Meditation: Nation, Religion and Politics

God, this subject bores me to tears in some ways. Given the current state of things, though, it's been on my mind a lot. What should your rights be in a secular county when you aren't religious, and a religious majority outnumbers you greatly?

I ask the question that way ("What should your rights be?") because, frankly, discussing the Constitution and the intentions of our Founding Fathers bores me even more than the question in general. Asking what the Madison or Jefferson would have thought of South Park, 2 Live Crew, gay marriage, or submachine guns is a little beside the point, isn't it? They would think, "What the fuck?" and run away.

People mistake the originators of our laws as visionaries who were building a set of principles for a country to run on forever. In some cases, they were, and they succeeded. In some cases, they were crafting a set of laws based on: just having fought a bloody war with a tyrannical power; centuries of religious strife in Europe that many immigrants had come here trying to escape; and a sense of Enlightenment newly sprung in Europe and elsewhere, which embodied the sense that reason, not social standing, should give society its hierarchy.

Yes, much of this evidence weighs in favor of a secularist view of American government. But I'm simply not that interested in it; more interesting is the American ideal of a society governed by a 200-some-odd intention, but by people who strive toward a more perfect understanding of "freedom", "democracy" and a "republican" form of government. Fundamentally, the Federalist Papers say that our President, senators, and congressmen - not to mention the judiciary - are supposed to be people who we believe to be better than us at making decisions about the country. Not ideologues whose particular positions we believe in; not people who we personally like and are comfortable with, but professional politicians who have the best interests of the American people in mind, and are able to make unpopular decisions.

So much for that.

I'm getting around to the point. Religion is popular now - as popular as it ever has been - and AT THE EXACT SAME TIME, liberal people are doing more to piss off religious people than ever before. It's a situation that, to say the least, is a little combustible. Think of the last few years: school prayer, gay marriage, the Terry Schiavo debacle, public displays of the Ten Commandments, courtroom challenges of the Pledge of Allegiance - I could go on.

Some of these things are molehills that have been made into mountains - the ACLU's attempt to wipe crosses off of every town crest in the US is a little bit petty, if fundamentally right. At stake is a serious question, though: do you want your government to tell people what to believe with regard to their faith? Because, no matter how you slice it, the Pledge of Allegiance (and most currency) tells you that there is a God, and the Ten Commandments in the middle of a courthouse means that your local government believes in a Judeo-Christian monotheism, which must piss you off a little if you're, say, Hindu.

It's not that you can't legislate morality; whether you like it or not, some fundamental precepts of the law that we all agree on ("you can't kill people", "you can't rape children," or "you can't tear that tag off of your mattress") are fundamentally based on moral presumptions. And I will say this: you CAN think that abortion is murder and gay marriage is a moral outrage without being told that by your religion. And you can, if you want to, encode that into our laws; it might be contrary to our country's ideal of freedom, and the courts might strike it down, but it wouldn't necessarily be mixing church and state.

What IS mixing church and state is encouraging kids to pray and acknowledge God in schools; teaching creationism or Intelligent Design anywhere other than a church; slapping crosses and Biblical verses on public buildings; or creating an electoral atmosphere so rife with professions of faith that it practically amounts to a religious test. I'll say it again: government has NO RIGHT telling you what to believe in, or telling you to believe in anything. Religion is a cancer on our body politic right now, and it shows little sign of purging itself any time soon.