A plague on both your houses 2: Theocracy, schmeocracy
That the two parties today mean nothing like what I tried to describe earlier is self-evident. But where lies that difference? According to the Democrats, in the intrusion of religion in public life. The scare merchants of the Left - for now there is such a thing in America, although very different from the classical form it had in Europe - go around threatening “theocracy” if the Republicans are allowed to stay in power.
That is obvious nonsense. The priorities of the Republican Party have nothing to do with religion. Let us start from the sorest single point in American Christian consciences, abortion. The battlefield over abortion, in America, is, as everyone knows, the Supreme Court. The Supreme Court established an unlimited right to abortion with two highly controversial sentences, and there is a very strong feeling that a Supreme Court with different priorities might revoke that sentence and return abortion legislation to the federal states where it belongs.
Now, from the point of view of genuine opponents of abortion, the record of the four Republican presidents since those sentences is truly woeful. Virtually every judge appointed by Presidents Ford, Reagan, Bush I and Bush II has been a die-hard abortionist. Judges Scalia and Thomas are exceptions. George W.Bush, the supposed Christian, carried on in this spineless tradition. His first nominee, Judge Roberts, was no doubt an excellent choice, but somewhat less than clear in his position on abortion. His fudging finally blew up in his face when his own party explained to him with the political equivalent of brass knuckles that his nominee Harriet Myers had no credibility at all; and it was only to make up for that disaster, not because he believed in him, that he finally nominated a credible conservative, Judge Alito.
Of course, as the Democrats showed at the time when President Bush I nominated Judge Robert Bork, the appointment of any conservative judge to the Supreme Court would have been resisted not only fiercely but by every most unscrupulous instrument of political streetfighting. Everyone remembers how the elderly Irish-American aristocrat Ted Kennedy reverted to the ways of his ward-heeling Irish party-machine forebears to stop this distinguished and universally respected jurist from taking the bench. Among Republicans, “Borking” became a word for the smearing and defaming of any candidate. But there are areas, such as spending priorities, where a President with a friendly majority in Congress can disregard opposition however rabid. President G.W. Bush signed legislation in 2002 that increased funding for International Family Planning by the enormous sum of $480.5 million - more than a dollar and a half for every American man, woman and child. This from a supposed Christian Conservative who is supposed not to even like the United Nations or multilateralism. And then there is Planned Parenthood: a corporate giant thinly disguised as a charity, existing to provide abortions and funded largely by the taxpayer. Millions of taxpayer dollars are routinely paid to Planned Parenthood. The amazing thing about Planned Parenthood, indeed, is that it has actually taken advantage of ground-level opposition to abortion, and of its supposed charity status, to become one of the mightiest American corporations. Over the years, small local abortion clinics have tended to close under the pressure of public opinion and, less frequently, of the disgust of the medics themselves; Planned Parenthood, massively financed, nationally organized, supported by a fanatical and embittered political constituency (an advantage other corporations wish they had) and stupendously endowed with lawyers, has consistently picked up the slack, to the point where it is near having a monopoly of abortion provision in America.
In the light of this, Bush was clearly playing games when he decided to withhold the comparatively ridiculous sum of $34 million in federal funds from UNFPA (a UN abortion agency in China). This was a clever move, since the obscene Chinese one-child law, with its carelessly cruel support among birth-control advocates around the world, is a cause célébre among opponents of abortion. Most pro-lifers failed to notice that Bush reallocated that $34 million to USAID Child Survival Health Program Fund. This fund includes money for "forecasting, purchasing, and supplying contraceptive commodities and other materials necessary for reproductive health programs." There is a word in American English - a rich and expressive language - for this: a shell game. As a leading opponent of abortion, Judy Brown of the American Life League, said, "These 'contraceptive commodities' are nothing but abortion-inducing chemicals that kill the very children that the fund claims to help."
I think it should be clear by now that the Republican leadership do not care for Christian goals in politics. Their total lack of attention to the persecution of Christians in various parts of the world, even in places where American power is overwhelming and could easily be used to force a change, tells the same story. Three years of American occupation in Iraq and Afghanistan have seen the ancient Iraqi Christian community reduced to a half of its previous numbers. Recently the Afghani authorities, wholly dependent on the pleasure of NATO, condemned a Christian convert to death while NATO troops guarded their very persons. The immensely embarrassed US did not even dare offer him asylum until Italy, of all places, offered a way out. So much for theocracy. As I said at the time of the Foley affair, the most telling thing about it was that Foley himself had received a couple of good private-sector job offers and wanted to quit Congress, and the Republican leadership, who knew all about his rather queasy courting of young men in Senate employment, talked him into running again. So much for the Republican view of “values voters”. But even before this fact came out, the black Evangelical minister Harry R. Jackson Jr. had well described the distance this showed between the party and its Christian electors: There are only three reasons that I can think of for the GOP’s failure to take action in the Foley situation. First, numbed by the hedonistic atmosphere of D.C., they may not have thought his personal excesses were very serious. Perhaps they forgot that pages are just wide-eyed kids filled with aspiration and naivety. Secondly, the GOP’s House leadership may have feared the wrath of the radical gay movement. They probably didn’t want to be labeled “anti-gay” or “bigoted” once again. Therefore, they steered clear of Foley’s follies. Thirdly, the GOP must have coveted Foley’s seat so much that their desire for political ascendance clouded their collective judgment. If only half of my assumptions are correct, there has got to be a realignment of the evangelical community’s values with the GOP’s practices…
But is that possible, is that even imaginable? In the same article, Jackson tells this astonishing story:
Four months ago I was a part of a very high level meeting with the evangelical community’s most influential leaders. We spent an entire day interacting with politicians on the Hill and the current administration’s most trusted advisors. Most of us were shocked that the president had not led the charge to protect marriage more aggressively---after all it was May, 2006. In our view, he had used up a great deal of political capital on social security reform, the unexpected Katrina debacle, the war, and other internal squabbles and fights. Frankly, we wondered if we had been pushed out of the “big tent.”
Although our concern was universal, everyone sat quietly, hoping to be proven wrong.
Everything was going fine until one of the speakers said, “The values voters did not make the difference in the 2004 election.” The speaker failed to even thank the folks in the room for their efforts to get out the vote, to get the marriage amendment on the ballots of important swing states, and for their unwavering support of President Bush.
I am not sure of the speaker’s true intent. Maybe he meant to say: the three major issues on the minds of the average voter are: 1) the war in Iraq, 2) gas prices, and 3) the domestic economy. Such a statement would have been understood by the leaders in the room. By contrast, what we heard in our heads was a condescending voice bellowing, It’s nice that you supported us, but we could have done it ourselves. We admire your passion, but you don’t know how we play this game in D.C.
As the chairman of the only black-led organization in the room, I tried to wait for someone else to talk first. When I could stand it no more, I spoke up in my most diplomatic tone of voice. “Sir, I am a part of this group because I grew weary of the Democratic Party taking blacks for granted,” I opined. Further, I explained that democrats treat blacks like we are in some kind of tawdry, adulterous affair with them. They show up at our house at midnight wanting us to meet their basest needs (votes-on-demand), yet they never publicly show us respect, romance, or courtship.
My homespun analogy incited the administration’s representative. He angrily became even more condescending. Later on, one of my colleagues said sympathetically, He was having a bad day. He didn’t mean what he said. I, however, left the meeting a little deflated. I had joined the evangelical Christian political movement feeling like Jamal Wallace, the bright African American kid in the movie Finding Forester. I left the building that day feeling more like Forrest Gump.
I repeat: so much for theocracy. If anyone, after reading this sort of story, can honestly bring him/herself to believe that the Republican Party has anything to do with Christianity beyond exploiting their voters, that really is an example of simple faith against evidence that my own religious mind, for one, cannot bring itself to embrace. Nor is there a lack of further evidence on the matter. The narrative of a genuine Christian, David Kuo, of his career in the foothills of the Republican leadership, has become quite a fast seller in the overcrowded genre of political memoir. By now, everyone has read it or heard of it. He found himself in a world where Evangelical leaders were courted and flattered to their faces, and abused behind their backs. The revelations have been so damaging that Karl Rove himself has had to react to them. His reaction: come on, I’ve got three Evangelicals on my staff, they would never stand for this sort of talk. Sure. And I bet some of his best friends are Jews, too. David Kuo asks rhetorically, "Is the White House using this to mobilize Christian conservatives by showing how much the 'liberals' are out to get them? Absolutely. They see this as a great opportunity to stir up the controversy necessary to mobilize blasé evangelicals."
David Kuo is not unworldly. He has been in politics long enough not to be surprised by little things, working as one of the crowd of aides and speechwriters for Sen.Robert Dole, Bill Bennett, Jack Kemp, John Ashcroft, Ralph Reed and George W. Bush himself. But he had his own goals, and it so happens that they did not mesh with the real Republican politics. Kuo notes that the 2001 Bush tax cut left out the president's promised $6 billion per year in tax credits for groups helping the poor. Those tax credits had been the centerpiece of compassionate conservative efforts for years… But the White House, Kuo charges, decided that it was more important to cut the estate tax than to help the poor and decentralize poverty fighting. Not wanting to make the big tax bill any bigger, the Bush administration surprised key congressional leaders by pushing successfully to have the anti-poverty tax credits dropped. This makes the real Republican priorities very clear.
This was a measure that kicked in the face every Christian who had supported Bush in the belief that he would advance their agendas. And yet it was so managed as to keep the values vote in spite of howling evidence; thanks, in effect, to a hidden convergence of interests between Democrats and Republicans. The Republicans wanted their tax cuts; they also did not want to lose the Christian constituency. The Democrats wanted to posture as the defenders of the secular society against proselytising Christian encroachment - “faith-based” social programs with State support are among the bugbears of the Left. Hey presto! The Republicans got their tax cuts; the Democrats got to do their posturing; and the disappointed Christian groups were kept dependent on Republican favour, since the Democrats were so evidently hostile.
Notice what really matters to the contemporary Republican party; for what they are disposed to run serious political risks. the White House… decided that it was more important to cut the estate tax than to help the poor and decentralize poverty fighting . That is the Republican agenda. Tax cuts. And not only tax cuts, but a certain kind of tax cuts.
The Bush tax cuts were opposed by the two richest men in America, Bill Gates and Warren Buffet, who were among the signatories of an open letter against them. But it does not mean that they were tax cuts against the rich. To the contrary, Gates and Buffet, both very much self-made men, opposed them because they tended to create an established aristocracy of wealth and pass it on from father to son, encouraging the stratification of American society and discouraging personal enterprise and social mobility. The Bush tax cuts struck at a century-old policy, practiced on both sides of the Atlantic, to break up great fortunes by inheritance tax, to stop the formation or preservation of aristocracies. This was the Bush priority, and for this he threw his Christian supporters overboard.
(Not that I approve of Gates and Buffet’s influence on politics either. I will deal later with what I find pestiferous about the influence on public life of them and people like them - and of course anyone who ever used a computer has a score to settle with Mr.Gates. But whatever their own personal failings, two men who have done more than anyone alive to create assets and jobs in America and elsewhere ought to be listened to when they attack a measure as being against social mobility, private initiative, and self-reliance.)
In this context, it is even possible to find a place for the success of Planned Parenthood. It is, after all, a very New Republican kind of organisation: large, monopolistic, unfriendly to competition, and supported by the State. No Republican has ever done anything to really check the steady growth of this corporate giant disguised as a charity. Perhaps they recognize, consciously or unconsciously, that this vast organisation belongs in their world.
That is obvious nonsense. The priorities of the Republican Party have nothing to do with religion. Let us start from the sorest single point in American Christian consciences, abortion. The battlefield over abortion, in America, is, as everyone knows, the Supreme Court. The Supreme Court established an unlimited right to abortion with two highly controversial sentences, and there is a very strong feeling that a Supreme Court with different priorities might revoke that sentence and return abortion legislation to the federal states where it belongs.
Now, from the point of view of genuine opponents of abortion, the record of the four Republican presidents since those sentences is truly woeful. Virtually every judge appointed by Presidents Ford, Reagan, Bush I and Bush II has been a die-hard abortionist. Judges Scalia and Thomas are exceptions. George W.Bush, the supposed Christian, carried on in this spineless tradition. His first nominee, Judge Roberts, was no doubt an excellent choice, but somewhat less than clear in his position on abortion. His fudging finally blew up in his face when his own party explained to him with the political equivalent of brass knuckles that his nominee Harriet Myers had no credibility at all; and it was only to make up for that disaster, not because he believed in him, that he finally nominated a credible conservative, Judge Alito.
Of course, as the Democrats showed at the time when President Bush I nominated Judge Robert Bork, the appointment of any conservative judge to the Supreme Court would have been resisted not only fiercely but by every most unscrupulous instrument of political streetfighting. Everyone remembers how the elderly Irish-American aristocrat Ted Kennedy reverted to the ways of his ward-heeling Irish party-machine forebears to stop this distinguished and universally respected jurist from taking the bench. Among Republicans, “Borking” became a word for the smearing and defaming of any candidate. But there are areas, such as spending priorities, where a President with a friendly majority in Congress can disregard opposition however rabid. President G.W. Bush signed legislation in 2002 that increased funding for International Family Planning by the enormous sum of $480.5 million - more than a dollar and a half for every American man, woman and child. This from a supposed Christian Conservative who is supposed not to even like the United Nations or multilateralism. And then there is Planned Parenthood: a corporate giant thinly disguised as a charity, existing to provide abortions and funded largely by the taxpayer. Millions of taxpayer dollars are routinely paid to Planned Parenthood. The amazing thing about Planned Parenthood, indeed, is that it has actually taken advantage of ground-level opposition to abortion, and of its supposed charity status, to become one of the mightiest American corporations. Over the years, small local abortion clinics have tended to close under the pressure of public opinion and, less frequently, of the disgust of the medics themselves; Planned Parenthood, massively financed, nationally organized, supported by a fanatical and embittered political constituency (an advantage other corporations wish they had) and stupendously endowed with lawyers, has consistently picked up the slack, to the point where it is near having a monopoly of abortion provision in America.
In the light of this, Bush was clearly playing games when he decided to withhold the comparatively ridiculous sum of $34 million in federal funds from UNFPA (a UN abortion agency in China). This was a clever move, since the obscene Chinese one-child law, with its carelessly cruel support among birth-control advocates around the world, is a cause célébre among opponents of abortion. Most pro-lifers failed to notice that Bush reallocated that $34 million to USAID Child Survival Health Program Fund. This fund includes money for "forecasting, purchasing, and supplying contraceptive commodities and other materials necessary for reproductive health programs." There is a word in American English - a rich and expressive language - for this: a shell game. As a leading opponent of abortion, Judy Brown of the American Life League, said, "These 'contraceptive commodities' are nothing but abortion-inducing chemicals that kill the very children that the fund claims to help."
I think it should be clear by now that the Republican leadership do not care for Christian goals in politics. Their total lack of attention to the persecution of Christians in various parts of the world, even in places where American power is overwhelming and could easily be used to force a change, tells the same story. Three years of American occupation in Iraq and Afghanistan have seen the ancient Iraqi Christian community reduced to a half of its previous numbers. Recently the Afghani authorities, wholly dependent on the pleasure of NATO, condemned a Christian convert to death while NATO troops guarded their very persons. The immensely embarrassed US did not even dare offer him asylum until Italy, of all places, offered a way out. So much for theocracy. As I said at the time of the Foley affair, the most telling thing about it was that Foley himself had received a couple of good private-sector job offers and wanted to quit Congress, and the Republican leadership, who knew all about his rather queasy courting of young men in Senate employment, talked him into running again. So much for the Republican view of “values voters”. But even before this fact came out, the black Evangelical minister Harry R. Jackson Jr. had well described the distance this showed between the party and its Christian electors: There are only three reasons that I can think of for the GOP’s failure to take action in the Foley situation. First, numbed by the hedonistic atmosphere of D.C., they may not have thought his personal excesses were very serious. Perhaps they forgot that pages are just wide-eyed kids filled with aspiration and naivety. Secondly, the GOP’s House leadership may have feared the wrath of the radical gay movement. They probably didn’t want to be labeled “anti-gay” or “bigoted” once again. Therefore, they steered clear of Foley’s follies. Thirdly, the GOP must have coveted Foley’s seat so much that their desire for political ascendance clouded their collective judgment. If only half of my assumptions are correct, there has got to be a realignment of the evangelical community’s values with the GOP’s practices…
But is that possible, is that even imaginable? In the same article, Jackson tells this astonishing story:
Four months ago I was a part of a very high level meeting with the evangelical community’s most influential leaders. We spent an entire day interacting with politicians on the Hill and the current administration’s most trusted advisors. Most of us were shocked that the president had not led the charge to protect marriage more aggressively---after all it was May, 2006. In our view, he had used up a great deal of political capital on social security reform, the unexpected Katrina debacle, the war, and other internal squabbles and fights. Frankly, we wondered if we had been pushed out of the “big tent.”
Although our concern was universal, everyone sat quietly, hoping to be proven wrong.
Everything was going fine until one of the speakers said, “The values voters did not make the difference in the 2004 election.” The speaker failed to even thank the folks in the room for their efforts to get out the vote, to get the marriage amendment on the ballots of important swing states, and for their unwavering support of President Bush.
I am not sure of the speaker’s true intent. Maybe he meant to say: the three major issues on the minds of the average voter are: 1) the war in Iraq, 2) gas prices, and 3) the domestic economy. Such a statement would have been understood by the leaders in the room. By contrast, what we heard in our heads was a condescending voice bellowing, It’s nice that you supported us, but we could have done it ourselves. We admire your passion, but you don’t know how we play this game in D.C.
As the chairman of the only black-led organization in the room, I tried to wait for someone else to talk first. When I could stand it no more, I spoke up in my most diplomatic tone of voice. “Sir, I am a part of this group because I grew weary of the Democratic Party taking blacks for granted,” I opined. Further, I explained that democrats treat blacks like we are in some kind of tawdry, adulterous affair with them. They show up at our house at midnight wanting us to meet their basest needs (votes-on-demand), yet they never publicly show us respect, romance, or courtship.
My homespun analogy incited the administration’s representative. He angrily became even more condescending. Later on, one of my colleagues said sympathetically, He was having a bad day. He didn’t mean what he said. I, however, left the meeting a little deflated. I had joined the evangelical Christian political movement feeling like Jamal Wallace, the bright African American kid in the movie Finding Forester. I left the building that day feeling more like Forrest Gump.
I repeat: so much for theocracy. If anyone, after reading this sort of story, can honestly bring him/herself to believe that the Republican Party has anything to do with Christianity beyond exploiting their voters, that really is an example of simple faith against evidence that my own religious mind, for one, cannot bring itself to embrace. Nor is there a lack of further evidence on the matter. The narrative of a genuine Christian, David Kuo, of his career in the foothills of the Republican leadership, has become quite a fast seller in the overcrowded genre of political memoir. By now, everyone has read it or heard of it. He found himself in a world where Evangelical leaders were courted and flattered to their faces, and abused behind their backs. The revelations have been so damaging that Karl Rove himself has had to react to them. His reaction: come on, I’ve got three Evangelicals on my staff, they would never stand for this sort of talk. Sure. And I bet some of his best friends are Jews, too. David Kuo asks rhetorically, "Is the White House using this to mobilize Christian conservatives by showing how much the 'liberals' are out to get them? Absolutely. They see this as a great opportunity to stir up the controversy necessary to mobilize blasé evangelicals."
David Kuo is not unworldly. He has been in politics long enough not to be surprised by little things, working as one of the crowd of aides and speechwriters for Sen.Robert Dole, Bill Bennett, Jack Kemp, John Ashcroft, Ralph Reed and George W. Bush himself. But he had his own goals, and it so happens that they did not mesh with the real Republican politics. Kuo notes that the 2001 Bush tax cut left out the president's promised $6 billion per year in tax credits for groups helping the poor. Those tax credits had been the centerpiece of compassionate conservative efforts for years… But the White House, Kuo charges, decided that it was more important to cut the estate tax than to help the poor and decentralize poverty fighting. Not wanting to make the big tax bill any bigger, the Bush administration surprised key congressional leaders by pushing successfully to have the anti-poverty tax credits dropped. This makes the real Republican priorities very clear.
This was a measure that kicked in the face every Christian who had supported Bush in the belief that he would advance their agendas. And yet it was so managed as to keep the values vote in spite of howling evidence; thanks, in effect, to a hidden convergence of interests between Democrats and Republicans. The Republicans wanted their tax cuts; they also did not want to lose the Christian constituency. The Democrats wanted to posture as the defenders of the secular society against proselytising Christian encroachment - “faith-based” social programs with State support are among the bugbears of the Left. Hey presto! The Republicans got their tax cuts; the Democrats got to do their posturing; and the disappointed Christian groups were kept dependent on Republican favour, since the Democrats were so evidently hostile.
Notice what really matters to the contemporary Republican party; for what they are disposed to run serious political risks. the White House… decided that it was more important to cut the estate tax than to help the poor and decentralize poverty fighting . That is the Republican agenda. Tax cuts. And not only tax cuts, but a certain kind of tax cuts.
The Bush tax cuts were opposed by the two richest men in America, Bill Gates and Warren Buffet, who were among the signatories of an open letter against them. But it does not mean that they were tax cuts against the rich. To the contrary, Gates and Buffet, both very much self-made men, opposed them because they tended to create an established aristocracy of wealth and pass it on from father to son, encouraging the stratification of American society and discouraging personal enterprise and social mobility. The Bush tax cuts struck at a century-old policy, practiced on both sides of the Atlantic, to break up great fortunes by inheritance tax, to stop the formation or preservation of aristocracies. This was the Bush priority, and for this he threw his Christian supporters overboard.
(Not that I approve of Gates and Buffet’s influence on politics either. I will deal later with what I find pestiferous about the influence on public life of them and people like them - and of course anyone who ever used a computer has a score to settle with Mr.Gates. But whatever their own personal failings, two men who have done more than anyone alive to create assets and jobs in America and elsewhere ought to be listened to when they attack a measure as being against social mobility, private initiative, and self-reliance.)
In this context, it is even possible to find a place for the success of Planned Parenthood. It is, after all, a very New Republican kind of organisation: large, monopolistic, unfriendly to competition, and supported by the State. No Republican has ever done anything to really check the steady growth of this corporate giant disguised as a charity. Perhaps they recognize, consciously or unconsciously, that this vast organisation belongs in their world.