the rix mix

I don't know when I really began to feel like a radical leftist. Probably during the Clinton presidency, when I was astonished at what passed for "liberal" with both parties. I'm always behind the curve on any progressive programs not at least suggested during Roosevelt's New Deal era. FDR didn't do half of what Eleanor wanted.

I didn't begin unequivocally supporting full marriage equality until about three years ago. I began to understand why it was insulting to call the relationship between dying Ocean County Police Lt. Laurel Hester & Stacie Andree a "domestic partnership" when the Law of Love clearly defined it as nothing less than a marriage in the spiritual sense. Yet, there they were, battling a collection of incredibly insensitive male Republican freeholders over Hester's pension death benefits. They were fighting for civil rights. not for the blessing of a priest. It was one of the most shameful things I had ever seen in Jersey politics, which is saying a lot. The blame for this "culture war" belonged on the religious right & that's where I placed it & that's where it's stayed.

I also had a genuine empathy for people with religious objections to abortion. That changed as I realized abortion was the "wedge" issue but religious right was actively trying to roll back reproductive rights in general: the right to have sex without fear of pregnancy; the right of access to birth control; the means to combat HIV & other STDs other than counseling celibacy. & the right to intelligent information.

Then there's the absurd "War on Christmas" in which American Christians are cast as victims of a great conspiracy by an oppressive secular minority. Bulldoodle. I was saddened by court rulings that restrained religious expression in public institutions & spaces; these were things of my childhood being changed. But I understood why the change was inevitable & necessary, that the demographics of religious belief were changing. It borders on hypocrisy for Christians to endorse the retail marketing monster Christmas has become, to demand that we all call it "Christmas" when it is something else, distinctly American & secular in its excesses. Inside this gargantuan, clerk-stomping festival is a touching, happy, & modest Christian holiday. It's not happening at Wal-Mart. Let it be "Happy Holidays.'

This from Battling for the Soul of the Democratic Party by Sarah Posner:

By rejecting the so-called “culture wars,” the “broader agenda” evangelicals and their Democratic allies imply that there is something inherently unseemly about advocating for reproductive or LGBT rights. The American Prospect’s Ann Friedman has rejected the use of the term “culture war” as a descriptor for the quest for LGBT equality because “the very act of invoking the term ‘culture war’ signals that we think something is controversial, when in fact, equal rights should be the furthest thing from it.” This is a secular viewpoint that is mirrored in progressive religious thinking. “Anytime someone calls them [abortion and gay marriage] hot button or wedge issues my back goes up,” says the Rev. Debra Haffner, director of the Religious Institute on Sexual Morality, Justice, and Healing. “It sounds like, oh, yeah, we don’t need to worry about women and gay people.”

It pains me when "liberal" Democratic presidential candidates attend a so-called "Compassion Forum" at Messiah College & genuflect to Rick "Purpose Driven" Warren at Saddleback Church, venues that are so unwelcoming of sane, enlightened attitudes that anyone merely expressing them in those places is made to feel like a moral outlaw.

The Christian right wing is comprised of various types of scriptural literalists, & yet they esteem the Bible most for its legalistic content. I value the Bible most for its accounts of miraculous events, & the truths I find in those events, & in he poetry & parables. I have a much more generous view of the miraculous than the conservatives.

Labels: blogging against theocracy, New Jersey politics, religion