[cryout-multi][cryout-column width=”1/4″] [/cryout-column] [cryout-column width=”1/2″]
BS ‘n’ About…
Christian Politics
The power of the conservative, Christian vote is that it is widespread, easily targeted, and tends to turn out on Election Day. It is the most organized vote in America and considered by many to be largely responsible for the Republican successes of recent years. But has that vote been served by those who have campaigned so piously for it? Have the values that vote represents been reflected by the actions of the politicians it elects?
Every four years the Republicans trot out a “Family Values” platform crafted from the incendiary amendment issues of abortion, the death penalty, gay marriage, stem cell research, and the like. It makes for a platform almost impossible for a good Christian to vote against. It makes for a platform that makes the Democrats come across all wishy-washy. Yet it also makes for a platform that conveniently disappears from the headlines the day after the election because it has nothing to do with the jobs we send these guys to Washington to do.
Washington’s job is to collect the taxes, spend them wisely, get along with the neighbors, and defend the Constitution. All that other stuff is just a distraction, a manipulation of our vote at its most blatant. If we strip away the self-serving moral stands on behalf of amendment issues they can do very little about, how much of the Republican platform has anything whatsoever to do with anything that can be reasonably construed as “Family Values”?
Under the Republican watch, Wall Street has boomed, yet very little of that has ‘trickled-down’ to the family. We can’t afford to educate our kids anymore. We can’t afford to get sick anymore. We can’t afford to retire anymore. Let’s not even talk about gas. Our out-dated, under-funded infrastructure is a series of Katrinas waiting to happen, yet we’ve run up a Haliburton-sized deficit that will still be strangling our grandkids.
Under the Republican watch, corruption and partisanship have nearly destroyed Congress, the Supreme Court has lost its luster, and the Executive Branch is making up the rules as it goes along. Many precedents are being set. Very few of them benefit the average citizen. Very few of them make us more democratic.
Under the Republican watch, we’ve grown into a cold, hard, selfish nation. We feed off our young and old, sick and poor, cutting funding for them every chance we get. Not even the politicians keep a straight face when they pretend any of our foreign policy is altruistic. We’ve gone from an open-bordered, Statue of Liberty nation with her arms outstretched to ‘the huddled masses yearning to be free’, to a Homeland Security nation where they darn near strip us buck-naked every time we want to get on an airplane.
Under the Republican watch, we’ve alienated our allies and enraged our enemies. We made no pretense of giving a damn what our allies thought before we stormtrooped off to save the world from terrorism. So now they sit on the sidelines rooting for us to fail. Right now we don’t really have any allies, yet we seem to be creating new enemies daily.
Washington’s job is to collect the taxes, spend them wisely, get along with the neighbors, and defend the Constitution. Under the Republican watch, we’ve spent gazillions more than we’ve collected, pissed off all the neighbors, and conducted the most insidious assault on the Constitution in US history.
Along the way, the wealth of America has been transferred from the workingman to the upper classes, the rudder of the nation has been handed to Wall Street, and We, the People have been pitted against each other as red and blue demographics.
Can these be in any way, shape, or form the results we were looking for when we put these guys in power? Is any of the above in the best interests of the average American family? What does any of it have to do with ‘Family Values’? What does any of it have to do with ‘Christian Values’? After all, the above is what we send these guys to Washington to do.
By focusing on the Amendment issues of abortion, gay marriage, assisted suicide, etc., Presidential and Congressional campaigns can avoid talking about any of the actual nuts-and-bolts stuff that affects our lives. When one Party uses these issues, the other is forced to respond, and the real issues never seem to get discussed. Amendment issues probably swayed the Presidential election in ’04, yet not one substantial thing has been done about any of them since. Nor would there have been if the other guy won. It’s not their job!
Our Founding Fathers wrote a Constitution that delegated these types of moral issues to the state and local levels to be resolved through the Amendment process. This kept our faith safe from the manipulations of our leaders and made it very difficult to impinge upon the religious freedoms of our neighbors. It separated church and state. It kept us free.
That freedom is in jeopardy when we are asked to vote our faith. When we use our faith to build the house in which our neighbor lives, we have both lost Freedom of Religion. There is no gray area. Freedom of Religion. You either have it or you don’t. If you want it in its entirety, you’ve got to allow it in its entirety. If you take away the other guy’s, you’ve lost your own.
For more than 200 years we’ve managed to separate church and state, protecting both in the process. We used our faiths to determine who we are, then made tough but secular decisions on issues like slavery, Manifest Destiny, suffrage, and civil rights. The fact that we were free citizens of a free country, free to vote as we like, united us as a people and made us fiercely proud of our freedoms and our country.
Bringing faith into the political process has turned our red, white, and blue nation into a red vs. blue nation. Because, all too often, a vote for faith is a vote against freedom. Faith is an either-or, black-or-white kind of thing whereas democracy is all gray area and compromise. The two do not mix well and, in the long run, cannot co-exist at all. We can build a Democracy, or a Theocracy. Not both.
Faith is far too powerful a force for an ideal as fragile as democracy to withstand. Faith knows no compromise, yet democracy cannot exist without it. Composed as we are of so many faiths, cultures, and races, no single voice, no matter how sure of itself, no matter how united, can hope to speak for more than a small fraction of us. Any voice that speaks for a democracy must be a voice of compromise, or it no longer speaks for a democracy.
Faith has been brought to the forefront of our political process by the Republican overtures to the Christian voter in recent years. But has that vote been served? Have the values it represents been reflected by legislation in Washington? Have the gains we’ve made been worth the prices we’ve paid?
The Christian vote has been mobilized to vote overwhelmingly Republican, repeatedly turning away Democratic overtures for more education, healthcare, job security, and social security. With a lot less Pentagon and Wall Street in the mix. Since traditional Democratic platforms should hold broad appeal for the poor, the workers, those with kids, and families, Christian or otherwise, the unity of the Christian vote is reason enough to be suspicious of manipulation.
When an electorate goes to the polls with gay marriage and abortion on its minds, in the midst of a bodybag war and gas on its way to three bucks a gallon, it is an electorate being distracted, disrespected, manipulated, and downright lied to: It is an electorate being removed from the process.
Washington has pitted us against each other over the sideshows so we won’t pay attention to all the wheelin’ an’ dealin’ going on in the center ring. As they say, ‘Follow the Money!’ Twenty-five years of Republican rule has kept Wall Street booming, the rich in tax cuts, and the Pentagon supplied with all the latest goodies. To pay for this they’ve busted the unions, slashed educational opportunities and healthcare benefits, allowed the infrastructure to continue to crumble, allowed Social Security to become unstable, and forced Mom into the workplace. Oops! They didn’t pay for it. As American citizens, we each owe $28,000 or so. We’re going to pay for it. Our kids are going to pay for it. Our grandkids are going to pay for it. And our lives aren’t one iota better for having been saddled with all this irresponsible debt.
When the rhetoric is put aside and reality examined, very few of the successes of the so-called conservative, Republican tide have bettered our lives, as families, as Americans, or as Christians. Abortion is still with us. Stem Cell research continues unabated. And in a world where they can send your kid home in a bodybag, does it really, truly matter how two gay people define their relationship here on Earth? God is going to sort us all out in the end anyway.
The ‘conservative Christian vote’, through its unity and sense of purpose, holds a political power out of proportion to its numbers. In a democracy, that is a heavy responsibility, implying knowledge of what’s best for us as a people, and as a nation.
But it is a responsibility that cannot be fulfilled through the black-and-white filter of faith. America needs the Christian voter back in the democratic process, voting for his or her family. The more we use faith to fashion the government under which we live, the more we become like the countries our ancestors fled. Faith almost always limits freedoms. We cannot vote for both. The only way we can have both is if we allow our neighbor to build his own house, in his own way.
The Christian vote needs to look beyond all the pious rhetoric and spiritual smokescreens and honestly assess what our leaders have done for us lately in the nuts-and-bolts department. For all their holier-than-thou posturings, the Republicans are a lot more about “Corporate Values” than “Family Values”. For all their scare tactics and false promises, twenty-five years under their watch has left the moral fabric of America in tatters. Wall Street parties while the rest of us are at each other’s throats, trying to scratch a living out of the leftovers. We no longer trust each other, nor anyone else in the world. Lying, cheating, and stealing fill the headlines. We’re turning into our own worst nightmare.
America faces some awfully tough decisions in the near future, decisions which may very well set the tone for the future of all mankind. The more we attempt to impose our wills and values on each other, the more we’ll be met with resistance and conflict. The future will look a whole lot like the past.
However, should we get back to representing and fighting for true freedom like in the old days, we might just set the tone for living in peace without all the resistance and conflict. The world looks to us for leadership. We need to be a united people. We need to start fighting for the other guy’s humanity and right to make his own decisions, then get out of his way and have faith in God to sort things out in the end. WWGD? WWJD? WWYD?
- [/cryout-column] [cryout-column width=”1/4″] [/cryout-column] [/cryout-multi]