Mormons and Marriage

Being thrice married myself, I'm pretty reluctant to advise anyone else about his or her marriage. I'm always cognizant of the fact that my ex-wife might interrupt one of my most lustrous pearls of domestic wisdom to inform my listeners of the true facts of my track record as a marital partner. If the wisdom of taking my own past into consideration before making public pronouncements on other people's lives is self-evident to me, someone with no communication with divine beings, one would think that the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, whose leadership claims to be in touch with the Creator of the Universe, could see the same thing.

However, this does not seem to be the case. The Mormon Church recently organized the donations of millions of dollars from its members to support Proposition 8, the anti-same-sex marriage amendment to the California Constitution. The amendment passed. This is the same church whose founding prophet, Joseph Smith, had at least 28 wives and whose charter was revoked by the United States Congress because of its practice of polygamy.

One might think that, given this history, the Mormon Church would be among the most sexually tolerant of religious sects. After all "Joe and Emma and Fanny and Lucinda and Louisa and Zina and . . ." makes "Adam and Steve" look like small potatoes when it comes to marital unconventionality. But no such luck. With the zeal of a convert, the LDS Church, which abandoned its revealed doctrine of "celestial marriage" in the face of political and legal opposition in the late 19th century, now advocates a particularly stringent version of the orthodox Christian sexual code.

Nobody likes a hypocrite. And Mormon hypocrisy is particularly annoying. The passage of Prop 8 sets back the move for full equality for sexual minorities. I have confidence that, in the end, justice will prevail. In the meantime, what goes around comes around.

Bearing False Witness

This morning, the U.S. Supreme Court heard arguments in the case of Pleasant Grove City v. Summum, a case in which a new age cult has won, in the lower court, the right to place a stone monument inscribed with the "Seven Aphorisms" of its faith in the same park that already contains a similar stone containing the Ten Commandments of the Old Testament.

This is an interesting case for a number of reasons, but what it got me thinking about was the propensity for religious public officials and their lawyers to lie when it comes to defending governmental endorsement of religion. It's my observation the propensity for outright prevarication about officials' motives in these cases is so great that the courts, the media, and the public don't even seem to take notice of it any more. The Pleasant Grove City case demonstrates what a tangled web can be woven when government officials try to get around the Constitution's prohibition of the establishment of religion.

In 1971, the Fraternal Order of Eagles donated the Ten Commandments monument for placement in a city park in Pleasant Grove City, Utah. In 2003, Summum, one of several strange religious groups based in Salt Lake City, applied to the city government for permission to donate their religious monument for erection in the same park. The city fathers rejected the Seven Aphorisms monument. But they didn't tell the truth about why they did so. The real reason that they were rejecting the cult's request was simple: a vast majority of the citizens and officials of Pleasant Grove City believe the Ten Commandments to be divinely ordained by the Creator; none of them think the same of the Seven Aphorisms. Instead of just saying that, the mayor wrote a letter claiming that the city was applying some (made-up after the fact) unwritten rule that allowed them to accept for placement in the park only displays that were relevant to the town's history.

The Mayor told this lie because his lawyer told him that, if he told the truth, his city would be violating the First Amendment's prohibition on the establishment of religion, but that the Court of Appeals had suggested in an earlier case that this "town history" gambit might work. So, the case is grinding on and on wasting dollars and other resources that governments and tax-exempt entities like Summum and the fundamentalist non-profit law firm representing the city could be devoting to worthwhile activities like educating our children or replacing our infrastructure.

There is, of course, a simple way to avoid all this never-ending litigation. Leave the Ten Commandments, the Seven Aphorisms, the crosses, the crucifixes, the Islamic crescents, the Magen Davids, the creches, the menorahs, and all the other religious totems in the churches, mosques, synagogues, and other private property where they belong. But our religious fellow citizens are not willing to do that for a very simple reason: despite what the First Amendment says, they want to establish their religion. Christian fundamentalists believe that this is a Christian nation and that non-Christians are second or third-class citizens, and nothing makes that point like the cross in the city park or the Decalogue in the courthouse square. Putting it on the church lawn next door just won't do, and they feel so strongly on the issue that they're willing to violate the First Amendment AND the Ninth Commandment just to let the rest of know that they're in charge.

Iowa

A couple of years ago, I read Gilead, a novel by Marilynne Robinson. I knew nothing of her work at the time--my recollection is that I selected the book at random from the "new arrivals" shelf at my local library. I loved it so much so that I emailed passionate recommendations to my family and friends, not something that I am in the practice of doing. This was strange because the book is explicitly a Christian one--the novel is in the form of a long letter written by a dying Congregationalist minister in the small town of Gilead, Iowa. Since I am not a Christian, I was hard put to explain my attraction to the book. In the end I put it down to my interpretation of the book as being largely about the history of white northerners' attitudes toward race--that and the fact that, as an alumnus of a congregationalist-founded college and Presbyterian Sunday School, I am familiar with and interested in the culture and theology of American Calvinism . My admiration for the book was widely shared; it won the Pulitzer Prize and our President-to-be listed it as as one his favorite books.

I've just finished reading Robinson's new novel, Home. It is also set in Gilead. And it has strong theological themes. And I love it, despite the fact that the racial/political/historical threads are much less prominent than in the earlier book.

Home is a presentation of the incidents of Gilead from another vantage point. Jack Boughton, the ne'er-do-well namesake of Gilead's narrator John Ames, has returned to town after a twenty-year absence. His father, a retired Presbyterian minister, welcomes him but cannot resist the impulse to judge him. If this brief summary brings the words "prodigal son" leaping into your consciousness, you are probably part of the audience for this book.

The novel is not particularly strong on plot, but there is a mildly surprising incident at the end. The writing is beautiful in a plain, Midwestern way that is artful without seeming self-consciously artsy. The characters are carefully drawn. The themes of family, alienation, moral responsibility, and mortality are universal, but the setting is distinctly American.

You don't need to have read Gilead to read Home, but you ought to read both because they are such good books. Home was published in the midst of the recent campaign, so I don't imagine that Barack Obama has had a chance to read it yet. I know he's busy these days, but I hope that someone will send him a copy for Christmas.

Big John Cornyn

For those of you wonder what it's really like to live in Texas, check out this honest-to-god ad for our incumbent U.S. Senator. Now try to imagine living some place where someone who gets paid to do this kind of stuff honestly thinks that this will help Cornyn get re-elected. Got that? OK, now . . . a little bigger stretch . . . imagine that you're living in a place where this ad really will help Cornyn get elected.

Two-Wheeled Politics III

One of the common complaints that car drivers have about bike riders is that cyclists "disobey traffic rules". This is true, of course. It is also true that drivers and pedestrians violate traffic laws, but nobody seems to write letters to the editor waxing indignant about speeders on Interstate 35 or jaywalkers on 4th Street. So why does the issue of cyclists compliance with traffic regulations loom so large in motorists' responses to bicycle riders?

One reason that cyclists violate traffic laws is that the rules of the road are basically designed for motor vehicles and therefore make much less sense when applied to bicycles. A cyclist approaching a 4-way stop sign at 10 miles an hour has much more time to make sure that the way is clear than does a car that's going 40 mph. In my experience, some maneuvers are safer for all concerned when carried out "illegally." For example, at some intersections on my commuting route, it is clearly safer for me to go through an intersection against a red light when there is no traffic in the cross street and I have a lane all to myself (because the car next to me is stopped for the red light) than it is to start off from a stop while sharing a lane with a car to my left. Indeed, at least one state has modified its traffic regulations (pdf) to take into account the intrinsic differences between motorized and pedal-powered vehicles. In any event, a 200-lb. cyclist, even one who runs stop signs, represents much less of a danger to others than a two-ton sedan, no matter how carefully the car is operated.

But what really bugs me about the constant refrain about bikes and traffic laws is that it is typically trotted out in reponse to arguments to which it is absolutely irrelevant:

"Bikes are non-polluting."
"Yeah, but I saw a bike run a stop sign on my way to work this morning."

"Riding a bike is good exercise."
"But why do you always see them riding the wrong way on one-way streets?"

"We really need to take some serious measures to encourage people to ride bikes."
"You know those crazy cyclists are just a bunch of scoff-laws!"

Cut it out! If you want to make a serious argument against bikes as transportation, make it! If you just think riding a bike sounds too much like work, say so. If you think that riding a bike is just not cool enough for you, ok. But stop claiming to be shocked by traffic violations!

Hard Working White Americans

Hillary Clinton's recent remark that she has the support of "hard working Americans, white Americans," is probably the first time since May 15, 1972 that a candidate for the Democratic Party's presidential nomination explicitly claimed to be running on behalf of white people.

Of course, Clinton would deny that her campaign has any similarity to George Wallace's. Her remark, she claims, was simply an attempt to point out to her fellow Democrats (and more particularly the party's "super delegates") a gap in Barack Obama's electoral coalition and to argue that she is more "electable."

Whatever her reasons, I can't help but see Clinton's remark as a step backward for the party and the country. After all, Lyndon Johnson, the most accomplished political realist ever to hold the office of president, willingly gave up the Southern white vote that had long been part of the Democrats' coalition in order to pass the civil rights acts of the 1960s. He did it because it was the right thing to do. To raise the flag of white resentment in 2008 in a mainstream political campaign only points out how much our political discourse has deteriorated in recent decades.