“Religious
war” is a pathetic oxymoron, unnecessarily repeated throughout history with
murderous effects. Open any history book; read millennia of examples where
humans dishonored God in the purported name of honoring God. The most vicious and
long-lasting violations were internal civil wars: Northern Ireland; India’s
Partition; the Thirty Years War; the Holocaust; and, on and on and on. These violations
are not simply fossils of antiquity; they continue today: 9/11; Israel-Palestine;
Sudan; Bosnia; Iraq; Nigeria; and, Lebanon. Religious violence is, regrettably,
a proven part of humankind’s DNA.
America is
hardly immune. Pilgrims fled the church-state establishment that outlawed their
beliefs, then hanged Quakers on Boston Common for preaching their beliefs. Roger
Williams founded Rhode Island and the Calvert family founded Maryland as sanctuaries
against religious violence.
America’s
constitutional framers understood this human failing. The framers’ solution was
as revolutionary as democracy: build a “wall” (Jefferson’s word) separating
church from state. By law, the American government must stay completely out of religious
matters. No citizen can use government to impose his/her religious beliefs on
anyone else. The first words in the First Amendment declare:
Congress shall make no
law respecting an establishment of religion…
Well-meaning Americans
repeatedly chip at this prohibitive wall. They ignore its existence (with prayers
at public schools) or ridicule its extreme interpretations (no Christmas mangers
on courthouse lawns). Yet, Americans intuitively appreciate the goodness of
separating government and religion. Politics demands compromise while scripture
condemns it. As our Union requires uniform laws, individual conscience require
absolute religious freedom. Ergo the remaining words in the first phrase of the
First Amendment:
… or prohibiting the free
exercise thereof;…
America’s
freedom of religion spans every degree and spectra. One in five Americans follows
no religion at all. A third attends services at least weekly. One in ten Americans
holds religion as their primary reason for being; twice as many give the same status
to money. While Christianity is the dominant religion in America by far, it is
splintered into irreconcilable sects with long histories of internecine slaughter.
Different Christian bibles omit entire books. Jews spilt along Reform,
Conservative and Orthodox lines, each with further subdivisions. Islam, Baha’I,
Buddhism, and Hinduism have completely separate tenets of morality and visions
of the afterlife. Unitarians, Deists, Druids, and hundreds of other faiths in
America expand the spectrum of beliefs, commitment and resolve toward infinity.
The First Amendment brilliantly protects religious freedom from itself by
precluding any sect from using government to enforce religious uniformity in
the face of America’s intractable diversity. Today’s Americans have benefited
so much from the constitutional framers’ hard-won wisdom that we have forgotten
its necessity.
Which brings us
to abortion.
When anti-abortion
zealots base their crusades solely in religious terms, they take sledgehammers
to the Constitution’s brilliant wall between church and state. Because their
personal consciences and religious beliefs condemn abortion under any circumstances,
they want government to prohibit any of their fellow citizens from aborting a pregnancy.
The question is, why?
Are anti-abortion
crusaders trying to turn America into a theocracy that imposes specific scriptural
laws on everyone? If so, they pose a historical threat to America’s democratic survival.
Are anti-abortion
crusaders trying to protect America’s respect for life? In the 40 years since
the Roe v Wage decision, America’s respect for life has INCREASED, not
decreased. The homicide rate is down by half. So is the highway fatality rate. Life
expectancy increased 8½ years. All these advances required massive investments.
Four decades of data prove there’s no threat to the social compact posed by abortion.
Are anti-abortion
crusaders trying to save their own souls? Some might argue that any government program
that underwrites abortions (however infinitesimally) inflicts a “sin” on every
taxpayer. But this is the same logic that opponents of the Vietnam and Iraq
wars used to avoid paying income taxes. They went to jail. Because government and
religion are completely separate in America, government actions do not convey religious
culpability to every citizen.
The pro-choice
movement has many sound arguments for its positions, including women’s health
and the primacy of individual conscience. Yet these arguments routinely fail to
sway millions of middle class Americans who routinely vote against their
economic interests because of their religious stand against abortion. Democrats
need to sever this link.
Religious
fervor during times of economic uncertainty is understandable. Just as there
are no atheists in foxholes, there are no atheists in unemployment lines.
Personal fervor, however, should not drive into government into the hands of
priest, ministers or mullahs.
It is a constitutionally
protected right for every American to make individual decisions on abortion based
on their own religious beliefs. At the same time, it is a constitutional
prohibition for any American to use government to impose individual religious
beliefs regarding abortion upon everyone else. In the face of committed
religious diversity, history teaches us that a wall between church and state is
absolutely necessary for national survival. If Americans tear down that wall we
risk repeating humankind’s history of religious violence.
No comments:
Post a Comment