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Barack Obama  |
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Rob Kailey is a working schmuck with no ties or affiliations to any governmental or political organizations, save those of sympathy.
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Tue Nov 03, 2009 at 10:42:50 AM MST
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| I haven't got much today; most of the nation's political class is focusing on key elections across the country, including public referenda on gay rights in Washington and Maine. In Maine, voters are being asked to uphold or deny a law passed in that state's legislature to legalize gay marriage; and in Washington, voters are asked to vote on a bill passed by that state's legislature that grant more legal protections to domestic partners.
As conservative religious groups across the country work to impose their brand of dogma on our legal system and deny basic rights to fellow citizens based on arbitrary, religious-based reasons, I'm reminded of this passage from Simon Schama's "The American Futre":
The implications of the First Amendment have inadvertently, or not, backed America into the great question on which the peace of the whole world, not just the United States, will turn....It's this unavoidable dialogue between faith and freedom, conviction and toleration, that has always been at the heart of American history and which is only crudely characterized as a "church-state separation debate." The unmistakable indifference of the American electorate to evangelical dogmatics in this election year, the clear sense...that evangelical politics has had its day, only comes as a surprise to those beyond America who imagined it would go on and on, eating away at democratic toleration. It's elsewhere in the world that dogma chokes on pluralism - the coexistence of conflicting versions of the best way to redemption - and uses state power to wipe it out. In the United States the Founding Fathers believed instead that religious truth would best be served by keeping the state out of the business of its propagation; that the power of religious engagement would not just survive freedom of conscience but be its noblest consequence. It was a daring bet: that faith and freedom were mutually nourishing. But it paid off and it has made America uniquely qualified to fight the only battle that matters, not General Boykin's quixotic reenactment of the true god against the false idol, but the war of toleration against conformity; the war of a faith that commands obedience against a faith that promises liberty. That, actually turns out to be the big American story.
The irony, then, in the pursuit of barring gays from state-based institutions is that religious groups are working to undermine the very structure of liberty that allowed religion to flourish in the United States. |
| Jay Stevens :: "...war of a faith that commands obedience against a faith that promises liberty..." |
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