I am pro-life. So are you. So was Saddam Hussein. And Hitler. So were Lincoln and the guy who killed him. And John Lennon and the guy who killed him. Every mass murderer is pro-life. The question is—which life, or lives, does a person mean by “pro-life”?
Who gets to decide? Why? The American system is not allowed to assume that one person’s ideas about “life” are more legitimate than anyone else’s, even if that person is “religious.” The idea that government policy should reflect any religious belief is rejected by our Constitution.
Our system creates a civic paradox that some find uncomfortable:
That’s the genius of America, the feature that has enabled our country to prosper while functioning as a multicultural melting pot: Give everyone the same chance, and don’t let officials or groups dictate what citizens believe in private. This allows everyone to have dignity and personal power, no matter how poor they are or how idiosyncratic their beliefs. This is exactly what was missing from multicultural societies that imploded in the last 20 years, from Yugoslavia to Iraq.
When Iran issued its infamous 1990 fatwa against Salman Rushdie, many in the West were indignant about a political regime passing a death sentence on someone simply for articulating a “blasphemous” thought.1
Western Europe is now struggling with the early breakdown of their social contract of pluralism and tolerance. The 2004 assassination of Dutch filmmaker Theo van Gogh for criticizing Islam’s treatment of women was a shocking challenge to the principle that people with contradictory religious ideas can coexist in civil society. Early in 2006, Denmark grappled with its Islamic community’s reaction to newspaper cartoons they said insulted the Prophet Muhammad. Local Muslims said they were “mentally tortured” by the images, and wanted the public expression of certain ideas forbidden. The newspaper, of course, was well within the West’s normal rights of free expression, but the artist received death threats. In subsequent months, over a million Muslims in dozens of countries marched in protest, almost always resulting in violence and, to date, hundreds of deaths.2
Islamic preachers throughout the world are now explicitly calling for the destruction of the Western political system. They do not want non-Muslims to have even the limited rights of self-expression that Muslims do. In February 2006, Sheikh Hassan Nasrallah told hundreds of thousands of Shia followers in Beirut that “We want the European parliament to draft laws that ban newspapers from insulting the Prophet.”3 The stark irony that it is precisely in the West that Muslims may express their ideas more fully than in any Muslim country on earth, of course, completely escapes these religious zealots.
It seems clear that more assassinations, accompanied by increasing numbers of people inhibiting what they say, write, and draw will surely follow. While pluralism makes room for religious fundamentalism, religious fundamentalism wishes to destroy pluralism. This asymmetry is an enormous political advantage for religious fundamentalism.
Similarly, zealous American Christians believe they are called upon to shape the public policy of the country in which they live. They believe that everyone should follow the word of the Christian god, even those who don’t believe in that god, or who interpret that god’s word differently. They might be called the Christian-American Taliban. They have murdered physicians and medical staff, and seriously wounded innocent bystanders. Like the white racists who firebombed churches in the South, they have firebombed medical clinics providing legal services they want criminalized.
The ferocity, the lying, the emotional and physical violence in which these people are willing to engage make it clear that they are involved in a fundamentally different struggle than the daily civic strife of healthy democracy. Their behavior sounds like news reports from Pakistan, not the United States. Indeed, political animosity in America goes all the way back to Founders such as Thomas Jefferson, John Adams, and Thomas Paine, who passionately and quite publicly hated their rivals’ positions. But they all agreed on how to stay engaged in a common process during conflict, and sought to create a country that guaranteed that same American dream for their countrymen. They didn’t bomb each other’s homes or churches.
American Christianity is extremely heterogeneous. Many Christians celebrate pluralism and the reality of different beliefs—including non-belief—in their communities and the world. But today’s religious zealots, like James Dobson, Michele Bachmann, Gary Bauer, Glenn Beck, Brent Bozell, Pat Robertson, Penny Nance, and Rick Santorum, do not agree with their opponents on the rules of the game. They say they do not want to govern a pluralistic, secular democracy; they want to govern a country whose goals are fundamentally different than America’s have ever been, whose citizens have fundamentally different rights than we have today.
They see a powerful connection between non-believers’ sexuality and their own. They believe their world is being polluted by the sexuality of non-believers. Conceptualizing their world as being vulnerable to others’ sexual sin almost inevitably leads to warring on the sexuality of non-believers in order to take care of themselves.
And most importantly, they see this battle as far bigger than mere earthly issues of pluralism, democracy, and individual rights. And so legal, cultural, social, even spiritual appeals to traditional American pluralism can’t succeed, because they don’t live in a world in which they can be safe if others are not like them. And so Randall Terry will go to jail 40 times, James Kopp will murder physicians who happen to perform abortions, and other religious terrorists—individually, in groups, or as elected officials—will pursue an America exactly as theocratic (no more, no less) as Iran.
Americans can no longer count on elected officials to uphold the single most important principle of American government and society—that everyone has the right to their own opinion, and has the right to live their own non-violent life as they please. This war is no metaphor. The struggle is tangible, and sexual expression is a key battlefield on which the war for the American covenant is being fought.
If these people did not claim to be devoutly religious—if, say, they were inspired by alcoholism, or visions of King Tut, or a desire to return the Louisiana Purchase to France—their demands would receive little serious consideration (and wouldn’t be tax-exempt). But because they say their program is driven by religious considerations, they get a seat at America’s public policy table. And so their bizarre demand that, for example, every American be prevented from using contraceptives or having abortions is taken seriously, included as a legitimate voice in public debate—because they claim this is the demand of their god. Even the one million people promoting citizenship and civil rights for fertilized eggs (“protecting the pre-born,” they call it) are taken seriously—because they claim their idea is motivated by religion rather than by schizophrenia or comedy.4
The very idea that sexuality is a religious issue, that public policy about sexuality requires the input of religious leaders, that religious leaders have special expertise about sexuality and public policy (because it involves what they call morality), is just an opinion—primarily the opinion of religious believers. The fact that so many people now accept the pragmatic inevitability of this linkage is itself a profound anti-sex victory in the War on Sex. (Once again validating the peculiar idea that “morality” is about limiting sexual expression.)
Given the high visibility and political influence afforded religious leaders today, which voices will be heard in the public square? For three decades, it has increasingly been the least tolerant, most anti-sex figures. If moderate or sex-positive religious leaders and laypeople cannot recapture their organizations from radicals who threaten our democracy, secular, pluralistically minded people will have to protect our democracy from them. This terrifying struggle is giving all American religion a bad name. The mass media is complicit in this, giving religious radicals far more exposure than moderates because their extreme, divisive opinions make for dramatic, conflict-oriented shows and stories.
In Planned Parenthood v. Casey (1992), the Supreme Court declared it is up to each individual to determine “the concept of existence, of meaning, of the universe, and of the mystery of human life.”5 This summarizes what makes America different from Saudi Arabia, North Korea, and other totalitarian societies. Every American is expected to agree to tolerate his neighbors’ wacky ideas about the meaning of life in exchange for tolerance of his own ideas. The lack of this single idea led to hundreds of years of brutal religious warfare in Western Europe.
In contrast, Pope John Paul II warned against this very “alliance between democracy and ethical relativism.” Christianity Today says, “This means that when truth itself is democratized—when truth is no more than the will of each individual or a majority of individuals—democracy is deprived of the claim to truth and stands naked to its enemies.”6
By “truth,” they and the Pope mean religious belief. By “truth,” the Supreme Court means scientific truth—that is, facts. This truth is not up for referendum. Gravity exists whether people believe in it or not. Racism and sexism have real, measurable consequences. Similarly, belief is not up for referendum. People believe what they believe, no matter how little grounded in fact or possibility. Truth is eternal, and belief is eternal. But they are not the same thing. When belief is elevated above truth, when religion and “morality” are taken as some ultimate, factual measure for law, democracy is deprived of the claim to truth and does stand naked to its enemies. We all hate that this enslaves a hundred million people in Iran and its neighbors. We must prevent it from taking over here as well.7
No matter how misplaced, many of the battles to control and limit Americans’ sexual expression have a heartfelt component. In addition to (ill-informed) practical concerns (“porn causes rape,” “sex on TV hurts kids,” “contraception causes sterility”), people often invoke “moral” considerations (teens shouldn’t be sexual, pornography enables infidelity). These “moral” concerns are particularly common in the battle over reproductive rights/abortion.
Abortion can be located in morality (both the autonomy of the woman and the value of fetal life), complete subjectivity (when does life begin), a tiny bit of science (ditto), and some (mostly recent) religious doctrine. Thus, those opposing abortion can sound like they’re on solid ground—that at the very least, their argument is as legitimate as any other. But it’s a familiar, multifaceted program—attempting to control everyone’s sexuality, saying anything necessary to justify it, even referring to an alleged “culture of life” (which is ad hoc nonsense, given their other public policy positions).
Some people claim a religious doctrinaire approach to oppose abortion and contraception. History shows that this argument is an artifact of political, very human decision-making. No less than St. Augustine (fifth century), Pope Innocent (thirteenth century), and St. Thomas Aquinas (thirteenth century) believed abortion in the first trimester was at times acceptable. Pope Sixtus (sixteenth century) said abortion at any stage was murder and should be punishable by death; only three years later, Pope Gregory reversed this, accepting abortion through 16½ weeks of pregnancy. So today’s Christian who screams that all abortion is murder would be condemning several cherished saints and popes.
In 1869, Pope Pius IX once again reversed the Catholic Church’s tolerant stance on abortion, where it has remained for 137 years—just a mere coffee break in the 20 centuries of Church time.
The construct of Limbo was adopted almost a thousand years ago as the destination of unbaptized infants’ souls; Pope Benedict recently started eliminating it, wanting it replaced by a more “compassionate” doctrine.8
No American is prevented from believing what he or she wants about abortion or Limbo. But when the Church changes its position on abortion or Limbo again in a decade, a century, or a millennium, presumably the rights it will support for non-believers will change again. Will believers then apologize for how they have forced, or tried to force, non-believers to live?
Complex times such as ours demand a great deal of self-direction and confidence from individuals. The wish for a simple morality to help one through complex times is understandable. Some people also yearn to connect with the Divine, and, of course, that’s a key promise of religious observance. Americans who want this, though, typically want it now, not after a lifetime of meditation and prayer. So for those who want to connect with the Divine now, acquiring ritual purity has far more appeal than painstakingly developing actual (“moral”) purity. For many people, that’s what religion is for: to tell them what they can do to have certifiable contact with the Divine.
Many Christian spiritual leaders have said that the key is doing good works. Jesus himself proposed that getting to heaven involved, more than anything else, helping others in tangible ways (see Matthew 25). But for some Christian fundamentalists, the modern route to heaven isn’t so much what you do, it’s what you believe—which is a lot easier. It can be done with virtually no sacrifice of position or comfort or time.
So for many fundamentalist Christians these days, the way to experience the Divine is to believe. And how do you show that you really believe? By attempting to force others to act the way you think is right. Wanting other people to forego behavior you think is immoral is a very low-cost way to feel religiously intact. Write a check, vote for an anti-choice candidate, go to church and commune with those who also believe. No sacrifice—just force others to sacrifice.
In some Christian sects, being against unauthorized sex is a certifiable way to contact the Divine. Conceptualizing “unauthorized sex,” of course, is the first step. Attacking sex is a way to live in the modern world and feel spiritual, without foregoing the comforts of technology or material goods.
The Abrahamic religions have problematized the body. Early influential Christian philosophers, such as Tertullian and Anicius Boethius, called woman “a temple built over a sewer.”9 At various times, Judaism has been obsessed with seminal emissions and menstrual impurity. Islam’s fixation on covering women’s bodies is well documented.
Believers, therefore, have to “solve” this “problem.” Seeing sex as the representative of the body calls for a philosophical policy about it, and seeing sexuality in a highly limited way makes this project much easier. Conceptualizing sexuality as impure then simply presents the religious community the task of purifying it. That means limiting those who would be pure to two choices: authorized sex or no sex.
With the two most revered figures in Christian history (Jesus and the Virgin Mary) both considered celibate (and she celebrated for that far beyond other qualities such as compassion or wisdom—it’s her name!), there’s a limit to how much believers can embrace sexuality and still feel spiritual. Eschewing eroticism (however that is intellectually justified) is a far more internally coherent solution to this Christian dilemma. And so any rationalizations that conceptualize and then condemn “uncontrolled” or “unspiritual” sex are very convenient.
In fact, today’s fundamentalist Christians are often pietistic; they observe or profess beyond what’s required, as a way of making a statement about themselves to themselves. Piety reinforces one’s self-identification as spiritual. It is always symbolic at its core, which makes it easier to profess than to actually live Jesus’s project of empowering the powerless. Jesus never said, “Fighting abortion is more important than feeding the poor.” But it is easier, cleaner, more exciting, and it doesn’t upset the neighborhood. Similarly, Jesus never said, “Since your time is limited, and you can’t rescue everyone, care about the unborn more than the born. Way more.”
But somehow, that’s what millions of Christians are choosing to rescue—the unborn, rather than the born—and choosing to adopt—frozen embryos instead of warm foster children. How are they choosing their projects? Apparently, to maximize their political impact. Not coincidentally, they keep selecting projects that limit others’ sexual choices. Their War on Sex around reproduction helps them feel holy, although it doesn’t help (and demonstrably harms) the disadvantaged already living.
It isn’t that the Right has no heart, it’s that it applies its heart to causes that pay off in controlling sexuality. So it claims it cares for “degraded” porn actresses, “vulnerable” prostitutes, and heartbroken teenagers. It doesn’t show the same concern for poor women who need day care, immigrant women who need English classes, or single women who need contraception to avoid pregnancies that will damage or destroy their families.
Many leaders of the Religious Right explicitly say their goal is installing a moral, Christ-centered government in the United States. That is, they want a government that will abandon America’s 236-year-long tradition of pluralism. That is, they want to change the most fundamental rules of America. And if 51 percent of America votes for this, or if 99 percent of America votes for this, it will still be wrong. It certainly won’t be “traditionally” American.
America’s religiously themed anti-sex program couldn’t succeed without active, enthusiastic government action. So why have America’s federal and state governments fallen in with these repressive elements?
There are presumably a variety of reasons, but they are primarily the twin evils of politics—money and power, along with something rarely found in American government—personal belief. And the impact of the irrational belief is enhanced because of the piety factor described above.
Former President George W. Bush described himself as ardently “pro-life” and has said he believes the laws of America should reflect his religious beliefs as much as possible. In 2002, he declared January 18 the first annual Sanctity of Life Day, describing America’s “essential moral duties, including … caring for children born and unborn.” And when he signed a 2004 bill recognizing that fetuses have rights separate from the mothers carrying them, he said, “We reaffirm that the United States of America is building a culture of life.”10
Thousands of other American politicians explicitly say they are attempting to inject Christian values into American governance. And former Alabama Chief Justice Roy Moore says God is the basis of American government—his vision amounting, according to the Atlantic, to “a theocracy.” “Let every soul be subject unto the higher powers,” says Moore. “Separation of church and state does not mean separation of God and government! We must return God to our public life and restore the moral foundation of our law.”11
In 2000, presidential candidate Pat Buchanan said that RU-486 is an abomination to God, and therefore, if elected, “I would use all the power of my office, including FDA appointments, to prevent RU-486 from being put on the market.” Note the logic: Buchanan’s decision that his god disapproves of RU-486 is the reason that all Americans, including those who don’t believe that Buchanan’s god exists, should be denied access to this medication. How different is this from saying that since Elvis would disapprove, no one should have access to the drug?
This idealism is horribly misguided, a fundamental misunderstanding of the American system. But it is idealism nevertheless. Unfortunately, that means that not even a high-quality civics lesson would be enough to change such attitudes about the role of belief in democratic government. There is no difference between President Bush and Judge Moore saying, “The law must conform to my religious beliefs” and Ayatollah Khamenei and President Ahmadinejad saying, “The law must conform to my religious beliefs.”
Money and power are the more sinister reasons that politicians are attempting to destroy Americans’ reproductive rights—and their influence, of course, is everywhere. Churches and religious organizations are giving more money to political candidates and officials than ever before. And in return, the government is giving churches and religious groups more money than ever before.
President Bush’s 2001 “faith-based initiative” (which President Obama expanded) was an honest declaration of his intention to do so, and he was extremely effective. Under this plan, tens of millions of federal tax dollars were distributed to religious (i.e., Christian) ministries to provide social services that were historically provided by government agencies or secular grantees, including health care “counseling,” abstinence education, after-school programs, job training, drug treatment, prison rehabilitation, and pregnancy “counseling.”
For example, Herb Lusk is a Philadelphia preacher with a long history of partisan activity on behalf of Republicans. In 2006, his Greater Exodus Baptist Church hosted a nationally broadcast rally to support the confirmation of Supreme Court nominee Samuel Alito. Sponsored by the Family Research Council, speakers included Jerry Falwell, Tony Perkins, James Dobson, and Senator Rick Santorum (who was facing a tight reelection campaign).12
Reverend Lusk was awarded $1.4 million of taxpayers’ money in faith-based grants by the Bush administration—and despite his work’s obviously partisan nature, he can administer the funds through tax-exempt organizations. Is his passion for Alito or for money and power? According to the New York Times, Lusk said, “I don’t know enough about him to actually think he’s the right man to do the job.”13
Another personal cause of President Bush was so-called embryo adoption. At a 2005 press conference on stem cell research, he introduced an (now federally funded) agency, Nightlight Christian Adoption. He spoke of the value of human life, saying that there is no such thing as a “spare embryo.” Twenty-one children born from adopted embryos (“snowflake children”) were paraded on stage to, as the agency director put it, “put a face to these embryos under discussion.”14
This pattern is repeated in abstinence programs, crisis pregnancy centers, and other tax-exempt religious institutions across America—state and federal officials funnel money to local and national groups, which support these officials and elect others. These groups now brazenly boast of their influence in destroying Americans’ reproductive rights: Concerned Women for America, for example, listed thwarting over-the-counter sales of the morning-after pill as one of its 2005 accomplishments.15
The U.S. Constitution guarantees each of us the freedom to practice any religion. This freedom does not extend to challenging the fundamental principle of the United States, that your freedom ends where my nose (or uterus) begins. Regardless of the majority’s wishes, fundamental principles like these can never be put up for referendum.
Somehow, those against the public’s access to contraceptive technology have put this access up for referendum. Each side continues scrambling for adherents. This means that those opposed to the unlimited availability of contraceptives have already won a crucial victory in the War on Sex. Wouldn’t we say the same thing if slavery were put up for a vote? Regardless of who won such a vote, the forces of freedom and democracy would have lost.