Democrats should pull the Jesus card

[thucythucy]

28. As I understand it, separation of church and state

means that the state can't and shouldn't throw its support behind one or another particular religion, or religion in general; that government shouldn't be used to force people to believe (or not to believe) in any particular faith.

On the other hand, "legislating morality" is precisely what Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. wanted to accomplish by passing the Civil Rights Act of 1964. According to his Christian belief, it was immoral for people to be excluded from jobs, from housing, from education, from medical care, simply because of the color of their skin. He, as leader of the Southern Christian Leadership Conference, was at the vanguard of the struggle for civil rights. Are you saying Rev. King should have "checked his religious baggage at the door" when he went to Congress and the White House to support the Civil Rights Act? Along with Rev. Ralph Abernathy, Rev. Jessie Jackson, and all the other ministers who led the marches in Selma, in Birmingham, in Washington? Do you disagree with President Kennedy when he said the struggle for civil rights was the great moral issue of the time? And when Rev. King denounced the Vietnam war as violating his Christian faith, and called for an end to funding for the war, and to use the money instead to build schools, hospitals, and housing, wasn't he trying to legislate his own morality (or at least get others--notably liberal Democrats like George McGovern -- to legislate it for him)?

It all depends on which morality you see as important. Personally, I think the government should have absolutely no say whatsoever in what consenting adults do in the privacy of their own lives. This is in direct opposition to the religious right, who have a fixation, an obsession really, with what other people do with their genitals. I DO think government has a role in providing access to comprehensive health care for all women--including contraception for women who can't afford it otherwise. That, to me, is the moral thing to do. If my reasoning for this is religious, why should I, as a liberal Democrat, be expected to deny it?

Similarly, I think the moral thing to do is to acknowledge the existence of global climate change, and our responsibility for it, and to act to stop it so that future generations won't pay the cost for our own selfishness and consumerism. (To progressive Christians, our consumerism is a form of idolatry: the god of America is money, and if anyone tells you otherwise...well, their eyes still need to be opened). So asking government to step in to regulate carbon emissions is in fact legislating morality--passing laws to force us to do the moral thing by our children and grandchildren.

Again, if you and I have the same goals, including specific legislation and policy we want to see passed and implemented, why should the fact that I might be motivated by religious belief be such a problem?

I think the Democratic Party made a huge mistake in the late 1960s in ceding the religious high ground to conservative Republicans. This happened after the assassination of Rev. King, which left a vacuum in American religious leadership on the left. Richard Nixon pursued a strategy of wooing and co-opting religious conservatives like Billy Graham; Ronald Reagan continued that strategy with Jerry Falwell and Pat Robertson; G.W. Bush with Ted Haggart and Focus on the Family. By contrast, Democrats have done nothing that I can see to reach out to the religious left.

As I said, whether you have faith or not, it's time we undid that mistake.