the crazy, the Mighty Mormon and Mr. Unfortunate Google Result have attempted to take a wrecking ball to the separation of church and state.

It was no great surprise that Rick Santorum went all Theo-Con radical on the subject. That Santorum would make a totally inappropriate comment about JFK’s fifty year old statement on the subject of church-state separation seems by now par for course.

It would take another post to tease out how wrong Santorum's musings were. Let’s just say that his religious beliefs are in no way “oppressed” when others block his attempt to force his special brand of theocracy down their throats.  Let’s us also say he has is Constitutional understandings of the First Amendments at a ninety degree opposition to reality. I could continue on this vane, but I want to move on to more pressing matters. There is a lot to cover, and only so much time. Let’s move on, shall we?

One of those matters was the rotting corpse of the US Catholic Bishops doubling down on contraception, along with Daryl Issa. I’m way late to this particular party, please forgive me, I was just unable to recover from the jaw-dropping idiocy of the whole tempest in a tea pot.

Of all the “cultural” conflicts that the Elephants could attempt to gin up outrage on, they choose contraception? And they did it in such ham-fisted way that the proceedings outraged anyone with a vagina or a functioning male brain? (I know, I know, a “functioning male brain” is an oxymoron)  

Riddle me this, how do the Elephants intend to win any national election with only 30% of the female vote? Yes, vote for us, the party that wants to take your BC pills, IUDs, diaphragms, etc, away from you! Vote for the barefoot and pregnant party! Wow, that’s a sure-fire winner; why has no one come up with that before?

But it gets better, or worse depending on your point of view. In the latests bit of Republicans pointing out, “if you haven’t noticed, the President is a black man,” Mitt channeled his inner, soulless, pander-bear and made noise about Obama’s lack of a proper Christian faith. Run that by me again oh magic underwear man, you have questions about Obama’s Orthodoxy? You who tote around a extra-special “Additional Gospel of Jesus Christ” want to get into a discussion of The One True Faith?

Exactly when did a candidates Christology become a matter of political speculation? When did a grubby, face-shifting, flip-flopping, political hack gain the right to smear any other candidates’ faith? What part of “no” in the constitution’s no religious tests for office did the seagull worshiping Romney fail to understand?

Honestly, that bit of pander by Willard floored me. It was so skeevy, so typical, so calculated, this slandering of Obama’s faith. It was a transparent bit of flummery tossed to the evangelical, fundamentalist, born-agains. It was Mitt saying “hey I can be an utterly intolerant jackass. I can do this racist, dog-whistle, political gamesmanship just like Mr. Sweater-vest and the Icky Amphibian can. See, I’m a narrow-minded, exclusionary, bigoted, Christian-In-Name-Only, mouth-breather--just like you!” How low has the Mitt man fallen. In the six years Willard Romney has pursued the goal of the Republican nomination for president, he has lost the thread, he has definitely forgotten Matthew 16:26.

I’m not even going to bother attempting to offer a rejoinder to the talking point that Obama is a bad or fake Christian. I have no idea what the term “Christian” might mean.* Give me the common thread that joins Orthodox Christians worshiping in one of the great basilicas built in post Soviet Russia ,and the Appalachians handling snakes in some shot gun shack in the middle of nowhere; then we can talk. Tell me what the link is between the mass of Syriac Orthodox Church and glossolaic utterances (Speaking in Tongues) of  Pentecostals --in twenty five words or less-- and you will rate as a super-genius in my book. No points for saying “Jesus” or “the Holy Spirit”

(* I know there are plenty of helmet-haired freaks of nature more than willing to blabber on ad infinitum, and ad nauseum, about their pet theory of what Christian and Christianity entails: “give your heart to Jesus, and blather, blather, yammer, yammer, jaw, jaw, etc.” That is not Christian nor Christianity. That is a very narrow interpretation of what Christianity might be. It is the not the first interpretation, nor will it be the last. It is most certainly not the only interpretation.)

As one who has read far too much history for normal functioning, I can tell you nothing good comes out of a debate about who the, “proper Christian” might be. The same question recast as , “who is the proper Muslim” is also incredibly problematic; just ask the Shia and Sunnis about that little conundrum. This is why we in West decided to give the entire thing a miss, and went for secularism.

I can see why the entire notion of secularism frosts Santorum’s corn flakes. For a Theo-Con like Santorum, secularism is the barred and bolted door that prevents him from achieving his theocratic state. Secularism is the big fat fortified mountain that Rick must overcome before he can shove his heretical notions down the rest of the nation’s throat. Secularism is real freedom contrasted with Santorum’s freedom to run the land as autocrat and Pope.

Our system of secularism did  not spring up as some evil plot hatched by Christ-hating, evil Liberals in the 1960’s. It was set up by the bitter lessons of two centuries of civil-religious warfare. It is the results of the hard lessons learned in Continental Europe, then In Cromwellian England and then finally in the wretched excess of the Puritans in New England. The founders wanted no part of any established faith, they had a belly full of the Church Of England and wanted no repeats.

In one respect the yammering of the Republican hopefuls is spot on, this election is a defining choice. Not because the shape-shifting, transactional Obama may win or loose a second term; it is not about Obama. What it is about is the over-reach of radical TEA Party ultras. It is about the over-reach of Theo-cons and other radicals who want to remake the nation into a regressive fantasy of a US that never existed. It is an attempt to negate not only the liberations of the 1960’s but also every bit of racial, social, and gender justice carved out since the New Deal. And once that work is complete the reactionaries will shred both the New Deal and that Commie pinko TR’s Fair Deal so they can properly relive the glory days of the Gilded Age.

The right is freaking out about the twin liberations of women and blacks. They want their white patriarchy back and don’t who gets hurt in its restoration. They mau-mau the Constitution on the way to shredding it into a fine confetti. This concern tolling about “religious liberty” is nothing more than Orwellian doublespeak. It is not about liberty, its about oppression. It is the attempt of a small cadre of reactionary evangelicals imposing their notions, their will to power on the rest of us.

The Limits Of Faith, Roman Catholic Edition.

I’m not Catholic. For me, the Roman Catholic Church is an interesting institution that has survived for over sixteen centuries with many ups and downs. As the last Mediaeval and absolute monarchy left standing, it is an always a fascinating, if frustrating, anachronism. Battered and bruised by modernity, diminished by secular society, it struggles to be relevant in a zeitgeist soaking in materialism. The Catholic Church has a few shreds of moral authority to wave about; but the authoritarian nature of the Papacy is its own worst enemy in keeping that moral authority relevant.

The church limps into the 21st Century as an institution diminished by the slings and arrows the 20th. The last part of the 20th Century was a really bad patch, as the church failed to meet the challenge of the Nazi terror, and then was called on the carpet for the failings of its Priests and charitable organizations in the last decade of the 20th.

With a new Millennium at hand, the Church that Peter and Paul built is a deep funk in the developed, post-industrial world. It keeps trying to play defense, but the social revolutions of the 20th Century, especially the sexual liberation of the 1960’s, have left its moral teaching in tatters. While increasingly authoritarian, the papacy has ever less authority among the laity.

This brings us, by an admitted long, circuitous route, to the Roman Catholic Church’s attempt to get a carve out an exemption for Reproductive health services for it’s hospitals and other institutions in the US. The Church’s insistence on following a deeply flawed teaching on birth control has once again brought in conflict with secular society. The church fathers are attempting to nullify the secular government’s prerogatives, and to carve out an illegitimate exception to the notion of the commons for themselves. This is ridiculous.

Let’s be clear, Catholic institutions that interface with the commons, Hospitals, Universities, Charitable organizations, etc. fall into the purview of governmental regulations. They are subject to Federal, State, and Local regulation just like any other institution. They are businesses, just like any other business. They are not special because their CEO hangs out in some very nice digs in Rome.

In the US, we live under the protections of a Constitution that separates church and state. The state in our nation is the final authority. Secular institutions have the final word about the most intimate details of family life. The state regulates marriage and family life; not the church. The church is allowed to participate in the institutions of marriage and family life, but the final answer, the rules for marriage, divorce, child rearing, are made and enforced by the secular state.

We live in a nation grounded in the notion of unalienable rights. These rights obtain by the very fact of our humanity. They are human rights, and to deny them is do violence to human beings. It is to do an act of evil.

But no right is absolute, they interact and are limited by other rights. Put simply, the right to swing your fist freely ends at someone else’s nose. What the Catholic Church is proposing is that it has the right to swing its fist into the noses of thousands of citizens who just happen to be women. The proposal is specious and wrong headed.

The church does not even have the right to impose it’s views on contraception by force on its own parishioners, never mind the general public. The insisting on the right to nullify the laws laid down by the Federal government is unacceptable. By offering its employees and others health services, by entering the commons, by serving the outside public, the Church has to accept the rules and regulation laid down by the state.

The church is not allowed to discriminate on account of sex. It can not create a second class, second tier cohort in its ranks. If a Catholic institution were to baring people of color from certain health benefits, the general public would demand immediate restitution from the government. Race bias is not allowed by the government in any institution that serves the public, neither should gender bias.

In one way the attempt by the Roman Catholic Church to get away with gender bias, its attempt to keep on wallowing in Patriarchy and Misogyny, is hardly surprising. The Catholic Church has become ever more reactionary, both politically and in matters of faith as the 20th Century wound down. The new century has not halted the retrograde activities of the church. If anything, the elevation of Benny the Rat-zinger has made the march rightward pick up speed.

What is surprising though is how the Church is getting away with this utter nonsense. The willingness of bobble head pundits to be spear carriers for the Roman Catholic hierarchy is mind bending. That an aid to the Speaker of the House does not get how the church is trying to do an end run around the constitutional protections of women is depressing. Is this a sign of creeping senility, or has Chris Mathews always been this dense?

This is all about equal protection under the law. You cannot have one level of care for the male of the species and then have a lower, more restrictive level of care for the female.That is flat out wrong, and no appeal to rosary-bead fiddling can ever change how wrong this kind of backwards thinking is.

The church has a right to teach on every subject under the sun. It has a right to expound on any weird notion that strikes its fancy. It can lock itself in any number of cloisters, and attempt to count the numbers of Angles sitting on a pin. It can continue its regard action against modern science. It can continue to rail against modernity in all its forms. It has that right. What it has no right to do, is shove its retrograde notions down the throats of millions of women in the US, and billions of women throughout the world.  The fundamental right of women to control their own bodies trumps Humanae Vitae.

In a world were the struggle against religious extremism is a a real concern, the only true bulwark against Theocratic rule is secularism.  The bar against the rule of zealots and fanatics of all stripes is a strict separation of church and state. If you wish to bar Sharia law from our governance, then you must also bar Roman Catholic Hierarchy from gaining a carve out on birth control. It is not the governments concern that the Bishops have issues with women’s sexual agency. The government is only concerned with bending the cost curve of health care via sound preventive medicine. The Catholic Church can either comply with the rules as written, or it can remove itself from the requirement by no longer participating in the public sector.

Final words. Every idiot pundit out there is indulging in heavy breathing about First Amendment protection for this outrageous move by the US Bishops. The First Amendment is not a get out of jail free card. The state would stop the Roman Catholic Church flat if the Holy Father attempted to restart the Auto Da Fe' of the Inquisition. The State these days has zero interest in persecuting Christian Heretics. This is because the state has made it clear it has no interest in establishing a religion. It is right there in the First Amendment : Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion.

We have no official Church in the US. Faith has its limits. In public governance, it is excluded. In the public sphere, the church is strictly regulated.  It has to follow the rules of any other employer. It has to answer to the state for any and all egregious malfeasance; which is why the Roman Catholic Church got clobbered in the tort courts when the hobbies of certain priests were revealed. The Roman Catholic Church is not a law to itself. It does not earn a carve out for birth control any more than it earns a carve out for child raping priests.

Just As Expected, This Is Working Out Just Great

The trial of Dutch politician Geert Wilders for his anti-Islamic views has been thrown into disarray after his judges were found to be themselves biased — against Wilder. A verdict from the panel of three judges at the Amsterdam district court was due next week. A re-trial will be scheduled with new judges.

For example, one of the appeal court judges, Tom Schalken, had dinner with Professor Hans Jansen, a professor of Arabic studies, a potential witness. Jansen revealed that Schalken tried “to convince me of the correctness of the decision to take Wilders to court.”

More at: http://goo.gl/TQVQ

Fred and Geert

It has been a weird week for fans of the First Amendment. In two distant land two controversial personalities have tested exactly what are the limits of civil discourse. Unless you are a compulsive news junky with feeds from multiple news sources ( guilty as charged your honor) nether Fred Phelps or Geert Wilders will be a name that causes any neurons to fire.

Actually they are very similar in the fact they happen to be very outlandish, very radical and very irritating. They are basically bomb-throwers, disturbers of the peace. Let us start with the dandy Dutch MP since most people in the U.S. would not know this guy from the lad that sits on the paint can.

Geert Wilders is a far-right politician who has caused the good people of the Netherlands more problems than Tulip collapse of 1637. He is the man behind the film Fitna; the film many consider to be anti-Islamic propaganda and hate speech.  As a matter of fact that is why Mr Wilders is in the news. He stands accused of fomenting hate speech. In the Netherlands that is a crime.

Mr Wilders had made no secret of his dislike for Islam, and his with wish that every last Muslim depart the Netherlands for somewhere less European. He has championed Burqa bans, a halt to Mosque construction, a freeze on immigration (especially if the immigrant happens to be Islamic), and other bits of unfriendly suggestions about the followers of Muhammad.

These and other bits of excessive enthusiasm have landed good old Geert in criminal court. And court is Fred happens to be now also. Fred being Fred Phelps.

On this side of the Atlantic, the U.S. side, Mr. Phelps is every bit, if not more controversial. Fred Phelps is the leader of an ultra small, ultra conservative, ultra evangelical church in the beating heart of the bible belt; Topeka, Kansas. This the man who though it would be a dandy idea that he ,and his congregants, protest the funerals of service members. Fred has the notion that those men and women died because God wants to punish us for the great sin of THE GAY. This is the man who proudly proclaims that God hates fags.

Both these men bring into real life the usually philosophical questions of free speech. In short, the question becomes how much of jerk can you be before you loose your right to free speech. Exactly were is the line between obnoxious and toxic?

In the U.S. the Supremes have cut out  exceptions to free speech. There is the “clear and present danger” exemption, there is also the notion of “fighting words.”  Most people are familiar with the notion of fire in a crowded theater. Unfortunately that particular example, or argument is a MacGuffin. When Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr. tossed out this canard in the Schenck case. (The exact quote “The most stringent protection of free speech would not protect a man falsely shouting fire in a theater and causing a panic.” ) he was being disingenuous. Shouting fire is no more speech than the profanity you may utter when you stub your toe. Shouting fire is to raise an alarm, it is utterance that communicates danger. It is a one way communication sent directly to the lizard brain. It is no way an attempt to communicate, to inform, to debate or to explain.  Holmes used the example to justify the court’s ruling against WWI protesters.

So if Fred is not really falsely shouting fire in theater, are his words still so inflammatory that they must be suppressed? He is an obnoxious little cockroach, but does that allow the government to step on him? In Phelps’ case, no. Granted that’a a bitter pill to swallow, especially for the bereaved relatives of the slain; but free speech is often rather ugly. Phelps fits very comfortably in the meme of a tiny group of neo-Nazis protesting in Jewish Skokie, Illinois. Ours is great country because small collection of vicious jerks are allowed the same right of speech that our more erudite citizens are.

Geert is a different matter all together. He is not some leader of a small literally inbred cult; he is a politician with real pull and real power. He is the tip of the spear of an assault on some of the most cherished democratic norms in Europe. In him we can see the outlines of a conflict between the freedom of speech and the freedom of religion.  Exactly how does a post-modern nation deal with the contradiction of using one freedom being used to suppress another?

We find once again the maxim that your freedom to swing your fists ends at my nose to be most useful. Geert is swinging his fists quite vigorously, and with possible bad intent; but for the moment no real damage is being done.

Criminalizing Geert Wilders would do more harm than good. It would make him a martyr  to the very Iislamophobes that support his thinking. Holland needs to come to grips with the facts on the ground. A new barbarism is rising in Europe, a new tribalism, and Mr. Wilders is merely a symptom of the disease not its cause.

Tying to legislate against people like Wilders and Phelps is bad idea. Bad ideas are one of the foremost causes of bad law. Both Holland and the USA appear to be headed down the path of bad law.

 Unfortunately the Supremes seem to be headed down that path of bad law. They will attempt to find some bogus cut-out to the first amendment with which they can slap Phelps and company down. Holland also seem to be working feverishly for a similar “solution” for Mr. Wilders.  The outcome of these efforts will be a terrible precedent.

It may sound ironic but we must have a little faith here. We must hold firm to the great secular faith first outlined by Enlightenment thinkers. It is clunky, kludgy construct who’s only advantage is that is slightly less dysfunctional than every thing else us hairless apes have attempted. That faith is that more speech is better than less, that eventually good ideas will triumph over bad ones as long as discussion is full and free. It often does not work out that way, but tell me of faith that is 100% correct in its prognostications. Full, free and vigorous speech is always better than the alternative. To secure the blessings of liberty you have to put up with quite a few verbal bomb-throwers. Fred and Geert are, by there very existence, guarantors of our freedoms; let them speak.

French Muslims Fried

French court approves veil ban.

Country's highest legal authority gives the green light to a ban on facial veils, despite previous warnings against it.

France's highest court has approved a law banning full-facial veils in public - with the exception of mosques - eliminating the last hurdle for the ban.

Those behind the law argue that it will protect women's rights. Its critics, however, say that it stigmatises Muslim women and it is a breach of religious freedom.

The court found the law to be constitutional, bar in the case of places of worship.

"The ban on covering the face in public places cannot constrain the practice of religious freedom in places of worship that are open to the public," the court said in its judgment, a nominal nod to religious freedoms.

The decision in favour of the law by the constitutional council came as a surprise to many. The court had warned that the ban – which includes the niqab and the burqa, but not the hijab – might be unconstitutional.

The path is now clear for the law to be implemented in early 2011, after a six month period of "mediation" and "education".

Snip

The European nation that defined the liberal and reformist troika ( Liberty, Equality, Fraternity) has now backslid into pointless repression. Exactly what danger does a Muslima in culturally approved atire offer to the nation first formed by Clovis and the Merovingian dynasty? A few thousand women be-bopping around in burqas  some how constitute a existential threat to the French Republic; who would of guessed?  Here's a helpful suggestion : cut back on the snail intake my Gallic friends; it is obviously affecting the higher brain functions.