Tennessee Lt. Gov. Ron Ramsey, who is currently (one might say justifiably) running third in the state’s Republican gubernatorial primary race, is apparently  not sure if the Constitution’s guarantees of freedom of religion apply to Islam, which happens to be the world’s second-largest religion – right after Ramsey’s own religion.

Multisource political news, world news, and entertainment news analysis by Newsy.com

This incident of gross stupidity and intolerance (it can only be both) took place at a recent event in Hamilton County, TN. Ramsey, responding to an audience question regarding the “threat that’s invading our country from the Muslims,” pretended support for the Constitution and the whole “Congress shall make no law” rigmarole when it comes to religion but voiced reservations about Islam’s status as a religion, claiming it’s more of a  “cult” than a religion.

“Now, you could even argue whether being a Muslim is actually a religion, or is it a nationality, way of life, cult whatever you want to call it,” Ramsey said. “Now certainly we do protect our religions, but at the same time this is something we are going to have to face.”

If you want to start pulling out your guides to what constitutes a cult, you will quickly see that Christianity qualifies in many ways as a cult. And this is to ignore the terrifying prospect of religion mixing with politics – which is the purpose of the Constitutional guarantees Ramsey pretends to support. Our Founding Fathers lived at a time in which governments supported state religion and of course deprived minority religious groups of their rights. I have in my family tree a French Huguenot, a protestant, who fled Catholic France for a chance of religious freedom in the New World. The Catholics then spoke of protestants in much the same way Christian conservatives in this country speak of Muslims, as non-people, a non-religion, an infestation to be stamped out.

Talk about a religious group controlling the US government to the extent that it decides which religions are religions and which are not is one that should not be taking place in this country. Christianity has made it quite clear that Christianity is the only true religion, that it is more equal than other religions, etc. This is fine. They have a right to feel that way. They do not have a right to impose it as public policy. That’s why we have the Constitutional guarantees Ramsey treats so carelessly.

I saw the following story on the Minnesota Independent this morning and being a Minnesota native myself, I felt moved to respond: White on same-sex marriage: Rosa Parks didn’t ‘move to the front of the bus to support sodomy’

“For the first time in Minnesota history, a legislative committee contemplated the legalization of same-sex marriage in the state on Monday.” About time, I’d say. And it’s a shame that Minnesota’s political landscape has been dirtied by the reprehensible beliefs of a small group of narrow-minded Christian bigots.

It wasn’t that way when I left – good Scandinavian pragmatism still had some meaning then – but now the ideologues are out in full force, spewing bile and hate everywhere they go. Case in point: In response to  “moving testimony” by LGBT families about “the hardships their families face because they cannot marry,” a pair of these bigots – congressional candidates both, I’m saddened to admit, had this to say:

Barb Davis White, a Tea Party activist and Republican candidate for Minnesota’s 5th Congressional District, prompted shocked gasps from the packed hearing room when she said, “Rosa Parks did not move to the front of the bus to support sodomy.” Her testimony involved accusations that the movement for marriage equality is hijacking the civil rights movement.

“There is no difference between a black person and a white person other than their skin color when there’s a tremendous difference between a man and a woman,” said White, who was the GOP’s endorsed candidate against Rep. Keith Ellison in 2008.

I’m impressed that she noticed, given the well known fear extremist Christians have of sexuality and the human body. But really, that there is a significant difference between men and women has no meaning beyond that which she gives it by way of her myopic and close-minded view of gender and gender roles.

She stated that “Allowing a black woman and a white man to marry does not change the definition of marriage. However, allowing two men or two women to marry would fundamentally change that definition.”

No, in point of fact, it would not. Marriage is between two people who love each other and wish to formalize their union. It makes no difference what the genders of the couple are. Love, I submit, is love. And rights, Ms. White, are rights. And the Constitution does not have any exclusionary clauses with regard to rights.

“White also garnered some laughs from the audience when she said, “Studies also show that the average homosexual has hundreds of sexual partners in his lifetime… and I repeat hundreds.””

Let’s be perfectly honest and direct here: this is something extremist Christians like to say. Like children who think they’re on to something clever, they will repeat it at every opportunity.

But here is the important point: It has no basis in fact. She has no studies to prove that gays and lesbians are more promiscuous than any pastor’s daughter.

And here is where Barb White stands up and testifies to all, “I am a narrow-minded and intolerant bigot”: “I’m here today to tell you that homosexuality and lesbian behavior is unhealthy,” claiming that gays and lesbians have higher rates of STDs than anyone else in the world, including, she asserts, “gay bowel disease,” an ailment the author of the article correctly points out that does not exist but which “is often used by religious right figures to paint gay men as diseased.”

I would like to submit this thought to Ms. White (since you seem to have few of your own): it is irrelevant how promiscuous a person is – it’s none of your damned business. It has nothing to do with their right to get married, or do you intend to impose a “promiscuity test” for marriage candidates – across the board, straight and LGBT? If you sleep around you lose your marriage rights? After all, if promiscuity is the issue, you have to apply the standard equally.

But as I said above, there were two congressional candidates exposing their bigotry at this gathering. The other nitwit adding her voice to the hatefest was St. Thomas University law professor Teresa Stanton Collett, “who is running as a Republican for the 4th Congressional District, warned that Minnesota’s Christians are under attack.” Teresa Collett is proof positive that you can get a college degree and still be as dumb as a box of hammers.

Christians under attack? It is difficult to see how this can be so, since Christianity doesn’t enter into the equation. The only people being attacked are those who are different from Ms. Collett: in other words, the LGBT community. I don’t know of any LGBT couple saying she should lose her rights because she is a Christian, or that Christianity should be outlawed.I don’t know of any bans being imposed (or even suggested) against Christianity or Christian belief. Ms. Collett’s beliefs are not being imposed on in any way. If you believe it’s wrong, don’t do it. It’s really as easy as that.

But let’s give this hate monger an opportunity to display her low thinking:

“Make no mistake: Marriage, as a civil institution, as a legal institution, is grounded not merely in religion but also in the biological reality that sex makes children and children need a mom and a dad,” she said. “And should we choose to redefine that legally we will put the religious and moral beliefs of all Minnesotans at issue.”

This is not much of an argument. All Minnesotans? She’s wrong about that. Not every Minnesotan is a narrow-minded bigot like her. But she is right that marriage is a civil, not a religious, institution, but she is also wrong because it is not historically grounded in religion. Her god did not invent the institution of marriage and has no exclusive rights to it.

Further, I would like to point out to Ms. Collett that the Bible presents all sorts of marriage scenarios, none of them including one man and on woman. Even in Jesus’ day polygyny (one man, multiple wives) was common. It is significant that Jesus did not take the time to denounce it.

But let the hate flow: “Churches and religiously affiliated institutions will lose their tax-exempt status,” she said.

I don’t see how this is a logical outcome of granting people their Constitutional rights, but they should lose it anyway, I say, as they blatantly and illegally engage in politicking.

The article goes on to inform us that “She claimed that Christian colleges would be forced to house same-sex couples in dorms, social work students would be kicked out of school if they refused to counsel gays and lesbians, politicians would revoke funds from religious organizations, and parents would be arrested for speaking out against homosexuality.”

Wow, those poor Christians. As opposed to say LGBT couples having no rights at all, at present, to get married, and who lack many other rights held by heterosexuals, who are banned from joining certain organizations (even if those organizations are publicly funded).

What Teresa Collett really wants is a right to violate the constitutional rights of individuals based on who hey fall in love with, all the while pretending to be concerned about rights. In truth, the only right she is concerned about is her right to deprive other people of theirs.

In the end, we are told, “The hourlong testimony from both sides contemplated three bills: one to create civil unions, one to recognize out-of-state same-sex marriages and one to allow full legal marriage for same-sex couples. The hearing was for informational purposes only, and no vote was taken.”

You can find my interview with Mikey Weinstein of the Military Religious Freedom Foundation at Pagan + Politics, the blog of the Pagan Newswire Collective: http://politics.pagannewswirecollective.com/2010/02/26/an-interview-with-mikey-weinstein-of-military-religious-freedom-foundation/

I hope you will take the time to give it a read. Mr. Weinstein has a very important message to get across about a threat to our freedoms that is very real and very frightening. It is one we should all take seriously.

I would like to introduce here my very first piece for Politicus USA (www.politicususa.com), Conservatives Argue Against the Constitution When They Oppose Gay Marriage

I am excited to be part of Politicus and look forward to being a weekly contributor there. This piece I see as a logical extension of my most recent piece here regarding gender and this is an issue, along with anything related to church-state issues, that I will discuss frequently wherever I can get my voice heard.

When you construct a neat little box for yourself and call this box “purity” or “truth,” then by definition all that falls outside that box becomes “impure” and “false.” That is a necessary result of such box construction. It is a process followed by monotheism (where everything outside itself is seen as “paganism”) and by particular groups within that genus – the Israelites themselves and a sub-category, the Essenes, and later, by the Christians. The objective might be to “box in” the “constructed other” (everyone outside that box) but it has the concomitant (and therefore unavoidable) effect of also boxing in those who lay claim to that purity and that truth.

They have, by creating the “other” category, also created a category for themselves: “We are special. We are real Americans; you are false.”

We have seen this construction of a purity box in American politics. Especially since the election of Barack Obama, Republicans who do not object to every proposal the president makes are accused of not really being Republican. This once unofficial trend has become doctrinaire (the ranting of Limbaugh, Coulter, Beck, Hannity and others) and has now been codified as of Friday, January 29, 2010: A proposal for a “litmus test” which would have required candidates to affirm ten core conservative positions (Ten Commandments anyone?) did not materialize but what did still amounts to a creed:  GOP candidates must support the party’s platform if they want gold for their war chests.[1]

The religious undertones are unmistakable. More and more, the GOP has become “God’s Own Party” – a party in which political purity closely aligns not only with religious purity but adopts the language of religious purity.[2] As Regina Schwartz says of monotheism,

Politics are not hardwired into theology. Worship of one deity need not necessarily produce this violent notion of identity, but monotheism has been caught up with particularism, with that production of collective identity as peoples set apart, and it so happens that when the biblical text moves more explicitly toward polytheism, it also endorses a more attractive toleration, even appreciation of difference.[3]

And it is this sense of collective identity, this idea that Republicans are a people apart – a people of God, a Chosen People like the Israelites – that epitomizes the recent polarization of the American political – and religious – landscape. It is not only required that you be Republican to be acceptable; you must also be a Christian, and not just any Christian, but a certain type of Christian.

Shades of the so-called Old Testament (more correctly, the Hebrew Bible).

In Upstate New York, recently, Republican Dede Scozzafava was forced to withdraw from the campaign for NY-23 Representative because she was not Republican enough to be truly a Republican. As Politico reported at the time, “Conservatives have asserted that Scozzafava, a GOP establishment-backed state assemblywoman who supports abortion rights and gay marriage, is far too liberal for them to support…”[4]

As the Washington Post tells it, “[former Alaska governor Sarah] Palin and [Minnesota Gov. Tim] Pawlenty cast the contest as a fight for the direction of the GOP.” But it is more than this. For purity ideologues, Scozzafava is not really a Republican at all. Pawlenty was strident: “we cannot send more politicians to Washington who wear the Republican jersey on the campaign trail but then vote like Democrats in Congress.” Glenn Beck denounced her as “ACORN-supported” and an “Obama-Lite Republican” and conservative robo-calls in the district describing her as a “child killer,” a “lesbian lover” and a “homo.”[5]

Rush Limbaugh was more blunt:

We can say she is guilty of widespread bestiality. She has screwed every RINO in the country. Everyone can see just how phony and dangerous they are. 2010 might be a nightmare for PETA. Tow animals may become extinct: RINOs and Blue Dog Democrats.[6]

CBSNews reports that “Michelle Malkin mocked her as a ‘radical leftist.’”[7]

Quite clearly, it is not political issues that define one’s political affiliation, but what are perceived to be violations of the Ten Commandments.

Again, we see the shadow of the Old Testament behind opposition to Scozzafava.

Regina Schwartz:

In the myth of monotheism, pluralism is betrayal, punishable with every kind of exile: loss of home, loss of land, even alienation from the earth itself.[8]

Loss of political office.

Schwartz notes the manner in which the Biblical narrative paints “inclinations toward polytheism” as “sexual infidelity” and how Israel itself “is castigated for ‘whoring after’ other gods, thereby imperiling her ‘purity.’ The land itself must be kept clean “or its inhabitants will be ejected, ‘vomited’ out of the land… When Israel is not monotheistic, it is filthy and pollutes the land” (Lev 20.20-25). “When Israel worships a foreign deity, she is a harlot, the land is made barren, and she is ejected from the land” (Jer 3.2-3).[9]

Dede Scozzafava has been vomited forth.

With the advent of the Republican purity test, of its “Ten Commandments” she will not be alone. This move leaves many Republican office-holders vulnerable.  The pressure to conform is intense. Extremist Rush Limbaugh has repeatedly bent Republican office holders to his will. In the case of Dede Scozzafava, CBSNews reports,

[Newt] Gingrich…[who] earlier this week…said conservative support for Hoffman had been a mistake…On Saturday… threw his support behind Hoffman via a Twitter post. Republican National Committee Chairman Michael Steele, who only a few days ago similarly backed Scozzafava, is now behind Hoffman.[10]

Repent or die…a political death. The message has been made clear. Nobody wants to be vomited forth.

Inside that little purity box there can be no tolerance of differing opinions because tolerance = compromise and compromise means surrendering the distinctions between True and false, no ultimate truth and no heresy. You’re one of “us” or you’re one of “them” (the dreaded “other”); you’re for us or against us. From inside the purity box, it is a struggle of good vs. evil, of right vs. wrong, of capital-T Truth vs. moral relativism.

In the same sense that ancient Christians saw themselves as inheritors of the mantle of “Chosen People” today’s extremist Republicans (is there any other kind after “Black Friday” January 29, 2010?) see themselves as today’s Chosen People.

We heard this rhetoric during the Bush Administration in the wake of 9/11: America was chosen by God to be the new Rome, a vehicle for the spread of Christianity and by extension then, Bush was chosen by God to be President. If you opposed Bush, you opposed not only America but you placed yourself in opposition to God.

Politics and religion have become indistinguishable in the new GOP; The Ten Commandments of the Israelites or the “ten political positions of the Republican Party. And as I have demonstrated here, the parallelism is not at all superficial, but reaches to a much deeper level. Be pure or you are not one of us; you will be vomited forth.

As New Testament scholar Gerd Lüdemann observes (Intolerance and the Gospel, 2006), the history of Christianity demonstrates that there is little tolerance for thinking or acting outside the “orthodox” Christian tradition. He suggest (and the evidence of the GOP offers tangible evidence) “that attempts to harmonize Christianity with the democratic ideal of tolerance cannot really work because there is a logical contradiction between monotheism and Christology, on the one hand, and the core values of a pluralistic society, on the other.”[11]

When the purity box makes compromise impossible, what is the prognosis for American politics? We have seen a very centrist-oriented Obama reaching across the aisle to work with Republicans. The Republicans insist that they are willing to work with Obama, but what they are suggesting is not give-and-take, it is not compromise (because compromise is not compatible with purity) but surrender: Obama must do what they want. They seem happily unaware that they lost the election (Democrats, by contrast, seem unaware they won, but that is another story altogether).

As Obama told the GOP leaders, “this is not how Democracy works.”[12]

But the GOP no longer seems interested in Democracy. The GOP’s only interest is in the diktat of “Truth”; the GOP has become the party of extremism. Extremism is “any ideology taken to its extreme, interpreted and enacted in an absolute sense that allowed no compromise with practical considerations or accommodation with the world.” As historian Michael Gaddis puts it, “Extremist discourse, in religion as in other contexts, valued above all zeal and authority in the pursuit of its cause, and strove for a total and perfect expression of its values.”[13]

And presto, we have the Republican Party’s “purity test.”

Religious extremists, Gaddis observes, “convinced themselves that they have enacted not only their own will, but God’s.”[14] We live in a world where political extremists feel the same.[15]

Such an attitude does not leave much room for the rest of us. Nor does it leave much hope for the future of American politics. The only solution, from the GOP’s point of view, is the complete surrender of the Democratic Party to its will. A governing majority is impossible without compromise; this necessity of working across the aisle is built into the American political system.

But hands cannot reach across the purity box. Or as Egyptologist Jan Assmann puts it (Moses the Egyptian, 1997), “false gods cannot be translated.[16] And the true God lives within the purity box; outside are false gods – real and metaphorical.

We are being asked to choose between the Constitution and God.

Historically, the solution to this dispute has been inquisition, holy war…and theocracy. Constitutionally, none of those outcomes are desirable – or even theoretically possible. The Founding Fathers could have established the new nation as a monarchy or a theocracy; they did neither. We can only assume they meant to have a liberal democracy. The Constitution codifies these ideas. It protects that liberal democracy.

The Constitution, significantly, is the highest development of the ideals of the Enlightenment.

But the war against the Constitution is very real and has proven unexpectedly effective. Church-State walls are under attack and crumbling and adherence to Enlightenment concepts such as diversity, tolerance, and individual human rights are seen as attacks on God. The Enlightenment gave us the Constitution; extremist Christianity and the Republican Party have united to attack – and destroy it.

The purity test – the Nicene Creed of the new republicanism – is not the end; it is only a step in the road that defines the nature of the struggle for the faithful. The purity box does not allow for retreat or surrender; nor for the sake of all our ancestors created in the New World – a land of liberty – can there can any retreat or surrender from progressives.

The outcome of such a surrender is unthinkable.

---

[1] My Oxford American Dictionary (2008) calls a creed “a statement of belief or principles.”

[2] HonoluluAdvertiser.com http://www.honoluluadvertiser.com/article/20100129/BREAKING01/100129052/GOP+adopts+platform+test+for+candidates+during+Hawaii+meeting

[3] Regina Schwartz, The Curse of Cain: The Violent Legacy of Monotheism (Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press, 1997),, 31.

[4] Politico.com http://www.politico.com/news/stories/1009/28970.html

[5] Washington Post http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2009/11/09/AR2009110903690.html

[6] MediaMatters for America http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2009/11/02/limbaugh-scozzafava-guilt_n_342535.html

[7] Coop’s Corner, CBS News http://www.cbsnews.com/blogs/2009/10/31/blogs/coopscorner/entry5475675.shtml

[8] Schwartz (1997), 47.

[9] Schwartz (1997), 63.

[10] Coop’s Corner, CBS News http://www.cbsnews.com/blogs/2009/10/31/blogs/coopscorner/entry5475675.shtml

[11] http://wwwuser.gwdg.de/~gluedem/eng/

[12] The Huffington Post http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2010/01/29/obama-goes-to-the-gop-lio_n_442331.html

[13] Michael Gaddis, There Is No Crime for Those Who Have Christ: Religious Violence in the Christian Roman Empire (University of California Press, 2005), 5-6.

[14] Gaddis (2005), 6.

[15] One need only remember Palin’s assurances to the “faithful” that God would do the right thing for America on election day. http://www.boston.com/news/politics/politicalintelligence/2008/10/palin_the_right.html

[16] Jan Assmann, Moses the Egyptian: The Memory of Egypt in Western Monotheism ((Harvard University Press, 1997), 3.

Update:  Please see the recent post by Gus diZerega over at Beliefnet,

James O’Keefe, Conservatism, Racism and a Religious Connection

Thanks go to Makarios for pointing me towards this excellent piece.