"Congress shall make no law
respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise
thereof." Ist Amendment
For Mary and millions like
her.
80's previous comments on the growing influence of the
religious right in the US have tended to look at the top of the pyramid, from
members of the Bush administration to various pressure groups with a national
scope, rather than their grassroots counterparts. But what is it like on a local
basis, how does such religiosity at the other end of the scale affect regular citizens
in their everyday lives? 80's example here is the
experience of an
old and dear friend who lives in a pleasant suburban neighborhood in Contra
Costa County, Northern California. A widow with a teenage son, she works
many hours a week to keep a good home and to be able to give her boy what he needs. Mary
(not her real name) is also a great believer in a live and let live philosophy -
other folk can do what they like, so long as they break no laws and bring no harm
to others. She loves the area in which she lives with its clean streets and
shopping plazas and access to the big city (San Francisco). She has been
struggling recently to cope with extra demands made upon her since her boy was
seriously injured in a car crash. Consequently she has been juggling her time between
working to keep the show on the road and caring for her son. This has obviously left her
feeling somewhat frazzled, but she is a great one for plowing on and working
hard at her office and home until things return to a semblance of normality.
Anyone unaware of her current problems wouldn't guess from her demeanor the
strain under which she is operating right now, but 80 spoke with her the other
day and found her uncharacteristically het up. The first thought was that her
son had suffered a setback, but no, he was ok. Maybe the huge amount of work she does was
wearing her down, but again, no. Just what was it that had so upset this tough
and caring mom? It was the arrival in her mailbox of the May issue of a local
magazine called The Valley Citizen. So? Big deal, we have all seen mags like this,
with reports of local interest, diaries of sporting events and pages with
recipes and lots of local ads - surely this is just the regular community stuff?
It turns out that, yes, the Valley Citizen does contain much of the content you
would expect, but it also runs columns that made Mary feel marginalized, shut
out, hurt and deeply offended. The magazine's main page proclaims "The
Valley Citizen is committed to providing a clear voice for our area's citizens."
But only some of them, as we shall learn.
You see, Mary does not believe in God - or any manifestation of the
supernatural. She also believes that women are fully the equal of men -
something she proves everyday, working and caring for the home she bought with
money she earned herself, and raising her son. In the Valley Citizen she read
the views of people who feel very differently. More than that, they wish to impose these
views on everyone else. She also read things that made her feel offended and
embarrassed on behalf of many of her neighbors, who represent the broad spectrum
of 21st century multicultural life. Many of them are professionals who emigrated
to California, drawn by the siren song of the place - and the good high-tech
jobs that needed their skills, skills the US alone can no longer supply (but
that's another story, although connected with this one). These neighbors include,
among others,
a couple of Indian families, one Sikh and the other Hindu. The neighbors also
include a gay couple in a longstanding and stable relationship, late middle-aged
men who have retired to this pleasant area. The columns in the Valley Citizen
that we shall glance at in a moment damn all these good people, just because
they are what they are. What is on display in this magazine is a complete
reversal of the all-inclusive American dream that has, in the past, attracted
immigrants the world over to make the country their home, where they can raise
their kids and where they can contribute to society and their new country and be
valued for it. In the past many of these people left their homelands because of
religious persecution. The Valley Citizen, for all of its external banality, is full of
bigotry and thinly disguised hatred, and it is aimed at these American citizens.
One attribute of the US that attracted folk in the past, particularly from Great
Britain, was the lack of a class system. If you worked hard and obeyed the law
then you belonged - this is no longer the case - there is now an attempt to
create a new underclass, an underclass consisting of those of a religion other
than Christianity or (gasp!) no religion at all. The agenda of the Valley Citizen, or
more accurately that of the editors, Terry & Dee Thompson, is a right-wing,
Christian, intolerant one that excludes many good Americans. (Their
racist views have
offended previously -
they must be a charming couple.) This
intolerance is nowhere more evident than in the section called
Family Values. There is something about that
term, and the kind of people who use it, that tells you it really means OUR values, not yours,
are the right ones. Here you will meet America's homespun Taliban, starting with
Our Godly Heritage by Russell Boates, in which
he uses the happy event of the birth of a grandchild to put women firmly in
their place, which is at home doing household work and having babies. As this
Christian mullah puts it, "Women are being stripped of
their God-given maternal instincts by liberal feminists who promote abortion,
alternate life-styles, and equality with men. How sad! Women can do men's work
many times but who is taking the woman's place in the home as mother, nurturer,
encourager, home-maker, etc." You can perhaps imagine the effect this
tirade had on Mary, who is not only an intelligent and independent woman
(something that seems to frighten Boates) but has managed to run a home, hold
down a job without which she would lose that home, and raise a son. Boates'
misrepresentation of "liberal feminists" is
outrageous - no one "promotes" abortion but in some sad and very difficult
circumstances it may be necessary. It is certainly not a course upon which ANY
woman would embark lightly - and it is certainly none of Boates' damn business
if they do. And what does he mean by alternate lifestyles? Any lifestyle which
differs from his own interpretation of a Christian one, of course. He also has another job in mind for mothers, "God
meant for them to impart rich character qualities into their children raising
them in the fear of God." Surely "rich character
qualities" and living in constant fear of a supernatural being are
mutually incompatible. In fact, the latter would seem to call for psychiatric
help rather than praise and approval.
Boates' agenda is made more obvious by clicking the link at the end of his
diatribe, which will take you to
Wallbuilders, a site apparently dedicated to
re-writing American history from a narrow religious point of view. While many of
the Founding Fathers believed in a god, the Christianity of someone like Boates is
not representative of their beliefs. Many of them were theists, believing in a
divine guiding power, but they deliberately chose not to establish a Christian
church - or any other. The example of the religious wars and intolerance in Europe
was enough for these wise men not to shackle themselves to a single
interpretation of religion. For all the cherrypicking of choice phrases by
Wallbuilders from the
correspondence of these men, employed in an attempt to bolster the idea of a Christian
theocracy, this is not reflected in the one document that really matters, the
Constitution. These founders were men of
the Enlightenment, they had seen the horrors of a church and state shackled
together in the holy wars and persecutions that had wracked Europe for
centuries. Many of them undoubtedly believed in a god, but equally undoubtedly
they did not seek to impose their religious beliefs on others who did not share
them.
Boates is not the only contributor who deeply upset Mary, there is David
"Pastor" Brown with his
View from the Pulpit. Brown takes exception to
the court decision that allowed Terri Schiavo to die, but not with any sort of
dignity. Who took away that dignity? Interfering politicians and religionists
like Brown who saw a bandwagon and jumped aboard - only to find that the
majority of Americans did not approve of such high-handed interference in what was a private family
tragedy. In his piece Standing Up or Standing By Brown equates the
decision of Judge Greer to allow Terri Schiavo to die, instead
of pointlessly prolonging her bodily functions
by the misapplication of technology, with the actions of the Nazis. As 80 has noted
before, anyone that starts flinging Nazi accusations around is doing so because of
the weakness of their own position, and pushing the Nazi button is the only thing
they can do. It is noteworthy that many of the leading lights of the Nazi regime
were, in fact, religionists
including Hitler himself. Belief in a deity, and
the belief that one's actions are ordered by that deity, has led to more oppression,
hatred and cruelty than any atheist or agnostic could achieve. The unbelievers
would have to live with the consequences of their actions, instead of shunting
responsibility "upstairs" to some supernatural Higher Command. To quote Blaise
Pascal, "Men never do evil so completely and cheerfully as when they do it from
religious conviction." Astoundingly,
Brown, by a twisted analogy between the court process in Florida and the
Nuremburg trials at the close of the second World War, says that, "By
the Nuremburg standard, Judge Greer is guilty and deserves the death penalty."
And how does this deeply unpleasant and bigoted man arrive at this conclusion?
"Because God's law takes precedence over man's
law!" This of course, is Brown's god, or rather his narrow interpretation of
the Christian god. Implicit in his piece is that everyone should live subject to
HIS god's laws, with a "...conscience formed from our
study of the Bible and the Ten Commandments". (Which
ten commandments he does not specify.) So there we have it - this
is the voice of those who want a theocracy - based on OUR study of the bible and
ten commandments, not yours. The arrogance of this person is breathtaking - he
already knows all the answers - this is the kind of smug certainty that one's
actions are unassailably right and divinely inspired that led to Auschwitz, the Inquisition and the Salem witch trials.
So, what place is there in the America of Boates and Brown and their ilk for
Mary, her neighbors and their children? The unsolicited arrival of the Valley
Citizen was like a slap in the face to my friend. At another time she might have
dismissed such bigotry and propaganda as not worth the little time she has to
spare in a busy life, but right now she is tired out, struggling hard so she can
keep her home and nurse her son back to health. Her vision of a good
life means
being caring and tolerant of other's point of view, and not unthinkingly and
contemptuously imposing one's beliefs, or lack of them, on others, in short, to
live and let live. No doubt the editors of the Valley Citizen are happily smug
in their righteousness and no doubt feel that the hurt and rejection felt by
those who worship differently from themselves, or not at all, is well-deserved.
The
editors, Terry & Dee Thompson, and their columnists such as Russell Boates and
Pastor Brown, are keen at every opportunity to wrap themselves in the flag of the
United States of America, but they do not represent the America where
individuals are free to make their own way and flourish in a climate of
tolerance, whether they are Hindus, Muslims, Sikhs, Christians or any other
faiths, and none. A land where ideally everyone is equal, where there is
no underclass whose membership is decided by ignorant religious bigots whose
cruel and thoughtless propaganda masquerades as a neighborhood magazine. This America, the land
of the free, is under threat as never before. This is not the external threat of
terrorism but a threat from within, a threat to the very structure of the
country, from the plutocrats like George W Bush and Tom DeLay at the very top,
down to the grimy
little footsoldiers spreading prejudice, intolerance, misogyny and homophobia
via grubby little publications such as the Valley Citizen. For every Russell
Boates or Pastor Brown and their poison there is a Mary, raising her son to be a fair and
tolerant citizen, a citizen unwilling to condemn others merely because their beliefs and
ways of life are different from his own. The bigots and the hatemongers must not be allowed to steal
America from its citizens. It would be a most interesting exercise to contact
the many
businesses that advertise in the Valley Citizen
and which no doubt furnish a large proportion of its revenue, to see if the
owners approve of the material published in Family Values, and whether they are
proud to have their businesses associated with such sentiments.
