hypocrisy rampant

[realthog]

 
Over at pds_lit there's a merry rant about the religious right's "backlash", even before the movie's release, against The Golden Compass; you can find it at http://pds-lit.livejournal.com/10105.html. (Declaration of interest: pds_lit is my wife and babe.)

The flap about The Golden Compass couldn't have come at a more apposite time, really, what with Mitt Romney's speech a day or two ago basically saying that people who didn't worship the Judeo-Christian god had no moral values and must be regarded as ineligible for public office; he further asserted that freedom and institutionalized religious belief have always gone hand in hand, a statement that is near dumbfounding in its disregard for many centuries of history -- centuries stretching back to long before there was such a thing as Christianity, indeed, and continuing to this day, as exemplified in the discrimination by Romney's own church against blacks until the mid-1970s. A society that discriminates against some of its members is not a free one. The nations where freedom can be said to have established itself and begun to flourish are precisely those in which religion has been tolerated and indeed widely practised by those in power but where the barrier between church and state has been rigorously maintained.

Take a look, for an example of the perils of mixing church and state, at what happened during the reigns of Mary I and Elizabeth I of England. Under the elder half-sister there was the vilest persecution of Protestants. When Bloody Mary died and "Good" Queen Bess took over, the air over England grew thick with the greasy smoke of another crop of religious believers being burned: the Catholics. The irrationality of involving religious belief in the running of nations could hardly be more horrifically demonstrated: no rational argument can be conceived whereby it can be OK to exalt Catholics and burn Protestants one day and do exactly the opposite the next. Another jolly product of institutionalized religion was, of course, the Spanish Inquisition . . . and we haven't yet got to the rather different but nonetheless directly pertinent case of the Holocaust.

I said above: "A society that discriminates against some of its members is not a free one." This is not a proposition with which, evidently, Romney agrees. He's not just laissez faire about the discrimination against agnostics and atheists in American public life, he's all gung-ho for it -- the more such discrimination the better, he told his audience . . . and almost in those words. He seems to be advocating a sort of religious apartheid as the ideal state for America. That's as disgusting a prospect as the race-based society created by the practitioners of the original apartheid.

The other lunatic-fringe holy roller among the Republican candidates is of course Mike Huckabee, that puckish nutcase who, stretching credulity well beyond its elastic limit, is so antagonistic towards the proven theory of evolution by natural selection that he claims the world and its creatures were created a few thousand years ago, just like it says in Genesis . . . assuming this is indeed what it says in Genesis, which most theologians don't.

This sort of thing is part and parcel of Huckabee's behaviour: while Governor of Arkansas he so detested a predecessor, Bill Clinton, that he claimed a convicted Arkansas serial rapist was rotting in prison solely because Clinton had corruptly put him there, the man's accuser being a relative of Clinton's. In fact, as Huckabee must have well known because it's right there in the Arkansas records, as soon as Clinton discovered he was related to one of the rapist's victims, he recused himself from having anything further to do with the case, which was the right and honourable thing for him to do. I do not regard Bill Clinton as the most honourable of men; it's very apparent, though, that in this instance he was significantly more honourable than the supposedly Good Book-obeying Governor Huckabee.

More truthful, too. Against much resistance, Huckabee got the rapist released. The rapist went on to rape and murder at least two more women before being caught. (He died in prison a few years ago.) Those women died horrifically because Huckabee either (a) wanted to score a cheap political point against Clinton or (b) possessed judgement so impaired that his detestation for Clinton blinded him to the reality staring him straight in the face. Even worse, perhaps: now that details are becoming widely public of his involvement and behaviour in this fiasco, he has taken to lying through his teeth about it. He's been lying through his teeth, too, as conversations have increased concerning his ethically questionable (ah, so genteelly do I euphemize for "corrupt") acceptance of countless financial goodies during his gubernatorial reign.

I do not remember the commandment that says: Thou shalt lie for the sake of political expediency -- to cover your ass. Cheating those who elected you to public office by making yourself available to the highest bidder is another Christian no-no, or so I've always thought. There most certainly was nothing to encourage it in the Sermon on the Mount. I do recall, however, that there's quite a lot in the Bible about God wanting you to tell the truth and be honest in your dealings with others.

Oddly enough, that's what rationalists believe, too. Perhaps this is why Romney and Huckabee think rationalists are unfit for public office -- who knows?

There's a good article by Joe Canason about Romney's bizarre speech on the Salon site: http://www.salon.com/opinion/conason/2007/12/07/religion_presidency/. (Thanks to Tim Sullivan for alerting me to it.)