November 22

The anniversary of the murder of Jack Kennedy usually sets me thinking about that long-ago day. But this year I was yanked back to it in particularly brutal fashion. Yesterday, I had a meeting at a law office in the 3300 block of Elm Street in Dallas, in the now hip, formerly industrial neighborhood of Deep Ellum. At the end of the meeting, two of the participants, both baby boomers, walked me to my car. "What's the best way," I asked, "to get onto Interstate 35?"

"Oh," one of them replied, "just follow Elm Street all the way through downtown, like you were in the Kennedy motorcade."

November 22, 1963, was a bright, beautiful fall day in suburban Philadelphia, where I was an eighth-grader. Shortly after we began our Latin class, the principal came on the PA system to announce that our president hat been shot in Texas--a few minutes later he came on to say that President Kennedy was dead. The teacher tried to continue with the lesson, but without much luck. I sat in my seat sobbing. The following Wednesday my family stood in a long line at Arlington National Cemetery, waiting for hours for the privilege of filing past his fresh grave.

I loved John Kennedy in a way that I have never loved any public figure since. He was for me, and millions of my generation, much more that a politician. He was young and beautiful and full of possibility. He was the promise of what we could grow up to be in a post-war America that was the greatest country that had ever been. The announcement over the junior high school public address system yanked the veil of innocence from my eyes; it never returned. For me, part of the attraction of the Obama campaign was the suggestion, the hint, that, if we could manage to elect this man, perhaps we could return to the world as it was on November 21, 1963, before we saw what was behind the facade.

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.

Culture Wars

Sarah Palin's nomination is being widely interpreted as another attempt by the Republican Party to exploit the public's resentment of the cultural liberalization that began in the 1960s. I agree. An interesting thing about this iteration of the "culture wars" is the extent to which Sarah Palin herself demonstrates the fact that, while the right may have won elections with cultural issues, the cultural left consistently wins the culture war itself.

Most of the "culture war" issues relate to the perception that our culture has abandoned the strict sexual mores which prevailed in earlier times. Opposition to abortion, homosexuality, sex education, and sexually explicit entertainment all rests on a sense that society now tolerates, or even embraces, extra-marital sexual behavior which was once taboo and on a desire to restore these old strict standards.

This call for a return to old fashioned morality has worked well as an electoral political issue, but, strangely enough, no matter how many Republican culture warriors are elected to office, the culture continues to move away from the sexual shaming that is necessary to enforce sexually repressive cultural codes. Americans, no matter what their religious/political stance, now accept the fact that it is normal for people to engage in heterosexual activity before marriage. The tiny minority who "save themselves" for marriage are, depending on your outlook, either virtuous heroes or self-denying prudes, but nobody thinks that they are not statistically anomalous. Consequentially, pre-marital sex no longer carries the stigma that it did in the 50s and unwed motherhood no longer excludes a young woman from "respectability" as it did then. As proof of that, when was the last time that you heard of a pregnant teenager "going to visit relatives" so that she could give birth and put her child up for adoption. The trend toward accepting pre-marital sex as "normal" was clearly manifested by the welcome given Bristol Palin and her fiance by the hordes of fundamentalist delegates at the Republican National Convention who treated Bristol as a hero because she had decided not to have an abortion.

Of course, proclaiming this young, single mother an admirable hero instead an object of contempt, the religious right is essentially declaring its defeat in the culture wars. Whereas it once fought legal abortion because the ability to quietly end a pregnancy freed "promiscuous" women from the stigma that was their rightful punishment for violating sexual codes, they now lionize a young woman solely because she decided to keep her baby, seemingly ignoring the issue of what she did to get it. These folks have, over the last several decades, thrown out the baby and kept the bath water!

Similarly, cultural traditionalists opposed the movement of women into the workforce because it undercut God-given gender roles. Now they are supporting a married mother of young children as a potential chief executive of the United States without the slightest concern for how that might effect the "proper" division of authority within her marriage or what kind of example it might set for young women, AND they accuse anyone who opposes Gov. Palin's candidacy of engaging in improper sex discrimination, invoking a principle whose legitimacy they rejected until a few years ago! Of course, if they openly favored sex discrimination, they would be seen as outside the mainstream culture.

Inerrant

The nomination of Sarah Palin as the vice-presidential candidate of a party whose presidential nominee is a 72-year-old cancer patient raises the possibility that, in the near future, the President of the United States could be a fundamentalist Protestant who actually believes that the King James Bible is the inerrant word of God. This would represent a cataclysmic change in American politics, a fact that is recognized by the fundamentalists of the religious right, but not so much by the mainstream media or the Democratic Party. Indeed, the possibility of revolutionary change that John McCain has presented to his party's theocratic base by nominating Palin is the reason that it is now willing to overlook its multiple disagreements with McCain and enthusiastically support the GOP ticket.

Palin was baptized as a Roman Catholic but began attending the pentecostal Assemblies of God church as a young girl. She was baptized in that faith at age 12. Recently, she changed her church affiliation from the A of G to a non-denominational "bible church," perhaps to advance her political career by escaping the stigma attached to "holy roller" pentecostal sects, who practice speaking in tongues and other extreme forms of worship. While her new church may not worship in as flamboyant a style as her old one, both groups share a belief in the infallibility of the Bible. As one of her Alaska neighbors told the New York Times, “The churches that Sarah has attended all believe in a literal translation of the Bible." There is significant evidence that Palin sees her political career as a mission from God and that she understands the world primarily through the lens of her religion. As a former pastor said, ""I believe Sarah would not live in a fragmented world. The idea that Sarah would take this huge influence of the worldview that really only the Bible and the relationship with Jesus opens up ... and suddenly marginalize it and put it over on the shelf somewhere and live apart from it—that would be entirely inconsistent." As President, we could recently expect Palin to look to the Bible for specific instructions. In this she would differ from almost all of her predecessors in the Oval Office, who have generally tended to adhere to a conventional sort of public Protestantism, but have not sought much more than general inspiration from the Bible.

Recent Republican presidents have relied on support from religious fundamentalists, but have not been one of them. Nixon was a non-practicing Quaker. Reagan was notoriously lax in his church attendance. Bush Senior is a country club Episcopalian. Even "Dubya," who sometimes appears to believe that that the Lord has chosen him as president, is a mainstream Methodist whose religious life before becoming president seems to consist primarily of the belief that Jesus helped him give up Demon Rum.

Unlike her GOP predecessors who simply exploited the votes of biblical literalists, a president Palin (who ran for for her public office with the slogan that it was time for "our first Christian mayor,") might very well seek the advice of a pentecostal preacher on her Middle East policy or pore over the Book of Genesis for clues as to Jehovah's views on global warming. Let's hope she doesn't get the chance to put the doctrine of inerrancy to the test!

John Edwards

Once again, the pundits chew over the question of the relevance of a politician's private life to his public career. I am not a prude, nor do I think that I am naive about human beings' capacity for duplicity. But I do think, in this case at least, John Edwards's behavior in his private life does have something to say to us about his politics.

When this year's Democratic presidential contest was first taking shape, Edwards positioned himself to appeal to people like me: left-liberals concerned about economic inequality and the plight of the poor. Despite the attractiveness of his message, I was skeptical of Edwards's candidacy, primarily because it didn't jibe with his record as a senator and vice-presidential candidate, where he had positioned himself as Southern moderate. However, the issue which ultimately convinced me not to support Edwards was his decision to continue his campaign in the face of his wife Elizabeth's diagnosis with terminal metastatic breast cancer.

My decision was not based, however, on a belief that Edwards was selfish or evil; rather it derived from my history as the spouse of woman who died of breast cancer. Based on my own experience, I thought that John Edwards needed to be with his wife and children during the next few years whether the Edwardses knew it or not. In other words, I opposed John Edwards's candidacy for his own good and that of his family.

In light of the latest revelations (and the fact that I believe that Edwards has still not come completely clean), I see John and Elizabeth in a different light. John's cheating on his cancer patient wife is reprehensible, no matter what his role in life. But the fact that he and, apparently, Elizabeth were willing to subject their children, their party, and their country to the risk that his affair with Rielle Hunter would become public during his presidential campaign strikes me as evidence of a self-centered ambition seldom seen in American politics. It's not really surprising that a bigtime plaintiff's lawyer would be comfortable risking other people's welfare to advance his own interests, but it is still sort of shocking to me that he would risk putting a Republican in the White House to satisfy his own desires. I now see John and Elizabeth as hillbilly MacBeths: as ambitious as the Clintons, but not as principled!