|
Edited on Wed Aug-03-05 07:48 AM by Taxloss
It just passed copy approval. It will be edited before publication (the presses roll on 10 August, street issue scheduled for full 1 September) and this is my raw copy, as I filed it. This was the first thing I asked to write about when I was assigned to international, American politics being a hobby of mine.
This article was greatly aided by the A&A Group - you have forwarded the cause of the UK leftist media and I thank and salute you.
Incidentally, I also interviewed Katherine Yurica. It was a great interview, but there was no place for it in the end, sadly.
Also, copyright law means I can only post half of the piece here. I probably shoudn't post that much, but it's my copyright so I suppose I can do what I want with it. If you want the rest, PM me. And I stress again, copyright is reserved to me.
And sorry if it sounds really dopey. Most Brits don't know what the Supreme Court is or does, or why it is important. I have to put in a lot of explaining.
Final warning: it's long. 3500 words in all.
Anyway, enough flimflam.
THE RELIGIOUS RIGHT IN THE UNITED STATES
You might not have heard of Judge John Roberts – it’s a forgettable name – but he’s on the brink of becoming one of the most powerful people in the world. Judge Roberts is US President George W Bush’s nominee to join the Supreme Court of the United States, one of the most exclusive clubs on the planet. With Bush’s announcement, the Washington DC resident became one of the most scrutinised men in America, and vast political armies, battle-hardened by more than a decade of clashes in the United States’ Culture Wars, sallied forth once more to slug it out.
The term “Culture Wars” might seem excessive to outsiders, but both sides of the ideological conflict in the United States are happy to use the term. The Supreme Court is the Stalingrad of the wars, a place where every inch of space is contested and is assaulted and defended with equal vigour and desperation. But there are similar battles on a smaller scale across the United States, fought on court lawns, on television, in schools, and outside clinics. And in order to understand the Culture Wars, it is necessary to understand one of the most extraordinary phenomena in Western politics – the rise of the religious right in the United States. In 30 years, this movement has grown from the derided margins of political culture to being an extremely powerful coalition of organisations with enormous resources and the ear of the President.
This extraordinarily powerful movement has set for itself an extremely ambitious goal – nothing less that the transformation of the United States from the bottom up, rolling back what it sees as half a century of liberal decadence and moral decline. Central to this drive is the movement’s stated intent to destroy the distinction between church and state – to embed the Ten Commandments in courthouses, to constitutionally enshrine prayer in schools, and to end once and for all the notion that the United States is a secular republic. Under them, it would be One Nation, Under God – With No Exceptions.
The religious right movement is spectacularly broad in its membership. Many of the organisations that can be included under that banner are represented by the Christian Communication Network, run by Gary McCullough. Built from nothing in 1989, it now represents more than 200 organisations from the religious right, with names as diverse as the Abstinence Clearinghouse, the Center for Moral Clarity, and Parents And Friends Of Ex-Gays. But the three biggest players on the scene are Jerry Falwell’s Christian Coalition, Jim Dobson’s Focus on the Family, and Lou Sheldon’s Traditional Values Coalition.
Reverend Lou Sheldon, the chairman of the Traditional Values Coalition, which represents more than 43,000 churches in the United States, was more than happy to speak to Total Spec. He positively bubbles with enthusiasm for the resurgence of muscular Christianity in the United States, and namechecks the key battlefields with the speed and skill of a seasoned orator, familiar with mobilising a base. “We’re lobbyists, and we predicate out particular special interest on moral principle, not theological principle, but moral principle,” he says, explaining the denominational diversity of his organisation. “Theologically we have different views. And so we unite under: Does life begin at conception? We all say yes. The sexual relationship needs to be committed to a man and a woman in marriage? We all say yes. Pornography and obscenity needs to be absolutely stamped out? We all say yes. We must keep the state of our backs, and allow for total religious liberties, that means for Muslims as well as Christians and Jews and others, and we all say yes to that. So that’s our unifying factor.”
It is this moral, rather than doctrinal, perspective that lends the Traditional Values Coalition and other bodies like it their strength – the religious right has learned to be inclusive, and draws support that transcends traditional divisions between Catholic and Protestant, and also racial and cultural distinctions. “Everyone is examining: why did we have segregation against our black brothers and sisters?” Sheldon says. “Why did we seem to look down our noses at Asians and folks of that ethnic background? And now there’s a huge integration of Hispanic, Blacks and Asians into churches together. You go into a church and you will see probably 10% African-Americans, (and) you will see a larger section of Hispanics now in most churches across America that are in the urban areas.”
“In other words, the fact that Jesus Christ we believe is the Son of God and that he died for the sin of the world, not just for Anglo sin, he died for Asian sin, he died for Hispanic sin, he died for Black sinners. So we’re all in this together. And it is in Christ that we come together. So this is taking on great reality.”
For Sheldon, this inclusiveness is not only swelling the ranks of his organisation, it is fusing with technology to give it great vigour. “Another factor of the revival is that for the first time in history Catholics and Protestants are fellowshipping, having Bible studies, having joint worship services, things of that nature that are evangelical together,” he says, enthusiastically. “What I’m saying is that the people have been there doing it in different ways, but now, with the electronic world, and with email and internet things are happening very fast.”
What do Sheldon and his organisation hope to achieve? “Ten years from now we hope to have a constitutional amendment that fully protects marriage,” he says. This means no gay marriage, one of the many battlefields of the Culture Wars. “We hope to have definitely pinned the ears back of pornography and obscenity on the internet. We definitely hope to have eliminated much of the abortion on demand, except in the cases of rape or incest. We hope to do many of these things. We hope to get the state off the back of the church.”
What is remarkable is not the vaulting ambition of this agenda, but the very real possibility of its imminent success. The religious right was heartened by the accession of President Bush in 2000, as the new President was openly “one of them” – a Born-Again Christian happy to entertain the leaders of the religious right in the White House and to pepper his speeches with references to the Almighty. The movement was further emboldened by Bush’s re-election in 2004. Even the most slender of mandates meant that the American people had not tired of that ole time religion. What’s more, the churches and organisations of the movement had been instrumental in Bush’s success at the polls, mobilising enormous numbers of churchgoers who would not have normally voted. The second-term Bush not only speaks the language of the religious right – he owes them one. And with a Republican-dominated Senate and Congress, he can deliver one – but for one obstacle.
This obstacle - the liberal citadel that Sheldon and his ilk are assaulting - is the “separation of church and state” in the United States, and its defenders in the Supreme Court. To understand the struggle is to take a spin through the history and constitution of the United States. The USA was founded by men who, despite mostly being men of faith themselves, were extremely aware of the horror of religious persecution. Many of their ancestors had fled persecution in England. For a document drafted by a group who were mostly Christians, it is light on references to religion.
“(The religious right) have had this chip on their shoulder since our country was founded with a godless and secular Constitution,” says Annie Laurie Gaylor, co-president of the Freedom From Religion Foundation, a not-for-profit organisation that catalogues and combats what it sees as violations of church-state separation. “The Constitution was adopted with the preamble that sovereignty is invested in ‘We, the People’, and this was a complete break from the past. There was no pipeline to a Divinity.
“The fundamentalists have always hated our secular Constitution, and then when the Bill of Rights was added, that even reinforced it. Our Constitution says there should be no religious test for public office, it gives the oath of office for the President and there is no ‘so help me God’ or mention of the Bible. Basically, the only references to religion in our constitution are exclusionary. But in the first amendment we have the establishment clause, that ‘Congress shall make no law respecting the establishment of religion, or prohibiting free practise thereof’. So there’s always that tension between the establishment clause and the free exercise clause.”
This ambiguity over religion in the Constitution is the fertile ground for a blizzard of disputes today, epitomised by the recent battle over the display of the Ten Commandments in courtrooms. Judge Roy Moore, Chief Justice of Alabama, thrust the controversy into the public eye in 2003 when he refused to remove a display of the Ten Commandments from his court. Alabama found that he had breached the constitutional guarantee that the state should not promote religion, and he was removed from office. Since then, similar disputes over the display of the Commandments have appeared across the country as both sides of the Culture Wars. The confrontation came to a head in June when the Supreme Court examined two cases of Commandment display, one in Texas and one in Kentucky.
|
Printer-friendly format
Email this thread to a friend
Bookmark this thread
(1000+ posts)
Send PM |
Profile |
Ignore
